"Whatever
style may be adopted by the... gardener, ... [they] must be guided...
by certain rules, deduced from fundamental principles."
So what were the Conventions of English
Gardening during the Victorian Era?
The
following are
some key gardening styles that were prevalent in and around the
Victorian Era in England:
Cottage
Garden: Cottage
gardens varied in appearance, but according to landscapist
J. C. Loudon, they were generally square or
rectangular, enclosed by a fence,
wall, or hedge, and had borders for culinary crops (potatoes, peas,
turnips, etc) and herbs, flowers, and low shrubs. The bulk of
the
garden was generally filled with fruit trees, easily accessible from
the cottage or house nearby.
Overall, utilitarian concerns were at the heart of the
cottage
garden, both in the plants and the design. (Helmreich 69) Most
Victorian-era gardeners saw the cottage garden as a "remnant of
England's vernacular or folk culture, untouched by modernity or
continental influence." (Helmreich 66) In other words, the
cottage garden
became
particularly connected with a collective English national identity
because it was associated with a uniquely-English countryside and
history.
Formal
(or Architectural) Garden: Formal gardens
were designed primarily by architects rather
than gardeners. According to a 1910 article in
The Architectural Review,
"attempts at imitating
nature... [were] thrown aside as both foolish and futile" in the
development of formal gardens. (Helmreich 91)
These gardens were marked by terraces, straight paths, "broad
masses of
shorn grass demarcated by trimmed hedges and alleys," and defined
flower beds. (Helmreich 92) As a 1907 article in
The Spectator
claimed,
The
best garden for a
garden-party is an old one, -walled, enclosed, subdivided, trim, and
suggestive everywhere of shelter and limitation... Here we seen Nature
thoroughly disciplined. The most civilized thing in the world
is
a well-kept garden.
They
were often used
for badminton, croquet,
and lawn tennis (Helmreich 92) - and emulated the country houses of the
upper classes. (Helmreich 91)
Gardenesque:
The gardenesque style
was developed by
landscape designer J. C. Loudon. He described the style as
follows:
The
characteristic
feature... is
the display of the beauty of trees and other plants, individually...
All the trees and shrubs are arranged in regard to their kinds and
dimensions; and they are planted at first as, or, as they grow, thinned
out to, such distances apart as may best display the natural form and
habit of each.
The
gardenesque
style was also heavily involved in the introduction of new
plant species from other parts of the Empire. As Loudon said,
the
purpose of the style was to make use of the charms "which the
sciences of gardening and botany, in their present advanced state, are
capable of producing." (Helmreich 14)
Landscape
(or Natural) Garden: The term
"landscape garden" was most commonly
associated with the eighteenth century, but continued to be
used
into the Victorian era. Overall, Victorian-era definitions of
the
landscape garden were very
vague. For example, Henry Ernest Milner described it as
"taking
the true cognizance of
Nature's means for the expression of beauty, and so disposing those
means artistically as to co-operate for our delight in given
conditions." (Helmreich 136) By the late Victorian era, a
landscape garden
was generally considered any garden that was not a formal
(architectural) garden.
Wild
Garden: Associated with William Robinson's
The Wild Garden,
published in 1870, this style rejected popular gardening conventions,
and claimed to model gardens from "the time of Shakespeare."
As Robinson
wrote in
The Wild Garden,
his aim was to:
show
how we may,
without losing
the better features of the mixed bedding or any other system, follow
one infinitely superior to any now practised, yet supplementing both,
and exhibiting more the varied beauty of hardy flowers than the most
ardent admirer of the old style of garden ever dreams of. We
may
do this by naturalizing or making wild innumerable beautiful natives of
many regions of the earth in our woods, wild and semi-wild places,
rougher parts of pleasure grounds, etc., and in unoccupied places in
almost every kind of garden.
Robinson
called the
wild garden "natural," associating the style with the values of the
English countryside.
While it claimed to be old-fashioned, the wild garden was
also
involved in Victorian-era movements like the importation of foreign
plants, the experiments of natural scientists, and the association of
garden with English rural culture. (Helmreich 39)
