London gardens

Magazine Antiques, August, 2001 by Alfred Mayor

Most gardens in London are proportionately as small as The London Town Garden, 1700-1840 is sweeping in its scope. The author sets out his goal as follows: "In analysing the role which small gardens assumed in defining personal space, this book is concerned with the garden as a symbolic structure as well as a physical and social space."

Fortunately for the philosophically impaired, there are many down-to-earth considerations encountered by the early urban gardener. The first authority on the matter was Thomas Fairchild, a London nurseryman, whose 1722 treatise The City Gardener addressed some of the problems of growing anything in the miasma of coal smoke that hung like a pall over the city. He felt that gardens nearest the Thames flourished more than others because "the constant rising Vapour from the River" counteracted "the poisonous Quality in the City Smoke." For all city gardens he compiled a list of plants that thrived despite predictions of their rapid demise. These included lilacs, lindens, Virginia creeper, marigolds, sunflowers, honeysuckle, pinks, and daisies. He also found that fruit trees did well, particularly figs "altho' encompass'd with Houses on every Side, which are so high, that the Sun never reaches them in Winter." Not only did they grow, but they also bore fruit, as did pear and mulberry trees, currant bushes, and gr apevines.

During the eighteenth century Londoners were often content with what is now called a borrowed landscape, which is to say the view of a restful prospect that did not belong to the viewer. Generally the command of such a view was the purview of the rich, who were able to buy or build houses overlooking parks or leafy squares.

The attitude of Londoners changed in the nineteenth century, when ownership of one's view became a prevailing imperative. As the landscape gardener Humphry Repton wrote in 1816: "A view into a square or into the parks may be cheerful and beautiful, but it wants appropriation, it wants that charm that only belongs to ownership; the exclusive right of enjoyment, with the power of refusing that others should share our pleasure."

To read from Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby of 1839 it is difficult to understand the charm of owning a garden behind the house. He wrote: "Some London houses have a melancholy little plot of ground behind them, usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys, in which there withers on from year to year a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few leaves in late autumn, when other trees shed theirs, and drooping in the effort, lingers on all crackled and smoke dried till the following season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps if the weather be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup in its branches. People sometimes call these dark yards 'gardens.'"

Because water was not universally piped in, and if piped in it was under feeble pressure, water gardens were uncommon in London. Rainwater or wells were used for watering and for "syringing" the leaves of plants to wash away the soot. Statues were less demanding and were supplied by London specialists known collectively as the Statuaries. These statues were, apparently, nearly uniformly dreadful and wildly popular. The author comments: "Indeed, so great was the proliferation of gods of Athens and Rome from Hyde Park Corner [the site of the Statuaries] that one author, meditating upon the decline of the established state religion, feared that 'the poor and vulgar, when they find all other worship ridiculed and laid aside, may foolishly take to these molten images, and adore every leaden godhead they can find.'"

Some homeowners surely tilled the sooty soil themselves, but a great many relied on jobbers--itinerant self-employed gardeners who did the job for building contractors, nurserymen, and garden owners. Beginning in the eighteenth century the generally held opinion was that these men possessed unequaled moral character, integrity, and intellect.

During the nineteenth century jobbers and nurserymen looked after private gardens on yearly or seasonal contracts and rented out fantastical floral arrangements for balls such as the one a Mrs. West gave in 1818. Her boudoir was, according to a newspaper notice, "fancifully decorated with shells and flowers; [and] a transparency in the background resembling the ruins of a Roman temple." While in the garden was "a full length figure of Wellington mounted on his charger. The tout ensemble was perfectly novel, and much admired." The climactic floral folly was the vogue for the French fete champetre. For these affairs "drawing-rooms were traversed by gravel paths, interior walls were embowered in laurel, and aviaries, pavilions and herbaceous floral borders littered the indoors, displacing regular room furnishings, which were placed in the garden."

The author then moves on to the grand squares and public gardens of London, which are among its delights today. Surprisingly, when Fairchild published his treatise in 1722, "many of the city's twelve great squares lay in a state of waste or disorder: Covent Garden Piazza was littered with shops, sheds, temporary stands and excavations for wells and privies; the pleasances of Lincoln's Inn Fields, Leicester Fields and Bloomsbury Square were sites of 'great mischief's and the resort of 'many wicked and disorderly persons'; and the 'Great Square Place' of St. James's Square was a 'rude waste in an uncleanly state.'"