Read My Heart

by Jane Dunn

  Dorothy’s coverlet, with its meandering vines and flowering tendrils uniting the disparate vignettes of wild life and scattered blossom, has an elegant airiness and visual symmetry that showed an artist’s eye. The motifs of sinuous plant life and some of the mythical beasts reveal too the distinct influence of Chinese and Indian design, examples of which Dorothy would certainly have seen while she was in The Hague, exploring the exotic imported fabrics and pottery in the overflowing warehouses of the mighty Dutch East India Company. Dutch houses of the time also incorporated these exotic goods in their own simple interiors.

  William had long recognised Dorothy as his intellectual equal and, given his expansive character, it would be strange if his garden planning and the style and content of his gentlemanly essays were not only shared with her but also modified by her criticisms and ideas. Certainly horticulture and writing were the obvious entertainments of their days at Sheen. His father’s gift of money to be spent beautifying the front elevation of the house and decorative details in the grounds had spurred him on in the creation of what were to become his famous gardens at Sheen. Dorothy, who happily chose to spend so much time as a young woman in the garden and surrounding countryside at the family house of Chicksands, and wrote about her pleasure in the scent of jasmine, orange flowers and roses, was most likely an active partner in the plans and planting schemes for their houses and gardens wherever they lived.

  William’s interest in gardening had begun during his childhood with his uncle Henry Hammond at Penshurst in Sussex: then his visits to the beautiful garden that the Franklins had inherited when they bought Moor Park turned his thoughts to the design of gardens. His and Dorothy’s first chance to create their own was in Ireland where the fertile soils of Carlow had rewarded their efforts well. Now retired, for a while at least, to Sheen, William could expand on his experiences there and explore the ideas he had formulated during his posting in the Low Countries where he had visited some of the finest gardens at a time when Dutch art and horticulture were at their most influential.

  Intellectually curious, generous-hearted and a proselytising enthusiast, he decided to share his passion with anyone else who was interested. His essay ‘On Gardens’, completed in 1685, is still in print today. In it William pointed out the fundamental importance of climate and soil and the fact that the inhabitants of these islands could not take for granted the conditions that made fruit production in the sunnier climes of Greece and Italy, for instance, so easy. Instead English gardeners had to take as much advantage of what sun was available by enclosing kitchen gardens with high insulating walls, growing fruit trees espaliered against them and vegetables and herbs in the warmth of the micro-climate they created.

  He had little patience with people who complained about the English weather, comparing it unfavourably with its continental neighbours. In fact, Charles II seemed to agree with him, much to William’s approval; in this subject at least he showed his patriotic colours and resisted the lure of France:

  I heard the King say, and I thought new and right, and truly like a King of England, that loved and esteemed his own country … he thought that [here] was the best climate, where he could be abroad in the air with pleasure, or at least without trouble or inconvenience, the most hours of the day; and this, he thought, he could be in England, more than in any country he knew in Europe, and the Low-Countries themselves; where the heats or the colds, and the changes of seasons, are less treatable than they are with us.2

  Where Dorothy may well have been interested in the narrative and aesthetics of a garden (her husband explained his own lack of interest in planting flowers by designating that as ‘more the ladies’ part’), William was certainly mostly excited by the structure and productive part, experimenting with propagating fruit trees and vines, both those native to England and the foreign varieties he had encountered in his travels and imported for trial plantings. He prided himself on having been the first to introduce to the gardens around him in Sheen ‘the Brussels apricot’ and four varieties of grape, his descriptions of which betray his combination of enthusiasm, sensual delight and scientific curiosity and care:

