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

Gravetye's gardens and landscape entailed a tremendous amount of work, including massive earth-moving and the building of walls, terraces, and pergolas. 'There is so much phrasemongering in matters of garden design and art', he scolded, 'that it is better to deal with actual work.' (14) In addition to the garden and pleasure grounds adjacent to the house, Gravetye had acres of naturalistically planted fields, meadows, and woods. The pleasure grounds were initially conceived along gardenesque lines, but after several years Robinson changed the naturally sloping grade near the house to the flat stone terraces that exemplified Blomfield's stance on garden design (Fig. 3). Unlike Blomfield, however, Robinson dealt with the greater landscape beyond the immediate house.

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At first the ornamental gardens consisted of flower beds close to the house filled with tufted pansies, self-coloured carnations and roses, with the emphasis on the plants themselves rather than on the design of the borders. 'I am a flower gardener', he wrote, 'and not a mere spreader-about of bad carpets done in reluctant flowers'. A garden should contain 'the greatest number of favourite plants in the simplest way'. With that in mind, he later 'threw the ground into simple beds, suiting the space for convenience of working and plantings, not losing an inch more than was necessary for walks' (Fig. 6). (15) He scoffed at a magazine editor's request to provide a plan for his garden. 'Plans should be made on the ground to fit the place', he wrote, 'and not the place made to suit some plan out of a book ... [which] any clerk can copy' (Fig. 5). (16)

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Henry James left a memorable record of Gravetye's gardens when he wrote, 'Few things in England can show a greater wealth of bloom than the wide flowery terrace immediately beneath the gray, gabled house, where tens of thousands of tea-roses ... divide their province with the carnations and pansies [and] the medley of tall yuccas and saxifrage'. (17) Robinson despaired, however, when 'a young lady who had been reading one of those mystifying books about formalities and informalities came in, and, instead of warming her eyes at my Roses and Carnations, said, "Oh, you, too, have a formal garden!"' (18)

For most visitors, the most breathtaking part of Gravetye was the west garden, brimming with tea and China roses and surrounded by wisteria-clad pergolas, arches, and trellises (Fig. 7). In its heyday this garden was given over to nearly thirty beds of roses and their companion plants, such as dianthus, violas, pansies, forget-me-nots and carnations whose colours were chosen to complement the grey stone of the manor house and the well-worn York pavers of the walkways. With Ernest George's stone summerhouse (Fig. 8) in one corner and a central sundial placed at the crossing of the two main paths, it had just the right amount of 'formality' to balance the riot of flowers.

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED] Robinson considered the west and south flower gardens, which open out directly from doors in the house, as 'a larger living-room' and 'in intimate relation to the house', the exact stance taken by his arch-rivals, the formalists, in the 1890s. 'The real flower garden, where all our precious flowers are', he commented, should be 'in close relation to the house, so that we can enjoy and see and gather our flowers in the most direct way ... Going for half a mile to get to the flower garden, as happens in some Scotch places, or scattering garden flowers in all directions, is not the right way', he concluded.' (19)