W. Robinson

“ Beneath all art there are laws, however subtle, that cannot be ignored without error and waste; and in garden design there are lessons innumerable both in wild and cultivated Nature which will guide us well if we seek to understand them simply.
These books are made up in great part of quotations from old books on gardening—many of them written by men who knew books better than gardens. Where the authors touch the ground of actuality, they soon show little acquaintance with the subject; and, indeed, they see no design at all in landscape gardening and admit their ignorance of it. ”

“ I hold that it is possible to get every charm of a garden and every use of a country-seat without sacrifice of the picturesque or beautiful; that there is no reason why, either in the working or design of gardens, there should be a single false line in them. ”

“ But those who attack the old English formal garden do not take the trouble to understand its very considerable differences from the Continental gardens of the same period.
No one has "attacked" old English gardens. Part of my work has been to preserve much record of their beauty. The necessary terraces round houses like Haddon may be and are as beautiful as any garden ever made by man. Can anything be more unlike than the delicate veil of beautiful climbers and flowers over the grey walls of the courtyard at Ightham Mote and the walls of some gardens of our own day? ”

“ Thus while it may be right to clip a tree to form a wall, dividing-line, or hedge, it is never so to clip trees grown as single specimens or groups, as by clipping such we only get ugly forms—unnatural, too. Last autumn, in Hyde Park, I saw a man clipping Hollies at the Rotten Row end of the Serpentine, and asking him why it was done, he said it was to "keep them in shape," though, to do him justice, he added that he thought it would be better to let them alone. Men who clip so handsome a tree as the Holly when taking no part in a hedge or formal line are blind to beauty of form. ”

“ It is surely flying in the face of Nature to fill our gardens with tropical plants, as we are urged to do by the writers on landscape gardening, ignoring the entire difference of climate and the fact that a colour which may look superb in the midst of other strong colours will look gaudy and vulgar amongst our sober tints, and that a leaf like that of the Yucca, which may be all very well in its own country, is out of scale and character amidst the modest foliage of our English trees. (The Formal Garden.) ”

“ A beautiful house in a fair landscape is the most delightful scene of the cultivated earth—all the more so if there be an artistic garden—the rarest thing to find! The union—a happy marriage it should be—between the house beautiful and the ground near it is worthy of more thought than it has had in the past, and the best ways of effecting that union artistically should interest men more and more as our cities grow larger and our lovely English landscape shrinks2 back from them. ”

“ Hedges and wall-like dividing lines of green living things will now and then be useful, and even may be artistically used; they are sometimes, however, used where a wall would be better, walls having the great advantage of not robbing the ground near. A wall is easily made into a beautiful garden with so many lovely things, too, from great scrambling yellow Roses to alpine flowers. To any one with the slightest sympathy with Nature or art these things need not be said. ”

“ But the lawn is the heart of the true English garden, and as essential as the terrace is to the gardens on the steep hills. English lawns have too often been destroyed that "geometrical" gardens may be made where they are not only needless, but harmful both to the garden and home landscape. Sometimes on level ground the terrace walls cut off the view of the landscape from the house, and, on the other hand, the house from the landscape! ”

“ So, apart from needless formality of design and bare walls where no walls were wanted, there was often an ugly formality of detail, a senseless attempt to leave Nature out of the garden, an outrage against all that ever has or ever can make a garden delightful throughout the year by ruling that even the walls of the house should not shelter a Rose! ”

“ I do not mean that we are to exclude other men than the landscape gardener proper from the garden. We want all the help we can get from those whose tastes and training enable them to help us—the landscape painter best of all, if he cares for gardens18 and trees—the country gentleman, or any keen student and lover of Nature. The landscape gardener of the present day is not always what we admire, his work often looking more like that of an engineer. His gardening near the house is usually a repetition of the decorative work of the house, of which I hope many artistic people are already tired. ”

“ We should see the flowers and feel the beauty of plant forms, with only the simplest possible plans to ensure good working, to secure every scrap of turf wanted for play or lawn, and for every enjoyment of a garden. ”

“ My own view is that we have never yet got from the garden, and, above all, the home landscape, half the beauty which we may get by abolishing the needless formality and geometry which disfigure so many gardens, both as regards plan and flower planting. ”

“ After we have settled the essential approaches, levels, and enclosures for shelter, privacy, or dividing lines around a house, the natural form or lines of the earth herself are in nearly all cases the best to follow, and in my work I face any labour to get the ground back into its natural level or fall where disfigured by ugly banks, lines, or angles.
In the true Italian garden on the hills we have to alter the natural line of the earth or "terrace" it, because we cannot otherwise cultivate the ground or move at ease upon it. ”

“ The place of formal gardening is clear for ever. The architect can help the gardener much by building a beautiful house! That is his work. The true architect, it seems to me, would seek to go no farther. The better the real work of the architect is done, the better for the garden and landscape. If there are any difficulties of level about the house beautiful, they should be dealt with by the architect, and the better his work and the necessary terracing, if any, are done, the pleasanter the work of the landscape or other gardener who has to follow him should be.17 ”

“ Once the necessary levels are settled and the garden walks by straight walls about the house are got away from, we soon come to ground which, whether we treat it rightly or not, will at once show whether the work done be landscape work or not. No plan, it seems to me, is so good as keeping to the natural form of the earth in all lawn, pleasure ground, and plantation work. ”