  I have had the honour of bringing over four sorts into England; the arboyse, from the Franche Compté, which is a small white grape, or rather runs into some small and some great upon the same branch; it agrees well with our climate, but is very choice in [particular about] soil, and must have sharp gravel; it is the most delicious of all grapes that are not muscat. The Burgundy, which is a grizelin or pale red, and of all others is surest to ripen in our climate, so that I have never known them to fail one summer these fifteen years, when all others have; and have had it very good upon an east wall. A black muscat, which is called the dowager, and ripens as well as the common white grape. And the fourth is the grizelin frontignac, being of that colour, and the highest of that taste, and the noblest of all grapes I ever ate in England; but requires the hottest wall and the sharpest gravel; and must be favoured by the summer too, to be very good.3

  William considered that during the years of Charles II’s reign gardening had become increasingly popular and techniques for growing different plants so improved that English gardens had grown in reputation until ‘perhaps few countries are before us, either in the elegance of our gardens, or in the number of our plants; and, I believe, none equal us in the variety of fruits which may be justly called good; and from the earliest cherry and strawberry, to the last apples and pears, may furnish every day of the circling year’.4 Martha recalled how her brother was usually rather abstemious and plain in his tastes in food and drink but that his real indulgence was his home-grown fruit: ‘If he ever was inclin’d to excess twas in fruits, wch by his care & aplication he was alwayes furnis’d the best off from his owne gardens.’5

  The problem in ripening fruit like peaches and nectarines in England was not so much the lack of sun but more the shortness of the ripening season and that could be remedied by choosing the right varieties (something on which, through scientific application and trial and error, he had become an expert), planting the trees in a suitable soil, ideally light and sandy, and using south-facing walls to absorb and radiate whatever heat there was from a more short-lived English sun. William considered the proper ripening of fruit to be not only a simple matter of taste but of health too – even of life and death. The dangers of unripe fruit worried him as a young man and during his courtship of Dorothy he urged her, in the beginning of the summer of 1653, not to eat too much of even fully ripened fruit, to which she replied that he ‘has frighted mee just now from a baskett of the most tempting Cherry’s that Ere I saw’.6 She teased him that in her father’s garden ‘heer is Enough to kill a 1000 such as I am, and soe Exelently good, that nothing but your power can secure mee, therfor forbid it mee that I may live’.7

  The hidden dangers of fruit obviously still exercised him into old age, for in his essay on gardening he explained how the poor city dwellers in autumn were so desperate for it that they would eat quantities, but often inferior and unripe, thereby ruining their digestive processes, risking illness and even death. On the other hand the lucky Temple family and their fruit-growing friends could benefit fully from the properly ripened cornucopia of goodness that flowed in summer and autumn from their gardens: ‘the season of summer fruits is ever the season of health with us, which I reckon from the beginning of June to the end of September: and for all sicknesses of the stomach (from which most others are judged to proceed), I do not think any that are, like me, the most subject to them, shall complain, whenever they eat thirty or forty cherries before meals, or the like proportion of strawberries, white figs, soft peaches, or grapes perfectly ripe.’8 Always pleased by evidence of the natural levellers of life, he declared that for this reason a poor man with a garden was richer than any rich man without.

  Given the care he extended to propagating his trees, William could not resist pointing out how highly regarded his fruit was by the world at large:

  I may truly say,
that the French, who have eaten my peaches and grapes at Sheen, in no very ill year, have generally concluded, that the last are as good as any they have eaten in France, on this side of Fontainebleau; and the first as good as any they have eat in Gascony … Italians have agreed, my white figs to be as good as any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of white fig there; for in the latter kind, and the blue, we cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in the Fontignac or Muscat grape. My orange-trees are as large as any I saw when I was young in France, except those of Fontainebleau, or what I have seen since in the Low-Countries, escept some very old ones of the Prince of Orange’s; as laden with flowers as any can well be, as full of fruit as I suffer or desire them, and as well tasted as are commonly brought over, except the best sorts of Seville and Portugal.9

  So great was his enthusiasm for his fruit trees, it did not occur to William that some of his foreign visitors may well have been being merely polite. However, John Evelyn, another gardening enthusiast, reported that the espaliered trees William had planted and nurtured at Sheen were in fact worthy of every praise that the owner had heaped on them himself: on a visit when the Temple garden was well established he wrote: ‘The most remarkable thing, is his Orangerie & Gardens; where the wall Fruite-trees are most exquisitely nailed & applied, far better than in my life I had ever noted.’10

