From bouquets to baskets - English gardens

Magazine Antiques, June, 2000 by Mark Laird

By 1816 Humphry Repton had demonstrated an inclination to use heightened artifice in some of his flower gardens, as in the proposal he and his son made to Lord and Lady Suffield for the greenhouse at Gunton Park in Norfolk (P1. X). Here they surrounded the garden with a low latticework fence reminiscent of a basket, but punctuated it at the corners with tall triangular wooden stands surmounted by baskets of flowers (see Fig. 2). Gervase Jackson-Stops observed that "the four stands seem actually derived from the torcheres or tripod candlestands fashionable in the Neo-classical interior, and almost invariably placed (as here) in the four corners." [22] He goes on to posit that there may even be an analogy between the floral scents of the climbing honeysuckles, jasmine, and roses and the perfume burners of the torcheres. However, interior tripods were meant to support flowers during the day and candies at night, and Patricia Ferguson has pointed to this as a precedent for garden devices like those at Gunton. [2 3]

Repton took the idea even further in one of his most fanciful horticultural conceits--Sunshine after Rain (see Pl. I), which depicts a "garden room" complete with tripod stands holding goldfish bowls flanking a marble-topped table, amidst trellises, arbors, and wicker-edged flower beds. John Hardy suggested to me that the whole is whimsically furnished as a banqueting room after the eighteenth-century manner. The table is decked with three baskets of flowers, but instead of vases of flowers on a stretcher tying the legs together, flowers are planted underneath as though growing in a bed. The tripod stands hold what could be pots of fuchsias. This vision of a sunny garden room looks back to the Georgian interior for inspiration but reflects the modernity of Regency taste. By this time, French doors linked indoors to outdoors, and the garden had invaded the interior. The architect and designer John Buonarotti Papworth (1775-1847) described a house "decorated with trellising, composed of light lath and wicker basket-work" and filled with "flower stands" and "festoons." [24] The outside had simulated the inside, and the inside had become outside. [25]

MARK LAIRD, a historic landscape consultant who works on preservation projects in North America and Europe, teaches landscape history at the University of Toronto.

(1.) Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1978), p. 210.

(2.) See Deborah E. Kraak, "Eighteenth-century English floral silks," ANTIQUES, June 1998, pp. 842-849.

(3.) Planting and Ornamental Gardening (London, 1785), p. 616. In Life in the English Country House, Girouard discusses the social origins of the "mainly feminine" drawing room (pp. 204--205).

(4.) Quoted in Mavis Batey, Regency Gardens (Shire Publications, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, 1995), p.23.

(5.) A Complete Body of Architecture... (London, 1756), pp. 651--652.

(6.) Illustrated and discussed in Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720--1800 (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 184--191 and Figs. 102, 107, 108.