with a garden’s forms.
On aesthetics, he first begins by deleting a section on beauty,11 presumably because he now suspects its analogy is awkward, as if bread cannot be both nourishing and pleasing and as if bread and gardens have the same function. But he continues to insist, as he did in the very first paragraph of his book, that the garden is like “an aesthetic composition” that needs to be maintained in the face of a naturalistic confusion that gardens ought to imitate nature. This confusion he attributes to the fuzzy thinking on the part of amateur English gentlemen and ladies who think of landscaping as a “hobby” (p. 11). While he agrees that it is hard to accept that the garden is a work of art and needs to be seen as a mediated activity, he proposes that the best of modern sculpture can be invoked to rethink garden ornament: both objets trouvés and the ancient stones and monoliths of ancient Britain (which can somehow be referenced in those objects). These were of especial interest to Paul Nash, who provided Tunnard with a photograph of standing stones in Cornwall12 and one of whose “objects” was illustrated and discussed (pp. 95 and 100). Tunnard argued that a garden designer needed to “co-operate with Nature” rather than “becoming a slave to her demands” (p. 95). The modern designer cannot be “bound by the conventional necessity for picturesque representation, and looks upon the imitation of Nature as a long-perpetuated artistic fraud” (p. 80). We may sense here a need that recalls the earliest historical objections to “Capability” Brown’s work that it seemed no different from common fields and allies it with an ecological fundamentalism: landscape architecture should look like landscape architecture and be, in some way, distinguishable from what surrounds it that is not.
It would be hard to see Tunnard as a theoretician.13 His own education in Europe had a touch of Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale, a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” Yet what he gathered was not unconsidered, only piecemeal. He garnered ideas on Japanese gardens from Percy S. Cane, for whom he worked between 1932 and 1935, but he may also have seen Japanese examples in his early years growing up in California.14 He also admired the work of the potter Bernard Leach, who had studied in Japan and returned to practice in Cornwall with a Japanese potter.15 He learned much when he visited Paris for a congress arranged by the Société Française des Architectes de Jardins, which occurred at the same time as the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, which also showed garden designs by André and Paul Vera.16 In Paris he encountered Achille Duchêne, the “re-inventor” of classical seventeenth-century French gardens for the present day; the Swedish Sven A. Hermelin, “who espoused functionalism and free planning”;17 the Belgian Jean Canneel-Claes, one of whose designs was featured in 1938 (pp. 64–65) and again in 1948 (p. 65); and other designers such as Gabriel Guevrekian. He maybe borrowed a term like “architectural plants” from the Swiss M. Correvon’s coinage of plants as “formes architecturales,”18 and introduced a set of a dozen images of such plants to support this. In England he was well connected with and worked for architects such as Raymond McGrath, Serge Chermayeff, A. J. Powell, and Oliver Hill.19 He probably derived most stimulation from his membership in MARS (Modern Architectural Research Group), which argued for housing and a functional social agenda; MARS was the British arm of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). But he also knew artists such as Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, and especially Paul Nash, whose garden he and Frank Clark designed.20 Nash’s well-mannered surrealism may also have attracted him: in Tunnard’s design for Bentley Wood, a noticeable feature is the open screen at the end of the patio, through whose ten rectangular openings we see the parkland beyond (published as the frontispiece in 1938 but in 1948 on p. 68). This is a familiar and repeated device in Paul Nash’s paintings, such as Landscape from a Dream (1936–38), another Landscape from a Dream (1936–38), and Month of March (1929).21 He also liked and used draughtsmen such as Gordon Cullen—his own graphic skills were not very good—whose lines and almost cartoon-like skill gave his projects a recognizable modernist effect. This graphic style, sharp and abstract like that of other earlier modernist designers in France such as Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, Pierre-Émile Legrain, and the Vera brothers, did suggest a much less traditional way of representing garden art, and it is curious how with all those designers we are more used to seeing their graphic rather than their finished work.
Tunnard’s own designs, both built and drawn (by others), suggest his strong desire to find a modernist “style,” if not always a modernist function. But “style” seems an awkward term, too often used in architectural writing when talking of a particular period or designer in ways that detract from its cultural content. Interestingly, he drops from the 1948 edition examples of different “styles” of garden elements, such as chairs and benches (1938, pp. 166–82), that implied too superficially that style was what determined a modern garden. He himself pillories it by citing Le Corbusier (p. 71)—“The styles are a lie”—who goes on to argue that in any epoch, “style” is what can be understood to unify and animate what is built. Landscape (as well as buildings) should not be labeled with this or that style but should address “site, enclosure, and materials” as a complex and intertwined whole.22 The permanence of any “architectural [sc. landscape] topic results from its essential correspondence with a recurring and fundamental human condition.” These conditions may change, but they will recur, and their recurrence necessitates that we reexamine contemporary sites by envisaging how they are enclosed, how they respond to current demands and expectations, and how they utilize available materials. All that involves an adequate and exciting “correspondence” between new experience and long-standing practice: this allows, as Tunnard wrote in the 1938 Foreword, that tradition and experiment be reconciled. And Holmes Perkins annotated his copy of Tunnard’s 1938 edition with two phrases: “all gardens = adaptations of past interventions” and “no tabula rasa.”23 Tunnard himself, too, assures his readers (p. 67) that “a new garden technique … need not necessarily reject the traditional elements of the garden plan.” Now this, despite Tunnard’s reliance upon the term “style,” is what he attends to more often than not when he looks to that triad of materials, site, and enclosure. He sees the need to relate gardens to the site and especially its house, and he notes how little idea of the “whole design” (p. 18) is visible in “villa gardens” today (p. 24). But he also envisages gardens that have both finite and permeable boundaries, and he explores on several occasions how gardens situate their spaces within larger landscapes. He notes the “necessity” of using new materials from plant importation and hybridization and their methods of application (p. 62), yet (somewhat ambiguously) sees “the rise of scientific horticulture [as] the partial eclipse of garden planning” (p. 63), not least in an ecological refusal to use natural materials in unusual ways.
One problem with the modern(ist) garden is that the forms of garden elements are still hugely atavistic (as Tunnard himself makes clear); garden plants willfully continue to behave as plants (however artists drew them). He much disliked arts and craft gardens, because he and perhaps Frank Clark, who collaborated with him on several planting designs, found Gertrude Jekyll’s reliance on impressionist planting dated; yet he was less able or certain how to utilize plant materials within sites that he could treat with more modern forms, and he withdrew from the second edition his planting
