Life in the Garden

by Penelope Lively

  As we have seen, garden fashion depends on what there is available to become fashionable, and who is dictating garden style. It is also, of course, a matter of garden size, of grand gardening and substantial country-garden gardening and the skimpy urban or suburban plot. Grand gardening has been forever in a category of its own, from the Roman villa to the Victorian mansion complete with fern house, walled kitchen garden, orangery, hothouse with vines. And the stately home with serious acreage has been made over more comprehensively than any – more on that shortly. But the immemorial gardener with just a patch at the front and a bit more at the back has gardened without benefit of style advice or access to new introductions, and has gardened with what was to hand. Remember Gertrude Jekyll’s fervent approval of the cottage garden. And what was to hand would have been, way back, the primroses (and snowdrops) you could take from the wild, and then all the ubiquitous, easily available marigolds and asters and nasturtiums and hollyhocks and pinks. And that lupin my neighbour down the road gave me a clump of, and the blue sweet pea from the seeds my mother sent, and my aunt’s Michaelmas daisy, and Mrs Smith’s iris … Random, opportunistic, comfortingly referential – the personal element that a garden had before we acquired everything from the garden centre and the catalogue. And with fashion not an issue, except where a plant became more widely grown and available and so gradually seeped from the grander garden to any garden.

  At no time was the garden owner more challenged by the requirements of contemporary fashion than in the late eighteenth century. The grand garden owner, that is, the landowner, the possessor of serious acreage. This was the age of ‘improvement’, the age of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. Jane Austen was poking fun at this obsession in Mansfield Park, when Mr Rushworth declares his discontent with his unimproved seat:

  ‘I wish you could see Compton,’ said he; ‘it is the most complete thing! I never saw a place so altered in my life … The approach now, is one of the finest things in the country: you see the house in the most surprising manner. I declare, when I got back to Sotherton yesterday, it looked like a prison – quite a dismal old prison.’

  ‘Oh, for shame!’ cried Mrs Norris. ‘A prison indeed? Sotherton Court is the noblest old place in the world.’

  ‘It wants improvement, ma’am, beyond anything. I never saw a place that wanted so much improvement in my life; and it is so forlorn that I do not know what can be done … I must try to do something with it … but I do not know what. I hope I shall have some good friend to help me.’

  ‘Your best friend upon such an occasion,’ said Miss Bertram calmly, ‘would be Mr Repton, I imagine.’

  ‘That is what I was thinking of. As he has done so well by Smith, I think I had better have him at once. His terms are five guineas a day.’

  ‘Well, and if they were ten,’ cried Mrs Norris, ‘I am sure you need not regard it. The expense need not be any impediment. If I were you, I should not think of the expense. I would have everything done in the best style, and made as nice as possible.’

  Lancelot Brown – ‘Capability’, from his practice of announcing the ‘capability’, the potential, of a landscape – had got going by the middle of the eighteenth century, and by the time of his death in 1783 had had his way with estates including Chatsworth, Blenheim, Petworth and many others. He was a gardener by training, and honed his landscaping skills at Stowe, setting up his own business in due course, as both consultant and contractor. The general principle of his designs was simplicity, undulating ground with an expanse of grass reaching away to a lake or stream, clumps or belts of trees softening the contours of the land, all this sweeping away the clutter of formal gardens. If the contours were insufficiently pleasing, adjustments would be made – hills scooped aside, rivers dammed to create a lake – while grazing cattle would be kept away from the precincts of the mansion with a ha-ha. If there happened to be obtrusive buildings, a cottage or two, a whole village, then away with them also. A makeover by Brown was extensive, expensive, and essential if you were to make the grade as the modern landowner of an impressive estate.

  In Headlong Hall, Thomas Love Peacock rolled Brown and Repton into one with his creation of Marmaduke Milestone, ‘a picturesque landscape gardener of the first celebrity’:

  ‘My dear sir,’ said Mr Milestone, ‘accord me your permission to wave the wand of enchantment over your grounds. The rocks shall be blown up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats shall vanish like mist. Pagodas and Chinese bridges, gravel walks and shrubberies, bowling-greens, canals, and clumps of larch, shall rise upon its ruins. One age, sir, has brought to light the treasures of ancient learning; a second has penetrated into the depths of metaphysics; a third has brought to perfection the science of astronomy; but it was reserved for the exclusive genius of the present times, to invent the noble art of picturesque gardening, which has given, as it were, a new tint to the complexion of nature, and a new outline to the physiognomy of the universe!’

  However, he is not without a critic. Sir Patrick O’Prism, another member of the house party of garrulous gentlemen whose opinions and exchanges are the substance of this plotless but engaging novel, takes issue: ‘I never saw one of your improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing but big bowling-greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at random out of a pen.’

  Peacock was writing in 1816, a couple of years after the publication of Mansfield Park, with both Brown and Repton safely out of the way, and the vogue for ‘improvement’ itself perhaps ripe for some amiable derision. But Brown and Repton between them had worked on over 1,000 country estates, not all of them as majestic as Chatsworth or Blenheim, but ranging down to the homes of gentlemen of more modest situation anxious to make their acreage as up to date and impressive as possible.

