Part 10 (1/2)
Compared with the frank raptures of such writings as these, the laboured treatises of the landscape-school are but petty hagglings over the mint and c.u.mmin of things. You go to the writings of the masters of the old formality, to come away invigorated as by a whiff of mountain air straight off Helicon; they shall give one fresh enthusiasm for Nature, fresh devotion to Art, fresh love for beautiful things. But from the other--
”The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I”--
they deal with technicalities in the affected language of connoisseurs.h.i.+p; they reveal a disenchanted world, a world of exploded hopes given over to the navvies and the critics; and it is no wonder that writings so prompted should have no charm for posterity; charm they never had. They are dry as summer dust.
For the honour of English gardening, and before closing this chapter, I would like to recall that betweenity--the garden of the transition--done at the very beginning of the century of revolution, which unites something of the spirit of the old and of the new schools. Here is Sir Walter Scott's report of the Kelso garden as he _first_ knew it, and _after_ it had been mauled by the landscape-gardener. It was a garden of seven or eight acres adjacent to the house of an ancient maiden lady:
”It was full of long straight walks between hedges of yew and hornbeam, which rose tall and close on every side. There were thickets of flowering shrubs, a bower, and an arbour, to which access was obtained through a little maze of contorted walks, calling itself a labyrinth. In the centre of the bower was a splendid Plata.n.u.s or Oriental plane, a huge hill of leaves, one of the n.o.blest specimens of that regularly beautiful tree which we remember to have seen. In different parts of the garden were fine ornamental trees which had attained great size, and the orchard was filled with fruit-trees of the best description. There were seats and trellis-walks, and a banqueting-house. Even in our time this little scene, intended to present a formal exhibition of vegetable beauty, was going fast to decay. The parterres of flowers were no longer watched by the quiet and simple _friends_ under whose auspices they had been planted, and much of the ornament of the domain had been neglected or destroyed to increase its productive value. We visited it lately, after an absence of many years. Its air of retreat, the seclusion which its alleys afforded was gone; the huge Plata.n.u.s had died, like most of its kind, in the beginning of this century; the hedges were cut down, the trees stubbed up, and the whole character of the place so much destroyed that I was glad when I could leave it.”--(”Essay on Landscape Gardening,”
_Quarterly Review_, 1828.[33])
[Footnote 33: ”The Praise of Gardens,” pp. 185-6.]
Another garden, of later date than this at Kelso, and somewhat less artistic, is that described by Mr Henry A. Bright in ”The English Flower Garden.”[34]
”One of the most beautiful gardens I ever knew depended almost entirely on the arrangement of its lawns and shrubberies. It had certainly been most carefully and adroitly planned, and it had every advantage in the soft climate of the West of England. The various lawns were divided by thick shrubberies, so that you wandered on from one to the other, and always came on something new. In front of these shrubberies was a large margin of flower-border, gay with the most effective plants and annuals. At the corner of the lawn a standard _Magnolia grandiflora_ of great size held up its chaliced blossoms; at another a tulip-tree was laden with hundreds of yellow flowers. Here a magnificent _Salisburia_ mocked the foliage of the maiden-hair; and here an old cedar swept the gra.s.s with its large pendent branches. But the main breadth of each lawn was never destroyed, and past them you might see the reaches of a river, now in one aspect, now in another. Each view was different, and each was a fresh enjoyment and surprise.
”A few years ago and I revisited the place; the 'improver' had been at work, and had been good enough to _open up_ the view.
Shrubberies had disappeared, and lawns had been thrown together.
The pretty peeps among the trees were gone, the long vistas had become open s.p.a.ces, and you saw at a glance all that there was to be seen. Of course the herbaceous borders, which once contained numberless rare and interesting plants, had disappeared, and the lawn in front of the house was cut up into little beds of red pelargoniums, yellow calceolarias, and the rest.”
[Footnote 34: _Ibid._, p. 296.]
In this example we miss the condensed beauty and sweet austerities of the older garden at Kelso: nevertheless, it represents a phase of workmans.h.i.+p which, for its real insight into the secrets of garden-beauty, we may well be proud of, and deplore its destruction at the hands of the landscape-gardener.
All arts are necessarily subject to progression of type. ”Man cannot escape from his time,” says Mr Morley, and with changed times come changed influences. But, then, to _progress_ is not to _change_: ”to progress is to live,” and one phase of healthy progression will tread the heels of that which precedes it. The restless changeful methods of modern gardening are, however, not to be ascribed to the healthy development of one consistent movement, but to chaos--to the revolution that ensued upon the overthrow of tradition--to the indeterminateness of men who have no guiding principles, who take so many wild leaps in the dark, in the course of which, rival champions jostle one another and only the fittest survives.
