Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Christopher Tunnard

of men of taste, and without its help our Kents and Browns could hardly have made the rapid strides they did in public favour. Brown’s ridiculous clumps and mounds would have been laughed out of existence a good deal less laboriously than they were removed a generation later under the direction of Repton, had they not been softened by the background of trees which landowners had planted, frightened by the denudation of the countryside of timber used for shipbuilding and the development of towns during the reigns of the Tudors. Evelyn’s Sylva had made a plea for the replacement of the national forests as early as 1664, and up to the end of the first third of the eighteenth century, when the wealthy classes had profited by his example and increased the stock, in almost every gardening and agricultural treatise one reads a plea for the replenishment of natural resources. “Improvement” was an accomplished practice in Restoration times before being recognized as a fashionable one in the age which followed.

      “Perhaps the landskips of Poussin are the best instructor which a gardener of genius and taste can follow” (Essay on the Different Natural Situations of Gardens : Samuel Ward, 1774). Above is Nicholas Poussin’s landscape, “Phocion,” illustrating the qualities of “picturesque” composition which were to be translated into the eighteenth-century garden.

      Other existing factors helped the bold Kent to “forge a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays.” The stiff brick-walled gardens of William III and his gardening queen had been relaxed at their margins by the introduction of grilles and iron railings, imported, together with the taste for pug dogs and pineapples, from the “Dutch morass,” and these former, with the help of the new gates of wrought iron, also introduced by William, enabled the eye to glance through to the plantations beyond. What more inevitable than the transition from the half-wall to the railing and thence to the ha-ha, a sinking of the ground in the form of a ditch, at this time to be seen in France where it formed part of a system of military defence ? And once the wall was down, there was no ignoring the landscape; something had to be done about untidy woods and fields that could be seen from the parterre. Kent’s famous leap, therefore, had it not been merely a figure of speech, would in any case have called for small athletic prowess.

      The hint of French influence in an art considered so unreservedly British in origin, has not so far proved very disturbing to horticultural historians. But Johnson,* whose information is usually reliable, mentions Dufresnoy, the successor of Le Notre, as being a creator of landscape parks in France in the year 1700, which is at least a decade before they were attempted in England. According to this author, “his example was only admired by his countrymen and not followed.” Any of Dufresnoy’s works might have been seen by Addison during his travels in France before the historic essays were written. One would hardly like to accuse the French public of having seen the landscape garden, dismissing it as altogether ridiculous and illogical, and sending the device that made it possible over the Channel to confound the English, who might be depended upon to play the idea to death while its Machiavellian originators in the wings laughed up their elegant, silken sleeves. It is, however, significant that later, when the French introduced Chinoiserie to Europe, they were inclined to restrict the innovations to garden architecture, tea pavilions, porcelain guinguettes and the like, and to disregard in great measure the Oriental abhorrence of avenue planting in straight lines. It is fairly safe to say that the majority of the French people remained faithful to the straight line even at the end of the eighteenth century when the cult of “zigzag shrubberies and wheelbarrow mounts” was at its height in Europe.

      Not so the English. “Is there anything more shocking than a stiff, regular garden?” asks Batty Langley in 1728, and proceeds to add weight to the claim by diversifying his own creations with winding valleys, dales, purling streams, serpentine meanders, enclosures of corn, wood-piles, precipices, cold baths and cabinets, to name but a few of the fifty odd component parts of “a beautiful rural garden.” Regularity is a term which could scarcely be applied to scenes which included all the appurtenances of the old gardens, together with some of the new, and with the paraphernalia of rusticity thrown in. In this last he was anticipating the Wordsworthian ideals of rural beauty, but it was an early stage at which to confuse still further the imitators of Claude and Salvator, in whose paintings this quality had not so far been applauded. Doubtless their followers were quick to see in Lorraine’s The Ford and similar works the symbol which they must at once have hurried to find.

      The gardens of Langley, Switzer, Addison, Pope† and Bridgeman, if it had not been for their medley of styles (Addison saw no reason why the Chinese and Queen Anne gardens should not be amalgamated in harmony), were by reason of their transitional nature more closely related to our present-day compromise of formality and informality than anything in the two hundred years between. The decorative scroll work of the parterre garden had been done away with during the reign of Anne, who had the parterre at Windsor covered with turf. Thus the ground near the house remained geometrical, but plain, and must have approximated to the modern terrace. Beyond lay “formal” gardens, usually with basins of water and fountains prominently displayed, and beyond that again the wilderness, albeit a wilderness more productive and entertaining than Elijah’s. Menageries, mirrors, waterworks, cones of fruit trees, and bird cages, were all relics of the age of William and Mary and of Louis XIV: the apparatus of a rude and hearty taste in outdoor amusement, soon to be superseded by the affectations of sentiment. The plan of Pope’s garden made by his gardener Serle in 1744 is typical of the more restrained layouts of this time.

      But whereas the tendency of the future will probably be away from “natural” gardening towards an architectural style, that is, away from unplanning towards conscious and balanced arrangement, the swing in those days was in the other direction. It is well known that during the dictatorships of Brown, Wright, Holland and Eames, flowers and flower-beds were practically abolished from English gardens. Such frippery would have disgraced “by discordant character the contiguous lawn.” Yet the earlier landscapists had no such ruthless ideas. They had as yet few theories about colour, although they had been forced to cultivate a rather unwilling taste for the sombre reds and browns of autumn by academicians of the day, and were particular about the distribution of light and shade, which Kent effected by means of evergreen and variegated shrubs. Flowers were still to them the “wholesome herbs” of Shakespeare, in spite of the findings of expeditions to America and China; ignorance of the cultural requirements of new species at this time led too often to failure and distrust of any but the better-known favourites, “the jessamine, violet, lily, gilly flower and carmine rose.”

      The beginnings of irregularity : from “New Principles of Gardening,” Batty Langley, London, 1728.

      The flowers with which Shenstone adorned his ornamental farm were of this kind. One can regard Shenstone, poet, essayist, and man of taste, as a typical artist of the first phase of the landscape movement. He was, of course, an amateur, but then some of the most admired of landscape gardens, Hagley, Persfield, Stourhead and Pain’s Hill, were laid out or developed by amateurs, with the great Price and Knight leading the host of gentlemen turned gardeners. He lacked pretension to architectural knowledge, in an age when every man was his own architect; he could never have achieved Kent’s perfect little temples at Stowe, for instance; but without this, his poetic and pictorial gift sufficed in abundance for the charm of “The Leasowes,” which he laid out to the admiration and envy of his many friends. Apart from the regrettable occupation of the place by fairies, whose presence, together with his reputation for indolence, have always detracted from a general appreciation of their author’s serious intentions towards art, the pictorial arrangement of the woods and fields, the grouping of ornament, and the management of water (of which we have exact descriptions), represent the culmination of all the confused gropings of that time towards a consistent technique. Shenstone had imagination and created pictures; the garden is a series of them, compositions in melancholy, pensiveness, and (we cannot judge, but are prepared to take another’s word for it) “sublimity,” the three tenets of his artistic faith, founded upon a study of Burke and the painters. “Pleasing the imagination by scenes of grandeur, beauty and variety,” was the sum of his demands of the garden as a whole.

      For