Gravetye Manor: home of the Robinsonian garden: Judith B. Tankard explores the legacy of William Robinson, a key proponent of Arts and Crafts ideals in gardening. His work at his own home, Gravetye Manor in Sussex, is recorded by the artists with whom he collaborated on his influential publications

Apollo, April, 2005 by Judith B. Tankard

In July 1885, when he was approaching fifty, Robinson acquired at auction Gravetye Manor, a dilapidated late-Elizabethan manor house. It was ideally situated in the rolling countryside of Sussex, but within easy access by rail to his editorial offices in London. Gravetye's situation, with views of the Sussex Weald and the Ashdown Forest, must have appealed to Robinson's aesthetic sensibilities. No doubt he saw his future as a gentleman farmer and country squire. Originally built in 1598 for Richard and Katharine Infield, the stone manor house stands midway on a hill, the north protected from the winds and the south front overlooking the expansive view. (7)

Over the next five decades Robinson would invest a considerable fortune in Gravetye, not only in modifications to the manor house, but also in extensive gardening activities. He published a detailed record of his yearly progress in Gravetye Manor, or Twenty Years' Work Round an Old Manor House, in 1911. (8) In its heyday, Gravetye was surrounded by 1,000 acres of bucolic fields, coppices, and woods (Fig. 2). The rolling terrain of the estate resembled the naturalistic beauties of an eighteenth-century picturesque landscape, replete with a herd of pedigree Sussex cattle whose deep red colour provided a perfect foil for the green countryside.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

For the interior alterations and additions to the manor house, Robinson turned to several architects, firstly George Devey. His work at Gravetye was a great disappointment to Robinson, who complained of defective plumbing and fireplaces that did not draw properly, in short, 'almost everything done by the builders ... was wrongly or carelessly done.' (9) After Devey's death in 1886, Robinson engaged Sir Ernest George of the London architectural firm George and Peto, whose most famous pupil was Edwin Lutyens. George added a new hall and refurbished the richly panelled interiors. Lutyens, who later designed a boathouse on one of the lakes at Gravetye, found Robinson exasperating, boring and full of contradictions. Jesting with the architect Reginald Blomfield one day, Lutyens suggested 'cutting a statue of W. Robinson in yew! as a monument to all he has done for gardening." (10)

Robinson was definitely full of contradictions. In the early 1890s, he increasingly railed against what he termed 'architects gardens', gardens designed by those he claimed knew nothing about horticulture. As the era's most vocal horticulturist, Robinson decried one of the favourite tricks of architects, the clipping and aligning of trees, as 'barbarous, needless, and inartistic." (11) The pages of his journals flowed with endless criticisms of books about garden design written, he declared, by those 'without any knowledge of plants, trees, or landscape beauty." (12) Robinson especially loathed Blomfield's The Formal Garden in England (1892) for its insensitivity to horticultural concerns and singled out John D. Sedding's Garden-Craft Old and New (1890) as one devoted to 'vegetable sculpture'. (13) In spite of these simmering controversies, Robinson valued the expertise of architects in assisting him with remodelling Gravetye.