A Quiet Empire

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, dramatised by Dave Simpson

Norwich Theatre Royal, 1996

Art and Artifice

The ideal English garden of the 18th century had been designed within an inch of its life to look as natural and impressive as possible. The Victorian garden of the nineteenth was a reaction against such stifling classicism, the park becoming more private and intimate, the planting aimed at creating an environment in harmony with itself, without reference to the landscape beyond. These were gardens rather than grounds, an intimate retreat reflecting a desire for privacy in an increasingly populous countryside.

At the same time as the scale was being reduced, the nature of the plants on view also underwent a change. It had been found that new species from abroad – especially those from North America and the Himalayas – did well in acid soils and these introduced more variety. Foreign influence also came to the aid of garden design. Albert, the Prince Consort, for example, laid out an Italian Garden at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Here the scale was much larger than most of the Italian Renaissance gardens which gave rise to the style. Geometrical shapes outlined in box-bush harmonised with terraces of formal design and proportion boasting a wealth of features like balustrades, fountains and urns, all tastefully dispersed among neatly clipped trees, lawns and flower beds.

So the new English garden was no less a product of artifice, but where previously the Circuit Walk had been specifically designed to offer a series of pleasing compositions and aesthetically satisfying vistas, the Victorian garden presented a sequence of distinct areas – here was a Chinese Garden, there a French one; the visitor could stroll in the arboretum, or view the rhododendrons from the formal terrace or the gravel parterre; there might be a small dell with a stream, a sheltered walkway lined with a variety of tress (evergreens were coming into vogue), a bower, a pond. Above all there was a sense of enclosure which still managed to suggest a greater extent than actually existed.

Prescription and Proscription

Already by 1838 the rules were forming up. The guru of formalism at the time, John Claudius Loudon, wrote “No residence in the modern style can have a claim to be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous ones.” Those foreign varieties which did not instantly take to the climate were accorded every chance to do well in the new hothouses (orchids were a particular favourite among amateur and professional growers). Thus the art and artifice of Repton and Brown gave way to the science and propagation of their successors.

But whereas the controlling geniuses of the previous century had been architects of landscape, the makers of the latest gardens were gardener architects who combined a knowledge of building with an interest in horticulture. Loudon himself became known as the Father of the English Garden, and after his death in 1843 his wife continued his work on The Encyclopaedia of Gardening for a further fifteen years – indeed, it was mainly due to her efforts that gardening became one of the more acceptable pastimes among Victorian gentlewomen.

The business side, however, was still largely in the hands of men, and one of the leading lights, Decimus Burton, did much of his best work at Kew. These famous grounds had originally been laid out by Sir William Chambers in 1757 at the behest of the Dowager Princess of Wales, the mother of George III. In 1840 Queen Victoria gave the Gardens to the Royal Botanic Society and Burton was called in to design a Palm House and a Temperate House to provide a congenial climate for the plethora of tropical and semi-tropical plants now being brought back from the furthest outposts of the Empire and beyond.

The taste for such plants also led to a boom in conservatories added on to private houses. These were designed not merely as a private nurturing ground for tender blooms lately transplanted to the chillier climes of England, but also as sub-gardens in their own right with none of the drawbacks of wind, weather or extremes of temperature that discomfited not only plants but human beings in the exposed garden beyond. In turn the ferns and foliage they provided helped add to the cluttered look of the rooms inside, the Victorians seeming to take a perverse delight in stuffing every corner with bric-a-brac both natural and man-made.

Bananas Come to Derbyshire

Burton was helped in his endeavours at Kew by William Andrews Nesfield, who had trained as an army engineer and who laid out the Pagoda Vista and the Broad Walk. Another one whose star rose around the same time was Joseph Paxton who in 1836 built he so-called Great Stove at Chatsworth in which the first home-grown banana in England came to ripeness, and the glass hall for the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park which, on being transplanted to Sydenham, came to be known as the Crystal Palace.

By the 1850s the nouveau riche merchant classes were beginning to move into their modest villas in the suburbs, as keen to copy their social betters in gardens as in everything else. Many books and magazines came to their aid providing basic if unadventurous rules and advice. Shirley Hibberd, for instance, in his book The Town Garden, decreed that the forecourt should be simple, elegant and formal with a minimum of rusticity: “winding paths, to make the butcher-boys giddy, and perplex the stranger… compel the visitor to make half a tour of the grounds when his chief object is to get inside the house”.

In the garden proper, too, there was a right way and a wrong way to go about things. Err on the side of restraint was the secret. The small garden of the time – though many times larger than the ‘small garden’ of today – typically comprised a square lawn with a single round bed, clipped bushes beyond, a small rockery, and tall trees around the edge. Topiary, if indulged, should confine itself to the Euclidean ideals of globe, pyramid and cone. Vegetables were on the way out as it was generally cheaper to buy these at the market than to grow them in one’s own backyard, but where there were kitchen crops, they should be planted separate from flowers. Paths should be functional and built for convenience. Styles may be mixed but not so much that confusion sets in. Where proscription rather than experiment was the rule, a certain lack of zest was inevitable, but these gardens matched the mood of the times where austerity was seen as a virtue.

Painting with Flowers

Out of town, the cottage garden was much praised for being so perfectly attuned to its surroundings. Practicality again was the factor which determined its composition, with the cheerful intermingling of herbs, flowers, bushes, fruit trees and vegetables all grown for a reason. This underlying unity was highly prized, not least by William Robinson who urged a more relaxed style comprising English and foreign wild flowers. He also encouraged the acceptance of narcissus and daffodils in grass, the commercial growth of these bulbs having begun in earnest in the balmy climate of the Scilly Isles in the 1870s.

The most famous name in garden design from the late Victorian period joined Robinson at Gardening magazine for a time before teaming up with the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. Gertrude Jekyll, herself a painter and a contemporary of the French Impressionists, saw gardens as the product of design, and flowers had to be selected and arranged as carefully as one would plan the colour scheme for a painting. Perhaps for this reason her borders have been likened to the pointillist style of Georges Seurat, each plant like a spot of colour. A water colourist rather than a painter in oils, her palette comprised little yellow and practically no hot reds or oranges. Larger gardens she planted in a gallery. The contrast between her soft style and the sometimes manically detailed work of Lutyens often leads to a stimulating tension between the planting and the architecture it inhabits.

From the evidence that still survives today, the Victorian garden proves two things. The first is that those with unlimited wealth to the exclusion of all else often went too far with their fountains, pillars, urns and statuary. The craze for importing architectural features was a fashion which needed taste to make it work. The second point is that the grandest of these gardens required an enormous amount of maintenance, and at the time they were being laid down, there was no reason to suppose that armies of gardeners would not always be on hand to do the donkeywork. This comfortable Victorian assumption, like so many others, was to be swept away forever by the 1914–18 war.

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924)