  Brown seems to have been a formidable personality, opinionated, a prolific writer, and an adept self-publicist. He died rich in 1783, having manipulated a great deal of English landscape, shifting inconvenient earth, and rearranging inappropriate water, and stamping his unforgettable name on some of the country’s stateliest homes. Humphry Repton was his successor, broadly in sympathy with Brown’s approach but keen to emphasize that landscape gardening should aim to display the natural beauty of the scene, and take pains to conceal any interference made to improve the natural state of the landscape: remove a hill, divert a stream, but this must not be apparent. He was concerned with architecture and a house to be displayed to best advantage by its setting. He reintroduced the terrace in front of a mansion, allowed an avenue approach, and permitted flower beds in the immediate vicinity of a house. He was not primarily a contractor, like Brown, though he would oversee a project if required, and was famed for his Red Books, customized for each client, in which a descriptive text was accompanied by paintings with flaps or overlays which showed the landscape around the property before his attentions and in the state they would be if the client followed his recommendations. The Red Book was, effectively, what he was selling, and he appears to have rivalled Brown in loquacity and a gift for self-presentation. His creation was the landscaped park as setting for a stylish mansion, as can be seen by his work at Uppark, Sheringham, Sezincote and other estates. Like Brown, he became the go-to operator for the aspirant home owner of means.

  Tom Stoppard’s glorious play Arcadia, a dance between past and present, is about truth and time, about Romantic and Classical, about Fermat’s Last Theorem, about Byron, about love and sex, and it makes exquisite use of the eighteenth century’s radical vision of landscape. The setting for the play is Sidley Park, in Derbyshire, and the action moves from the early nineteenth century to the present day, always in the same room, in which appear now the family in the past, now the family today, along with further essential characters including, in 1809, Mr Noakes, described as ‘a landskip architect’. Noakes lacks the Repton/Brown personality; he is a bumbling and sycophantic fellow, though equipped
with a Repton-style Red Book, which gives Lady Croom pause for thought:

  LADY CROOM: … I would not have recognized my own garden but for your ingenious book – is it not? – look! Here is the Park as it appears to us now, and here as it might be when Mr Noakes has done with it. Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a cricket pitch. My hyacinth dell is become a haunt for hobgoblins, my Chinese bridge, which I am assured is superior to the one at Kew, and for all I know at Peking, is usurped by a fallen obelisk overgrown with briars –

  In fact, it appears that what is to be made over, if Noakes secures his commission, is a Capability Brown ‘improvement’. Hannah, a visiting academic in the present day, defines the ravaging of Sidley Park in terms of the shift from Enlightenment thought to the sensibilities of Romanticism.

  HANNAH: … It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone – the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes – the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he’d finished it looked like this … The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.

  This is a most thought-provoking alignment of garden fashion with intellectual history, and earlier Hannah had had a go at perceived eighteenth-century derivative pretentiousness:

  HANNAH: … English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour. Here, look – Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, superimposed by Richard Noakes, untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It’s the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires …

  Repton was correcting Brown’s undulations, clumps and belts of trees with the introduction of features that complied more with the current notion of the picturesque, and here the question of garden fashion merged with the wider problem of landscape appreciation – how the eighteenth-century person of taste was to view the world. Because it was not enough to view: the discriminating traveller must be able to discriminate between the picturesque, the beautiful and the sublime. And the picturesque was at the heart of the matter; ideally, a landscape should compose itself to the eye as does a painting by a master – Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa being particular favourites. To this end, fashionable travellers equipped themselves with a Claude glass, a small, slightly convex, tinted mirror. You turned your back on the scene to be assessed, in order to observe it reflected in the mirror, which would effectively abstract it from its surroundings, giving it a painterly, or picturesque, effect. Or not, as the case may be; if that particular section of the Lake District or wherever did not meet requirements, you moved on to find somewhere more satisfactorily picturesque. It seems to me very like today’s tourist practice of taking a photograph before, or even without, looking at the object of interest.

  These distinctions must have made travel even more taxing than it already was in the age of coach or horseback. You were in search of remarkable scenery, but must also be able to make an informed and intelligent pronouncement on the nature of the scenery in question. The discerning traveller would be able to summon up the appropriate response to the sublime. It had been defined, and distinguished from the beautiful, by Edmund Burke in 1757, in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, and was understood to imply an element of fear, and to involve majesty, vastness, the sense of awe and terror. The ocean was sublime, because of its implication of infinity. Equally, you could be comfortably (or uncomfortably) certain that you were in the presence of the sublime if viewing some great torrent of water, or intense and craggy cliffs.

