Princess Beatrice's garden at Carisbrooke Castle: Edwardian? Mediaeval? Or 21st century? |
I’ve been wondering a bit lately about all these historic gardens we’re restoring.
And that’s not even counting Hidcote, the Liverpool Garden Festival site, the Seafront Gardensat Felixstowe and Myddleton House, EA Bowles’s pad in Enfield, Middlesex.
I can’t prove it, but
I'd be willing to bet we've restored more historic gardens in the last four or
five years than at any point in the last 50.
A good time, then, to
take a step back and really think about what we’re doing here.
Note the many different
words we use for the restoration of a garden: recreation,
revitalisation, reconstruction.... When we take a neglected garden
and return it to something people will pay to come and see (and after
all, that’s – at least partly – what it’s all about) –
what, exactly, are we doing?
Ancient and modern: grass plats and mulberry trees |
In a rather timely sort of way, the Professional Gardeners’ Guild held its annual seminar on Historic Buildings Parks and Gardens earlier this month, during which they considered this a lot more coherently than I can. They looked at the choices you make when you decide to restore a garden: do you restore them to a historic plan, perhaps the original design you’ve discovered at the back of some dusty cupboard in the Big House?
Or do you come up with a new design – perhaps echoing the style of the original garden, or evoking a historical reference but with a modern twist?
As it happens, I’ve been to visit one of each this year.
Hestercombe
near Taunton in Somerset is a faithful restoration of what was
there originally: and who can blame them. They had one of the most
historically important landscapes in the country on their hands,
including an iconic Jekyll-Lutyens design. They had lots of maps,
documents, drawings, plans: so what you see now is pretty much an
exact replica of what was there when each of the various parts of the
garden was in its heyday. Double rills, terraces, pergolas and
bedding in fancy formal layouts. Very beautiful; very late Victorian;
very faithful.
Hestercombe: a truly faithful restoration |
There is always,
however, something of the museum about these gardens. I love
Hestercombe, don’t get me wrong: and there’s something wonderful
about being able to taste living history like this, to experience
life as it must have been in the 19th century (with added
tea-shops).
But it is Victorian life preserved in aspic, and gardens
are living, breathing things that above all change: perhaps the
essence of the paradox that lies at the heart of garden restoration.
At the other extreme:
when English Heritage decided they wanted to return what was
essentially a small field within the walls of Carisbrooke Castle on
the Isle of Wight back to its Edwardian incarnation as the privy
garden used by Princess Beatrice, daughter of Queen Victoria, they
decided against a restoration, in the classical sense. Instead, they
brought in Chris Beardshaw to design what you might call an evocation
of the original.
Berkheya purpurea - it just looks historic |
It does use the layout
you would have seen in the original early-20th century
garden, but the planting is noticeably modern. It does ‘reflect the
feel and spirit of the period’, as the blurb says: there's something about Berkheya purpurea that always looks like it's been around a long time.
But superb
colour combinations such as Agastache 'Black Adder', Sedum telephium
'Purple Emperor' and Geranium wlassovianum had the exciting, vibrant
feel of 21st-century planting. There were subtle
references – a blue, red and gold colour scheme reflecting Princess
Beatrice’s crest, for example – but it felt like a modern garden.
And that was odd,
because it wasn’t. Actually I think this was further complicated by
the fact that Princess Beatrice clearly had a penchant for the
mediaeval: I suppose it was all those castle walls looming over her.
So there are grass plats, and flowery meads, and spreading mulberry
trees over seating areas. Very lovely, and a relaxing space to stroll
around, but undeniably in the vaguely Mediaev-Eliza-Tudor mould. So
not Edwardian at all, then.
Again – I don’t
mean to give the impression I disliked the garden: actually, I loved
it, especially the enclosed, intimate feeling. The big figs in
planters didn’t work for me, leaving one side of the garden feeling
rather unresolved, but that wasn’t really Chris’s fault as he was
trying to avoid sending roots into the foundations of a 13th-century
building they discovered while creating the garden. By such
compromises are history-riddled projects beset.
Sublime planting... though perhaps not what Princess Beatrice would have seen. But does that matter? |
But I felt that as a
garden, it wasn’t really sure what it was. A celebration of
Edwardian style and elegance? A modern take on the mediaeval tradition?
Or a homage to a lady who lived in the early 20th century
but rather preferred the 12th? Perhaps all those things.
It’s clearly
possible to capture the spirit, or the essence of a garden: Chris
himself is a past master at it, and has successfully converted bare
plots at Chelsea into slices of Boveridge House in Dorset, Hidcote,
and next year Furzey Gardens in Hampshire.
But when you take that to
the actual place – the location of the original garden – you end
up with something akin to pastiche, or at best a mildly uncomfortable
dissonance.
The PGG seminar
concluded that design, and designers, have an important part to play
in garden restoration. But Lord Cavendish - who has I think a better
solution by commissioning Kim Wilkie, of Orpheus fame, to build him
an unashamedly 21st century earthworks in the late 18th
century grounds of Holker Hall (opening next spring) – made the point that gardens these
days are used differently now to how they were in the past.
And, he added, perhaps
saying the unsayable, ‘Some gardens will be lost. But gardens are
and should be ephemeral.’
Which puts a whole new slant on the
question: should we be restoring gardens at all?
1 comment:
The Berkheya is historic, here in South Africa. Princess Beatrice figs look a little confused, one missing? A very satisfying garden - good bones, gentle colours. Somewhere to enjoy being!
Post a Comment