  The garden at Moor Park in Hertfordshire where William and Dorothy spent their honeymoon was always to remain for William the ideal. Like that romantic garden of his dreams, he thought the design of any good English garden should be based on a rectangle, preferably involving some natural inclination in the land to provide interest and perspective. ‘The beauty, the air, the view makes amends for the expence, which is very great in finishing and supporting the terras-walks, in levelling the parterres, and in the stone stairs that are necessary from one to the other.’11 He was in fact describing the setting for the gardens at Moor Park but he and Dorothy had also been lucky enough to see some of the best Dutch gardens and certainly these had had an influence on William’s aesthetic, and increasingly on English horticulture at large towards the end of the century when William and Mary came to the throne. The Anglo-Dutch style was characterised by considering the garden as an extension of the house with walls, straight lines and regular spaces. There was an emphasis on parterres, formal water features such as canals and fountains, topiary, orchards and the planting of avenues of trees.

  William offered his advice to all newly converted horticulturists on how to make a garden from a field or modify existing old Elizabethan and early Stuart gardens of enclosed geometrical formality:

  I think from four or five to seven or eight acres is as much as any Gentleman need design … In every garden, four things are necessary to be provided for, flowers, fruit, shade, and water … it ought to lie to the best parts of the house, or to those of the master’s commonest use, so as to be but like one of the rooms out of which you step into another. The part of your garden next your house (besides the walks that go round it) should be a parterre for flowers, or grass-plots bordered with flowers; or if, according to the newest mode, it be cast all into grass-plots and gravel walks, the dryness of these should be relieved with fountains, and the plainness of those with statues … However, the part next the house should be open, and no other fruit but upon the walls. If this take up one half of the garden, the other should be fruit-trees, unless some grove for shade lie in the middle.12

  It was this regularity and form that most appealed to William with the image of Moor Park ever before him, but he did recognise that there was a different kind of beauty to be found in a more natural asymmetry in garden design, emanating from the oriental cultures, for which he had a name, sharawadgi,* meaning the beauty of studied irregularity. This word was thought to be Chinese and apply to a naturalistic form of Chinese garden design but in fact it was an ancient Japanese word, mispronounced by the Dutch merchants. William had heard about these wonderful oriental gardens from men who had travelled to Japan, India and China with the Dutch East India Company, some of whom had undoubtedly seen gardens in China and the extraordinary gardens at Kyoto in Japan with temples and naturalistic designs of water, specimen trees and stone. They had described their admiration and they used a word they recognised as sounding like sharawadgi for this kind of contrived naturalistic beauty. William and Dorothy had also seen the artefacts brought back by the East India Company, the porcelain and cloth and paper on which representations of this kind of landscape and garden so intrigued Europeans and visually enriched Dutch life.

  A French Jesuit, Jean-François Gerbillon,* was part of the first expedition sent by Louis XIV into China in 1685 and he subsequently published his view on the style of gardens he found there: ‘The Beauty of their House and Gardens consists in a great Property and Imitation of Nature as Grotto’s, Shellwork and craggy Fragments of Rock, such as are seen in the wildest Desarts. But above all they are fond of little Arbors and Parterres, enclosed with green Hedges which form little Walks. This is the Genius of the Nation.’13

  William was open-minded, intellectually curious and well-travelled enough to understand the attraction of this exotic naturalistic form where order was implied in apparent disorder rather than rigidly enforced through straight lines of structure and planting: ‘their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that can be commonly or easily observed.’ He recognised, however, that this new kind of asymmetric and organic garden design was much harder to achieve than the geometric forms he had advocated, and thus advised his readers to stick to regularity unless they were unusually gifted: ‘I should hardly advise any of these attempts in the figure of gardens among us; they are adventures of too hard atchievement for any common hands; and, though there may be more honour if they succeed well, yet there is more dishonour if they fail, and it is twenty to one they will; whereas, in regular figures, it is hard to make any great and remarkable faults.’14