  The sublime was relatively straightforward, and the discerning traveller would be able to summon up the appropriate response. The trouble came with distinguishing the beautiful from the picturesque, the concept that had been established by William Gilpin with his publications on the nature of the picturesque in the later part of the century. It had become clear that scenic beauty alone was not enough, it must be possible also to find in the scene before you that painterly, picturesque quality, helped out, if necessary, by a Claude glass. And now, to complicate matters, the distinction was applied to more immediate scenery, to the landscape of a park or estate, whether improved or unimproved. The distinction had become a gardening matter.

  That satirical fun could be had on this theme by Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock indicates that the matter of the picturesque would have been familiar to most if not all their readers. Readers would have views themselves, in all probability, which might well have stemmed from familiarity with the work of Uvedale Price, a country landowner who made himself the principal spokesman on the subject in 1796, with his Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful. Price was very much concerned with the gardening aspect of the picturesque debate, and much of his Essay is devoted to lambasting Capability Brown, safely dead so unable to answer back, though Repton, treated with more circumspection, was still around. Price’s Essay is a polemic, emphatic in its pronouncements on the picturesque, which he distinguishes from the beautiful as the contrast between smoothness and roughness. Qualities of harmony and uniformity attributed to beauty, whereas the interest of the picturesque lies in its elements of surprise, irregularity: ‘A temple or palace of Grecian architecture in its perfect entire state, and with its surface and colour smooth and even, either in painting or reality is beautiful; in ruin it is picturesque. Observe the process by which time … converts a beautiful object into a picturesque one. First, by means of weather stains, partial incrustations, mosses, &c. it at the same time takes off from the uniformity of the surface, and of the colour; that is, gives it a degree of roughness, and variety of tint.’

  So, ruins good, pristine constructions bad. But Price extended his comparisons rather wildly to animals; where dogs were concerned a Pomeranian or rough water dog was picturesque, a smooth spaniel or greyhound not, a worn-out carthorse or wild forester was preferable to a ‘sleek pampered steed’, goats superior to sheep, and a lion to a lioness (the mane, you see). And when it came to ‘our own species’, beggars, gypsies and ‘all such rough tattered figures’ were picturesque in the same way. One would like to think that he is writing tongue in cheek here, but I’m not at all sure that he is – the picturesque was an extremely serious matter for Price. Tom Stoppard’s landscape gardener Mr Noakes in Arcadia had certainly paid attention to him – one of the requirements of his proposed improvement of Sidley Park is the construction of a hermitage, to be occupied by a hermit. Lady Croom supposes that he will supply the hermit, and when he admits that he does not have one to hand, she is aghast:

  LADY CROOM: Not one? I am speechless.

  NOAKES: I am sure a hermit can be found. One could advertise.

  LADY CROOM: Advertise?

  NOAKES: In the newspapers.

  LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

  Price is after variety, intricacy, the capacity to invite curiosity in the viewer: the picturesque ‘corrects the languor of beauty or the horror of sublimity’. Fortunately, the sublime does not much arise in a landscape gardening context, so it is the correction of the merely beautiful that is at issue, beauty being ‘O
ne cause of the insipidity that has prevailed under the name of improvement’. And this is when he really gets going with his attack on Brown: ‘this great legislator of our national taste’. He derides Brown’s fixation with smooth sweeps of grass and groups and belts of trees: ‘the great distinguishing feature of modern improvement is the clump; whose name, if the first letter were taken away, would most accurately describe its form and effect’. Brown’s calm expanses of water won’t do because they lack the element of reflection – the banks – of the overhanging trees and other growth that would supply interest: ‘I am aware that Mr Brown’s admirers, with one voice, will quote the great water at Blenheim as a complete answer to all I have said against him on the subject …’ He goes on to make specific criticism of the layout of the Blenheim lake and bridge. Years ago, when we lived a few miles away, I spent much time precisely there, sitting on the despised bank by the water, with not a thought about the nature of the picturesque, but fascinated by the courtship displays of the great crested grebe. Actually, applying Price criteria, I think a grebe would be more acceptably picturesque than, say, a mallard – that crest, a generally more edgy appearance.

  ‘Mr Brown was bred a gardener,’ says Price dismissively, ‘and having nothing of the mind, or the eye of a painter, he formed his style (or rather his plan) upon the model of a parterre; and transferred its minute beauties, its little clumps, knots, and patches of flowers, the oval belt that surrounds it, and all its twists and crincum crancums, to the great scale of nature.’ And that is what is very much at issue: Price wants the natural effect. Brown, he says, is only satisfied when he has made a natural river look like an artificial one. He loathes Brown’s use of clumps of firs or larches; he wants the kind of mixed woodland that provides variety of texture, of light and shade. On and on he goes, citing instances of Brownian abuse of the landscape on every page, ending up with a sigh: ‘It is equally probable that many an English gentleman has felt deep regret when Mr Brown had improved some charming trout stream into a piece of water; and that many a time afterwards, when walking along its naked banks, and disgusted with its glare and formality, he has thought how beautifully fringed those of his little brook once had been; how it sometimes ran rapidly over the stones and shallows, and sometimes in a narrower channel stole silently beneath the overhanging boughs.’