Designing history

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.

I spend a hefty proportion of my days writing about garden restoration projects. We seem to be in a restoration frenzy: in the last two or three years alone we’ve seen Wrest Park rise from the ashes, the Elizabethangarden at Kenilworth Castle recreated, the Crystal Grotto atPainshill Park rescued from oblivion and Chiswick Park overhauled to within an inch of its life.

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Or do you come up with a new design – perhaps echoing the style of the original garden, or evoking a historical reference but with a modern twist?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 19^th 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-20^th 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 21^st-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 13^th-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 20^th century but rather preferred the 12^th? 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 21^st century earthworks in the late 18^th 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?

Gardening on air #4: Of Austen and arcadia

Did you know the 18th century landscape designer Humphry Repton turns up in Jane Austen's novel, Mansfield Park?

No, I didn't either: but a rather wonderful programme about him in the series 'Escape to the Country', about people who make the transition from city to countryside, had me scurrying to my dog-eared edition of Ms Austen's book to check. It's true - it's the bit in chapter 6 where they're talking about Sotherton Hall:

"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 with it."

"No wonder that Mr. Rushworth should think so at present," said Mrs. Grant to Mrs. Norris, with a smile; "but depend upon it, Sotherton will have every improvement in time which his heart can desire."

"I must try to do something with it," said Mr. Rushworth, "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."

The first programme in the series was all about Mr Repton and his five-guinea-a-day designs. It's presented by Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, who I have until now chiefly associated with wafting around Chelsea in very large cuffs, but clearly I've been doing him an injustice.

Humphry Repton was the one responsible for places like Tatton Park, Longleat Park, Woburn and Kenwood House. He was the one after Capability: Llewelyn-Bowen describes him as the 'feminine' to Capability Brown's 'masculine'. (He also describes him, with I hope a deliberately tongue-in-cheek irony, as 'a makeover artist'). And in a very real sense he took up the reins from Brown, beginning his landscaping career at a time when Capability Brown bestrode the landscape and indeed was largely shaping it.

Repton was all serpentine paths, terraces, balustrades and topiary, often plonking them right in the middle of Capability landscapes in an expensive 18th-century exercise in nose-thumbing. He didn't do what Capability did and sweep away any villages and pesky peasants who got in the way of the grand vision: though what Repton did wasn't much better, as he framed them as part of his presentation of a kind of bucolic Arcadia to be viewed from the terraces of the big house.

The main bit about Repton which stuck in my memory from garden history lessons is also mentioned here: he drew his gardens in beautifully-painted watercolours in red books which he then gave to his clients: the early precursor to a Vectorworks printout, perhaps.

You can listen to this edition of Escape to the Country until next Sunday by the miracle of Listen Again: it's here.

Those were the days...

While I was in Cornwall (told you I'd be going on about it a bit) I popped into the National Gardening Museum at Trevarno, near Falmouth (which is itself a lovely garden - the bluebell walk was in full flower and a welcome respite from the gale-force winds knocking us off our feet everywhere else).

I've only ever been to one gardening museum before - the one everyone's been to, the Museum of Garden History in London. That was a few years back now, and all I can really remember of it was the utterly charming knot garden nestled in behind it - which made it more of a garden visit than a museum visit really.

The National Gardening Museum is less charming, in that it's housed in a rather post-industrial barn-cum-warehouse, so it's best not to look up too often. But what it contains is utterly absorbing and quite surprisingly fascinating.

Garden museums seem to be largely about tools and sundries, not plants, unfortunately, but you do realise there's a story behind each one. I happened to be walking around behind a group of old boys, who kept remembering having used half the things on display. There was a quite absurd number of watering cans, some sinister-looking spray guns, and I'll never view gazebos in quite the same way again after seeing the Victorian version.

But most fascinating of all, to me, was the display of seed packets. Again, it's something you take so much for granted - yet did you know Suttons used to supply their seeds in what they called "close cases" - glass test tubes to you and me, bunged up with a stopper and presented in a sort of large cigar case, beautifully and with much ceremony. Even the labels had a touch of mystery and gave a real feeling that here was a little pot of gold dust.

It makes you feel the romance has gone out of gardening a little these days - I can't imagine them making a display out of your average Suttons seed packet circa 2008. I could be mistaken, though - no doubt we'll all get our seeds virtually in times to come, teleported magically into our gardens with not a seed packet in sight. Now there's a thought...

Waxing lyrical

When I'm not out in the garden, or writing about it, it seems I'm listening to things about it... This morning it was a little gem on Woman's Hour, on Radio Four, that caught my attention. It was an interview with garden historian Jenny Uglow in her suspiciously neat-sounding shed (she could get inside it, along with a radio reporter, for a start).

Jenny's delightful book, A Little History of British Gardening, is one of the treasures on my bookshelf. It's full of interesting things, and so was her interview on garden tools - as regular readers will know, I'm a bit of an anorak where the tools of my trade are concerned.

Anyway, did you know, for example, that painting your tools blue keeps flies off? Or that one of the daily tasks for Victorian estate gardeners was squeezing ants?

The report also had a little ditty which I just have to share - I'm sure everyone else has come across it already, but I had the delight of discovering it for the first time:

"From where the old thick laurels grow along the toolshed wall
You find the tool and potting sheds, which are the heart of all.
The cold frames, and the hothouses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drainpipes with the barrows and the planks,

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys,
Told off to do as they are bid, and do it without noise;
For except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The glory of the garden, it abideth not in words.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing, "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.
Far better men than we go out and start their working lives
In grubbing weeds from gravel paths, with broken dinner knives."

I discover from Jenny's book that this is actually by Rudyard Kipling - it's called The Glory of the Garden. In case you're interested (the internet is a wonderful thing... but it does also encourage you to go on a bit) there's more:

"There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!"

That's quite enough of that - ed.