From bouquets to baskets - English gardens

Magazine Antiques, June, 2000 by Mark Laird

The Georgian interior, with its sumptuous furnishings and decorations, is usually regarded as entirely removed--aesthetically at least--from the lawns and lakes of the English landscape garden. A park designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1715-1783) appears to have very little to do with a library designed by Robert Adam (1728-1792). Yet, as Mark Girouard pointed out some years ago, taking tea in a temple, fishing on a lake, or plunging into a cold bath in the garden were not unlike the varied and discrete happenings within the Georgian country house--playing cards in one room, dining in another, or dancing in a third. [1] More than that, the ornamental pleasure ground offered a place for ladies to continue their domestic pursuits in fresh air. Amateur botany could be applied to gardening; flowers could influence needlework and textile designs; [2] and painting, reading, or conversing could be enjoyed outside, especially when privacy was at issue. In fact, there was greater correspondence between inside an d outside than is generally believed, and a synergy of the decorative and horticultural arts turns out to have been one of the unappreciated glories of picturesque garden design. In 1785 William Marshall (c. 1745-1818), an agricultural and horticultural authority, wrote that the garden should be planted to correspond with the rooms that looked out on it:

By the Regency period, "garden rooms" opening out from the irregular picturesque house promoted a new sense of integrated space and reciprocal decoration. When, for example, the landowner and landscape gardener Hermann, prince of P[ddot{u}]ckler-Muskau (1785-1871), attended a London ball on a visit from Germany in 1827, he commented:

The [landscape] improvements and the rooms from which they are to be seen should be in unison. Thus, the view from the drawing-room should be highly embellished, to correspond with the beauty and elegance within: everything here should be feminine-- elegant--beautiful--such as attunes the mind to politeness and lively conversation. The breakfasting-room should have more masculine objects in view: wood, water, and an extended country for the eye to roam over: such as allures us imperceptibly to the ride or chace. [3]

the whole garden was covered over and divided into large rooms which were hung with draperies of rose-coloured muslin, enormous ornamental mirrors and numerous chandeliers and perfumed with every kind of flower. [4]

From the 1720s to the 1820s designers explored a variety of ways of bringing flowers into the house and furnishings into the garden. A correspondence between interior and exterior floral displays developed that was not in itself new but expressed a newfound pleasure in what might be called simulations, or illusions. The simple bouquet gave rise to the first simulation. In 1756, as the geometric pattems of baroque parterre gardens were increasingly giving way to the irregular beds of the picturesque, the architect Isaac Ware (d. 1766) observed that since "grass is the best foil to flowers," the most pleasing way to lay out flower beds was "as flower-pots, or large nosegays rising out of the ground in their happy form." [5] This notion had been carried out first by the Honorable Richard Bateman (d. 1773) in the early 1730s on his estate at Grove House in Old Windsor, where he created two picturesque flower gardens that are immortalized in paintings by Thomas Robins the Elder. [6] An artist who painted both topo graphical scenes and flower portraits (see frontispiece and PL IV), Robins also com memorated the transformation of Woodside, the estate of Bateman's neighbor, Hugh Hamersley. His view of the greenhouse garden there (see Pl. II) gives a lively sense of how bouquets were popping up in flower beds.

If the bouquet was the dominant motif of the flower garden, the "theater" of plants was the overriding conceit that shaped both the flower bed and the garden shrubbery after 1750. In 1759 Richard North (d. 1766) illustrated a shrubbery as a "theatrical Appearance of ye Front of a Wood," on the frontispiece of his nursery catalogue. [7] In 1778 another nurseryman, Nathaniel Swinden (b.c. 1745), used similar terms to describe a flower bed, writing that "The lowest plants being placed in front, and rising gradually in height from the edge upwards, will form the appearance of plants placed in a Greenhouse, or seats in a Theatre." [8] The painting in Plate V shows a theatrical clump of shrubs and trees in the right foreground.

One of the earliest associations of the term theatrical with plant arrangements appears in the manuscript "Elysium Britannicum," a wide-ranging work written by the virtuoso and garden authority John Evelyn (1620-1706) and first compiled in the late 1650s. [9] In it Evelyn described "benches & shelves Theatricaly [sic] placed in degrees one above another." [10] The word theater, however, was already linked to the idea of a compendium, or comprehensive collection of objects, as the Theatrum Botanicum: The Theater of Plantes, or an Universall and Complete Herball (London, 1640), by John Parkinson (1567-1650). In this sense, as John Dixon Hunt has pointed out, "Evelyn's 'Theatre of Pastimes' implies both a collection or conspectus of amusements and a stage or arena on which they were presented." [11] The two meanings of the word would remain resonant to eighteenth-century gardeners; for whom the shrubbery was not merely a graduated display in an amphitheatrical mode but also a compendium of woody plants.