  In fact this paragraph proved William’s remarkable prescience, for it would take the genius of William Kent† and then that of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown* in the following century to revolutionise garden landscaping and create the great romantic parkland and naturalistic gardens that are still considered the epitome of English garden landscaping. Kent’s Palladian architectural sympathies were translated in his garden design into a creation of an arcadian paradise of undulating turf, romantic vistas, temples, grottoes and statues as visual punctuations of the landscape. Cascades and watercourses were all part of this vision of an enhanced nature. But his concern was with more than the visual, for there were carefully contrived classical allusions and commentary on contemporary issues; at Stowe, for instance, he carefully positioned the Temple of Ancient Virtue within sight of the Temple of Modern Virtue, deliberately constructed as a ruin. Landscape gardening had become political.

  Capability Brown, Kent’s apprentice, then went on to surpass his master with his expansive naturalistic sweep, creating great landscapes of deftly contrived beauty using copses or a single dramatic tree, serpentine lakes reflecting woods and sky, and re-routing rivers and waterfalls to made it seem that nature herself was grateful for the improvement. He reinvented the English landscape and many of his creations, as settings for the great English country houses, are still living monuments to his art: Blenheim Palace, Bowood, Kew Gardens, Chatsworth, and of course at Stowe, where he began his life’s work alongside William Kent.

  In fact the seed of this revolution in English garden design could be found in William Temple’s informed enthusiasms, for his essay on gardening became influential in itself and his descriptions of the sharawadgi of these irregular oriental gardens inspired Joseph Addison† to propagate William’s views to an even wider audience, particularly with one famous essay in the Spectator in 1721, at a time when people were sympathetic to ideas of increasing liberty and individualism.

 
; In a direct reference to William Temple, and in the following sentence paraphrasing him, Addison wrote:

  Writers, who have given us an account of China, tell us, the Inhabitants of that Country laugh at the plantations of our Europeans, which are laid by the Rule and the Line; because, they say, any one may place Trees in equal Rows and uniform Figures … Our British gardeners … instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of the Scissars upon every Plant and Bush … I would rather look upon a Tree in all its Luxuriancy and Diffusion of Boughs and Branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a Mathematical Figure; and cannot but fancy that an Orchard in Flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little Labyrinths or the most finished Parterre.15

  He wrote this at a time when the tight geometry of French gardens, for instance, was still the admired ideal. So William Temple’s seed of sharawadgi was taken up and nurtured and its remarkable and long-lasting flowering was the style of English landscape gardening still loved today.

  While the beautifying of their house and planting of the gardens continued, the Temples’ happiness at home was in stark contrast to the deterioration of the situation abroad. Charles II proceeded to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover, signed in the summer of 1670, when he was bribed by Louis XIV to convert to Catholicism and support France in any naval battle with the Dutch. Needing a pretext to declare war, the British navy was ordered to attack the Dutch fleet off the Isle of Wight on 13 March 1672. William explained the sense of shock at this unwarranted and outlandish act in characteristic vein: ‘No clap of thunder in a fair frosty day could more astonish the world.’16 By the beginning of the next month the French too had declared war and the shameful third Anglo-Dutch war was under way, catching the Dutch off guard. An Anglo-French fleet then engaged the Dutch off Southwold on the Suffolk coast at the end of May, again to not much purpose but with grievous loss of life. John Evelyn was as outraged as William at the false pretensions of this war. The wasteful loss of his friend, the Earl of Sandwich,* and other promising young officers, as well as the scores of wounded and dead sailors, fuelled his disgust: ‘the folly of hazarding so brave a fleete, & loosing so many good men, for no provocation in the World but because the Hollander exceeded us in Industrie, & all things else but envy’.17