Delight - landscape architecture - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, March, 2001 by Peter Davey

LAND ART IS AMERICA'S GREAT CONTRIBUTION TO LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURE. HERE, IT HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO BRITAIN, AND MADE POIGNANT WITH WILD FLOWERS, NOW DYING OUT IN THEIR NATURAL HABITATS.

Harewood House in Yorkshire is one of the great mansions of the north of England. The main block and its outbuildings were created by an astonishing spectrum of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century architects from Adam to Barry. The grounds were by Lancelot Brown, overlaid near the house by the Italianate formalism of Barry and Nesfield. On a promontory in Brown's lake is the old walled garden, where fruit and vegetables were raised for the big household, but as the establishment shrank, the kitchen garden was superseded by the economies of scale offered by supermarkets. Its sheltered spaces were laid down to lawns.

A couple of years ago, Diane Howse (with Andy Halley and Thomas Clarke) designed a great spiral in half of the garden. Turf was dug out with a machine and replaced by new soil, later sown by hand with traditional meadow grasses and wild flowers. We have seen a lot of things a bit like this in America, but the Harewood spiral is one of the first in Britain, and the only one ever to celebrate the fragile beauties of the English flora.

In spring, the pale, delicate yellows of stiff cowslips are succeeded by the stronger chromes of sprawling birdsfoot trefoil and buttercup. Then white umbels of pignuts contrast with the drooping honey-scented cream plumes of meadowsweet. At harvest time, the shocking scarlet of poppies and piercing blue of cornflowers (both banished by chemical farming from the fields) sparkle again against the delicate structures of grasses like golden oat, meadow barley and Yorkshire fog. The spiral is transient. It is to be ploughed up. But from the air, its traces will surely be seen for ages, and wandering through the meadow that is to replace it, people will be surprised to find corn cockle, vetch, devil's bit scabious, selfheal, agrimony, yarrow, ox-eye daisy and quaking grass: the plants of old England, all strangely gathered within the walls. P.D.