From bouquets to baskets - English gardens

Magazine Antiques, June, 2000 by Mark Laird

Or the converse might be true, the planting in the garden affecting the decoration in the fireplace. A clearer instance of the decorative arts responding to a motif in the pleasure ground may be seen in the development of ceramic vessels for displaying flowering bulbs. Many were designed to hold the fashionable double hyacinth--a subject Patricia F. Ferguson of the George R. Gardner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto has researched in great depth. [18] Until about 1762, and following a trend that began in the Netherlands, hyacinth bulbs seem to have been grown primarily as singles in pots or in larger ceramic containers with flat lids. Thereafter tiered vessels that held several bulbs began to appear in Strasbourg and Paris, just when the theatrical or amphitheatrical mode of planting was becoming fashionable on the Continent. I have tried to reconstruct with horticultural accuracy how in the eighteenth century these flowers would have appeared when displayed in a triple-tiered porcelain bulb pot made at the f actory founded by Jean Baptiste Locre de Roissy (b. 1726) in Paris in the 1770s (P1. VI). In this "theatrical" setting, the beautiful conical blooms of the period, combined with the repeated rhythm of the supports, establish a counterpoint to the sinuous leaves. It seems a perfect image of the moment--poised between the rococo and the neoclassical--a balance of naturalness and artifice. Such vessels often formed the centerpiece of a garniture of bulb holders, along a mantelpiece, for instance, where they might be seen as a floral border at eye level. A two-tiered flower stand designed about 1770 by Robert Adam for Osterley Park House in Isleworth, London, might also be seen as part of the same dynamic. Or the Adam stand and the tiered French pots might simply reflect the adaptation of the auricula-stage aesthetic to the interior.

The French also had another tradition of tiered floral display--the corbeille, [19] which the British borrowed and translated into the floral basket. In Humphry Repton's Red Book of 1791 for Courteenhall, in Northamptonshire, is a plan for a "parterre for flowers in small beds" and a "corbeille for flowers" in Lady Wake's flower garden. [20] Repton's use of the term corbeille certainly suggests a familiarity with French sources, possibly with illustrations in French publications such as Georges Louis Le Rouge's Detail de nouveaux jardins a la mode (1776-1788), which depicts the round corbeille in the duc de Biron's garden, or Plate 369 in Andre Jacques Roubo's L'Art du menuisier (Fig. 1). Here, the highly ornamental plant container, held up by a complex quatrefoil trelliswork and spilling over with flowers, forms an architectural ziggurat that is not unlike the theatrical flower beds of the landscape garden.

Without additional written or pictorial evidence, it is impossible to know if Repton's corbeille for Lady Wake incorporated such elaborate devices as trelliswork, but as he spent much time in the Netherlands as a youth, it seems equally likely that he would have replicated the natural simplicity of wicker baskets of the Low Countries, like those depicted in the works of Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573 -1621) or Jan Brueghel the Elder (see Pl. IX). His daughter Mary Dorothy Repton painted a watercolor in this style (which also suggests the links between ladies' pursuits and the flower garden as a female domain), which she or someone else touchingly inscribed as "designed by Papa" (Pl. VII). Repton's predilection for this sort of Dutch-basket interpretation is seen in a proposal for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (Pl. XI), as well as in some of his other projects. [20] His eldest son, John Adey Repton, introduced a variation on the theme to England when he designed the so-called Hardenberg basket [21] for the dowager Lady Suffield's garden at Blickling Hall in Norfolk in 1823 (see Fig. 3). The wooden basket was just over eight feet in diameter and more than three feet high. He intended it to be filled with roses and placed within a parterre of small flowers in radial beds edged by dwarf boxwood.