Antiques

Magazine Antiques, April, 1996 by Wendell Garrett

Francis Bacon, "Of Gardens," 1625

For Bacon a garden was a reconstruction of the Biblical Garden of Eden, and fine gardening was an accomplishment of civilization. The great houses of the gentry in seventeenth-century England needed gardens to echo their imposing show of classical symmetry, inspired by Italian Renaissance interpretations of ancient Roman villas. Architecture has always provided the context for landscape gardening, and there can be few gardens not originally laid out to complement a building.

Garden designers have themselves used architecture in their creations. In 1709 Antoine Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville catalogued everything on the subject of classical garden design in La theorie et la pratique du jardinage, writing that "Arcades, Arbours and Alcoves of greenery are 'fragments of architecture' which, when well situated, have a special beauty and magnificence that greatly enhances the natural beauty of the garden."

The classic English garden was shaped not only by the country's climate but also by a cultural taste for irregularity and asymmetry. This sensibility was closely related to contemporary English taste, which reflected a new sense of freedom and, in particular, an aesthetic aversion to straight lines. Sir Henry Wotton in The Elements of Architecture (1624) anticipates the emphasis on surprise and variety typical of eighteenth-century landscape gardeners: "I must note a certaine contrarietie between building and gardening: For as Fabriques should bee regular, so Gardens should bee irregular, or at least cast into a very wilde Regularitie."

In England during the eighteenth century a preoccupation with ancient Rome led to the invocation of classical examples as models for the modern world. If insufficient antique examples existed, as was the case in architecture and landscape architecture, the classical legacy could be approached through the surviving works and writings of the Renaissance Italians. However, in considering Vitruvius, Horace, Pliny, or Palladio, the English were obliged to address the question of how these writers of another place and time would have functioned in present-day England. It was as much a question of adaptation as imitation. In An Epistle to Lord Burlington (1731) Alexander Pope advised his patron and other enthusiastic gardeners of the day to "Consult the Genius of the Place in all,/That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall...." Classically educated Englishmen saw nature as a force that strove for perfection but was prone to unfortunate accidents along the way. To "Consult the Genius of the Place" was to seek to understand the potential perfection of a site and to help it to live up to its potential with discreet intervention if necessary. Humphry Repton praised "the blended graces" of Jean Antoine Watteau's painted gardens "where nature is dressed, but not disfigured, by art."

Gardens have specific meanings; they are "speaking pictures" that are as much identified with their designer as a canvas is with its painter. "As is the Gardener, so is the Garden," Thomas Fuller wrote in 1732, while Pope, the poet, went so far as to say "Gardening is...nearer God's own Work, than Poetry."