“ No good means have ever been devised for the teaching of this delightful English art. Here and there a man of keen sympathy with Nature does good work, but often it is carried out by men trained for a very different life, as engineers in the great Paris parks, and in our own country by surveyors and others whose training often wholly unfits them for the study of the elements of beautiful landscape. Thus we do not often see good examples of picturesque garden and park design, while bad work is common. ”

“ These lines are seen in all bad landscape work, though with good workmen I find it is as easy to form true and artistic lines as false and ugly ones. Every landscape painter or observer of landscape will know what is meant here, though I fear it is far beyond the limits of the ideas of design held by the authors of the Formal Garden. Also, that every charm of the flower garden may be secured by avoiding wholly the knots and scrolls which make all the plants and flowers of a garden, all its joy and life, subordinate to the wretched conventional design in which they are "set out." ”

“ Here is a poor sneer at true art, not only at art in landscape gardening, but in all the fine arts. The central and essential idea of the landscape art is choice of what is beautiful—not taking the salt waste in Utah, or a field of weeds, or a Welsh slope of decayed slate, or the bog of Allen, or the thousand other things in Nature that are monotonous or dull to us, even though here and there beautiful as a wide bog may be. We can have in a38 garden a group of Scotch Firs as good in form as a fine group in wild Nature, and so of the Cedar of Lebanon and many of the lovely trees of the world. ”

“ Everywhere—unhappily, even in England, the home of landscape gardening—the too frequent presence of stupid work in landscape gardening offers some excuse for the two reactionary books which have lately appeared—books not worth notice for their own sake, as they contribute nothing to our knowledge of the beautiful art of gardening or garden design. ”

“ The men whose business it is to design gardens are heartily abused. How very graceful it would be on the part of one of them to write an essay telling architects how to build, and showing that to build well it is not necessary to know anything about the inhabitants or uses of a house! ”

“ Even teachers by profession confuse themselves and their unfortunate pupils with vague and hyper-refined talk about art and "schools" and "styles," while all the time much worse work is done than in days when simpler, clearer views were held. To prove this there is the example of the great Master's work and the eternal laws of nature, on the study of which all serious art must be for ever based. ”

“ They may be quite sure that there is a true and beautiful art of landscape gardening, notwithstanding their denunciations, and it is none the less real because there is no smug definition of it that pleases the minds of men who declare that it does not exist.49
The horticulturist and the gardener are indispensable, but they should work under control, and they stand in the same relation to the designer as the artist's colourman does to the painter, or, perhaps it would be fairer to say, as the builder and his workmen stand to the architect. ”

“ I hold up "the clipped Yew tree to obloquy," as the tree in its natural form is the most beautiful evergreen tree of our western world—as fine as the Cedar in its plumy branches, and more beautiful than any Cedar in the colour of its stem. In our own day we have seen trees of the same55 great order as the Yew gathered from a thousand hills—from British Columbia, through North America and Europe to the Atlas Mountains, and not one of them has yet proved to be so beautiful as our native Yew when it is allowed to grow unclipped root or branch. ”

“ But so many people suppose that artistic matters are mere questions of windy argument, that I think it well to show by English gardens and country seats of to-day that the many sweeping statements of their authors may be disproved by reference to actual things, to be seen by all who care for them. We live at a time when, through complexity of thought and speech, artistic questions have got into a maze of confusion. ”

“ Formality is often essential in the plan of a flower garden near a house—never as regards the arrangements of its flowers or shrubs. To array these in lines or rings or patterns can only be ugly wherever done!
That men have never yet generally enjoyed the beauty that good garden design may give is clear from the fact that the painter is driven from the garden! The artist dislikes the common garden with its formality and bedding; he cannot help hating it! In a country3 place he will seek anything but the garden, but may, perhaps, be found near a wild Rose tossing over the pigsty. ”

“ The Bamboo garden at Shrubland, the Primrose garden at Munstead, the rock and other gardens, 41 which we must keep in quiet places away from any sight of walls, are all "impossible" to these authors! How much better it would be for every art if it were impossible for men to write about things of which by their own showing they have not even elementary knowledge! ”

“ Blomfield would accept a plumb line? One can hardly leave London an hour before a person who looks at the landscape may see the lines or boundaries between one mass and another. Who could stand amongst downs or an alpine63 valley and say there are no lines in them, inasmuch as one of the most visible and delightful things in all such cases is the beauty of those lines? This is the key of the whole question of landscape gardening. There is no good landscape gardening possible without a feeling for the natural gradation and forms of the earth. ”

“ One of the most effective reasons indeed for adopting the English landscape garden was that it gave people some fresh and open Grass, often with picturesque surroundings, and, nowadays, one can hardly travel on the continent and not see some pleasant results of this. In England, the landscape gardeners and writers have almost destroyed every trace of the stiff old formal gardens, and we cannot judge the ill effects of the builder's garden so easily as in France. ”

“ Many old gardens of this sort that remain to us are far more beautiful than the modern formal gardening, which by a strange perversity has been kept naked of plants or flower life! When safety came from civil war, then came to us the often beautiful Eliza21bethan house, free of all moat or trace of war. At one time it was rash to make a garden away from the protecting walls. Now, any day in a country place beautiful situations may be found for certain kinds of gardens far away from the house, out of sight of it often. ”

“ It can be seen in little things, like the slope of a field as well as in the slope of a mountain, and it is the neglect of this which leaves us so little to boast of in landscape work. In a country slightly diversified it is, of course, more important than in a perfectly flat one, but in all diversified ground no good landscape work can be done without regarding the natural gradation of the earth, which will often tell us what to do. ”