Garden Design and Architects' Gardens Part 4

Let us here point to the fact, that any garden whatsoever is but Nature idealised, pastoral scenery rendered in a fanciful manner. It matters not what the date, size, or style of the garden, it represents an idealisation of Nature. _Real_ nature exists outside the artist and apart from him. The Ideal is that which the artist conceives to be an interpretation of the outside objects, or that which he adds to the objects. The garden gives imaginative form to emotions the natural objects have awakened in man. The _raison d'etre_ of a garden is man's feeling the _ensemble_.

But we cannot allow him to bring the false and confusing "art" drivel of the day into the garden without showing the absurdity of his ideas.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Warren House, Coombe Wood_]

The ill.u.s.trations are of the most wretched kind produced by some process, the only interesting one being one of Levens. The most childish ideas of the garden prevail--indeed we hardly like to call them childish, because children do put sensible questions and see clearly.

For instance, for the author there is no art in gardening at all--the "art" consists entirely of building walls and planting Yew hedges. Thus the work of the late James Backhouse, who knew every flower on the hills of Northern England, and expressed that knowledge in his charming rock garden, is not art, but cutting a tree into the shape of a c.o.c.ked hat _is_ art, according to Mr. Sedding!

He a.s.sumes that landscape gardeners all follow artistic ways, and that only architects make terraces; whereas the greatest sinners in this respect have been landscape gardeners--Nesfield and Paxton. He has paid so little attention to the subject, that he says that the landscape gardener's only notion is to put Gra.s.s all around the house! It does not even occur to him that there may be Gra.s.s on one side of a house and gardens of various sorts at the others, as at Goodwood, Shrubland, Knole, and that a house may have at each side a different expression of landscape gardening!

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Drummond Castle. Example of beautiful garden in Scotland, in position requiring terracing_]

He takes the _English Flower Garden_ as the expression of landscape gardening practice; whereas the book, in all the parts that treat of design, is a protest against the formation by landscape gardeners of costly things which have nothing to do with gardening and nothing to do with true architecture. The good architect is satisfied with building a beautiful house, and that we are all the happier for. But what we have to deplore is that men who are not really architects, who are not gardeners, should cover the earth with rubbish like the Crystal Palace basins, the thing at the top of the Serpentine, and the Grand Trianon at Versailles.

Here is a specimen of Mr. Sedding's knowledge of the landscape art.

For the "landscape style" does not countenance a straight line, or terrace, or architectural form, or symmetrical beds about the house, for to allow these would not be to photograph Nature. As carried into practice, the style demands that the house shall rise abruptly from the Gra.s.s, and the general surface of the ground shall be _characterised by smoothness and bareness (like Nature!)_.

If he had even taken the trouble to see a good garden laid out by Mr.

Marnock or anybody worthy of the name of landscape gardener, he would find that they knew the use of the terrace very well. If he had taken the trouble to see one of my own gardens, he would find beds quite as formal, but not so frivolous as those described in the older books, and lines simple and straight as they can be. Where Barry left room for a dozen flowers at Shrubland I put one hundred; so much for the "_bareness_"!

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Madresfield. Example of modern English garden_]

On page 180 he says:--

I have no more scruple in using the scissors upon tree or shrub, where trimness is desirable, than I have in mowing the turf of the lawn that once represented a virgin world. There is a quaint charm in the results of the topiary art, in the prim imagery of evergreens, that all ages have felt. And I would even introduce Bizarreries on the principle of not leaving all that is wild and odd to Nature outside of the garden paling; and in the formal part of the garden _my Yews should take the shape of pyramids, or peac.o.c.ks, or c.o.c.ked hats, or ramping lions in Lincoln green, or any other conceit I had a mind to, which vegetable sculpture can take_.

After reading this I saw again some of the true "vegetable sculpture"

that I have been fortunate to see; Reed and Lily, a model for ever in stem, leaf, and bloom; the grey Willows of Britain, sometimes lovelier than Olives against our skies; many-columned Oak groves set in seas of Primroses, Cuckoo flowers and Violets; Silver Birch woods of Northern Europe beyond all grace possible in stone; the eternal garland of beauty that one kind of Palm waves for hundreds of miles throughout the land of Egypt,--a vein of summer in a lifeless world: the n.o.ble Pine woods of California and Oregon, like fleets of colossal masts on mountain waves--saw again these and many other lovely forms in garden and woodland, and then wondered that any one could be so blind to the beauty of plant and tree as to write as Mr. Sedding does here.

From the days of the Greeks to our own time, the delight of all great artists has been to get as near this divine beauty as the material they work with permits. But this deplorable "_vegetable sculptor's_" delight is in distorting beautiful natural forms; and this in the one art in which we enjoy the living things themselves, and not merely representations of them!

The old people from whom he takes his ideas were not nearly so foolish, as when the Yew tree was used as a shelter or a dividing line, and when a Yew was put at a garden door for shelter or to form a hedge, it was necessary to clip it if it was not to get out of all bounds. But here is a man delighting for its own sake in what he calls with such delicate feeling "_vegetable sculpture_," in "c.o.c.ked hats" and "ramping lions"!

[Ill.u.s.tration: Tailpiece]