In treating of Modern English Gardening, it is difficult to make our way along the tortuous path of change, development it is not, that set in with the banishment of Art in a garden. Critical writers have done their best to unravel things, to find the relation of each fractured phase, and to give each phase a descriptive name, but there are still many unexplained points, many contradictions that are unsolved, to which I have already alluded.
Loudon's Introduction to Repton's ”Landscape Gardening” gives perhaps the most intelligible account of the whole matter. The art of laying out grounds has been displayed in two very distinct styles: the first of which is called the ”Ancient Roman, Geometric, Regular, or Architectural Style; and the second the Modern, _English_,[35] Irregular, Natural, or Landscape Style.”
[Footnote 35: This is a little unpatriotic of Loudon to imply that the _English_ had no garden-style till the 18th century, but one can stand a great deal from Loudon.]
We have, he says, the Italian, the French, and the Dutch Schools of the Geometric Style. The Modern, or Landscape Style, when it first displayed itself in English country residences, was distinctly marked by the absence of everything that had the appearance of a terrace, or of architectural forms, or lines, immediately about the house. The house, in short, rose abruptly from the lawn, and the general surface of the ground was characterised by smoothness and bareness. This const.i.tuted the first School of the Landscape Style, introduced by Kent and Brown.
This manner was followed by the romantic or Picturesque Style, which inaugurates a School which aimed at producing architectural tricks and devices, allied with scenery of picturesque character and sham rusticity. The conglomeration at Stowe, albeit that it is attributed to Kent, shows what man can do in the way of heroically wrong garden-craft.
To know truly how to lay out a garden ”_After a more Grand and Rural Manner than has been done before_,” you cannot do better than get Batty Langley's ”New Principles of Gardening,” and among other things you have rules whereby you may concoct natural extravagances, how you shall prime prospects, make landscapes that are pictures of nothing and very like; how to copy hills, valleys, dales, purling streams, rocks, ruins, grottoes, precipices, amphitheatres, &c.
The writings of Gilpin and Price were effective in undermining Kent's School; they helped to check the rage for destroying avenues and terraces, and insisted upon the propriety of uniting a country-house with the surrounding scenery by architectural appendages. The leakage from the ranks of Kent's School was not all towards the Picturesque School, but to what Loudon terms Repton's School, which may be considered as combining all that was excellent in what had gone before.
Following upon these phases is one that is oddly called the ”_Gardenesque_” Style, the leading feature of which is that it ill.u.s.trates the beauty of trees, and other plants _individually_; in short, it is the _specimen_ style. According to the practice of all previous phases of modern gardening, trees, shrubs, and flowers were indiscriminately mixed and crowded together, in shrubberies or other plantations. According to the Gardenesque School, all the trees and shrubs are arranged to suit their kinds and dimensions, and to display them to advantage. The ablest exponents of the school are Loudon in the recent past, and Messrs Marnock and Robinson in the present, and their method is based upon Loudon.
To know how to lay out a garden after the most approved modern fas.h.i.+on we have but to turn to the deservedly popular pages of ”The English Flower Garden.” This book contains not only model designs and commended examples from various existing gardens, but text contributed by some seventy professional and amateur gardeners. Even the gardener who has other ideals and larger ambitions than are here expected, heartily welcomes a book so well stored with modern garden-lore up to date, with suggestions for new aspects of vegetation, new renderings of plant life, and must earnestly desire to see any system of gardening made perfect after its kind--
... ”I wish the sun should s.h.i.+ne On all men's fruits and flowers, as well as mine.”
Gardening is, above all things, a progressive Art which has never had so fine a time to display its possibilities as now, if we were only wise enough to freely employ old experiences and modern opportunities. People are, however, so readily content with their stereotyped models, with barren imitations, with their petty list of specimens, when instead of half-a-dozen kinds of plants, their garden has room for hundreds of different plants of fine form--hardy or half-hardy, annual and bulbous--which would equally well suit the British garden and add to its wealth of beauty by varied colourings in spring, summer, and autumn. At present ”the choke-muddle shrubbery, in which the poor flowering shrubs dwindle and kill each other, generally supports a few ill-grown and ill-chosen plants, but it is mainly distinguished for wide patches of bare earth in summer, over which, in better hands, pretty green things might crowd.” The specimen plant has no chance of displaying itself under such conditions.