A steep bank fell away from the tennis lawn yew hedge (native again, for a change) and with this we are in South America. Huge tumbling bushes of Fuchsia magellanica, both the scarlet and the pink varieties. This profuse and glorious creature loves the mild, damp weather of the West Country, as do its descendants, the many hybrids bred in the nineteenth century, when the slender and dainty flower of F. magellanica was reborn with ruffles, frills, great waxy corollas and extravagant colour combinations.
Below the fuchsia bank there were swathes of naturalized narcissi. Several different varieties, with an emphasis on the smaller, free-flowering kinds. No strident ‘King Alfred’. And with these we are in Europe at last, with various species originating in Spain, Portugal and the Maritime Alps. Many were collected in the nineteenth century by an energetic Scot called Peter Barr (Scotland's contribution to plant-collecting has been phenomenal) who had set out to rediscover as many as possible of the species listed in a plant catalogue of 1629 and subsequently lost. All these botanical transitions conjure up vibrant pictures – Wilson's thousands of regale lilies lighting up the Chinese gorge, the sad stump of that chopped-down davidia – but perhaps none is more poignant than the fate of the narcissus. Once blowing wild and free on southern European hillsides (where some, of course, still do), now reincarnated as the staple plant of every British garden, patio, window-box and public park. It has been hybridized out of all recognition, in many cases. Moreover, bulb collection has been one of the more dubious areas of acquisition. One particular white daffodil, Narcissus alpestris, a rare plant of the Pyrenees, was collected virtually to extinction in the early part of the twentieth century. One thinks uneasily of Wilson and his targeted 6,000 Lillium regale. What did that valley look like after he'd had his way with it?
The Golsoncott garden was a sloping site, falling away from the back of the house and with its varying levels cleverly exploited. A steep little flight of steps led up from the tennis lawn to the wide terrace separating it from the canal garden. This sheltered and sunny place was home to the peonies – a long border of them underplanted with more narcissi. China muscling in again, depending on variety – all I remember is the great pink blowsy explosion of high summer. China would have supplied the white buddleias that fringed the steps up to the gap in the yew hedge and the entrance to the canal garden. But my grandmother's favoured silver leaf plants (influence of Jekyll, again, but all of them going strong today) are a wave in a different direction, with Cineraria maritima emanating from Australia and the South Sea Islands and Senecio laxifolius from New Zealand. And the flowering currant by the kitchen garden gate Ribes sanguineum – is a native of western America, introduced by another of those intrepid Scots, David Douglas. Douglas had been apprenticed as a gardener at the age of eleven and while working at the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow as a young man came to the attention of Sir William Hooker (later to be the first Director of Kew). Hooker took him up and put his name forward as a collector for the Horticultural Society. Thus, in 1823 Douglas was sent to North America, the first of several voyages. He is very much in the Fortune tradition intrepid and adventurous, hardened by his experience roaming the Scottish Highlands, happy to live rough and undaunted by the wild terrain and fast-flowing rivers of the area around Fort Vancouver, where he spent much time. He had brushes with grizzly bears and Native Americans, though he was astute enough to get on good terms with the latter whenever he could and to make use of their knowledge of plants and habitats. Apart from the homely flowering currant, he is remembered in the Douglas fir, along with Garrya elliptica and a good deal more.
There was one corner of the canal garden that was forever England. The long narrow area was entirely enclosed by high yew hedges. One end met up with the curved veranda of what would today be called a conservatory but was known at Golsoncott as the sun parlour. Wisteria dripped down from this, reflected in the square pond from which opened the canal, a couple of feet wide, running the length of the garden to a matching square pond at the other end. Here were the snowdrops – vast swathes and drifts so well established that they probed out into the long beds below the hedges, where they were not supposed to be and which were given over to irises.
The iris garden, this was: many varieties, horribly labour-intensive. I can see my grandmother now, doggedly weeding and dividing, in her sixties, seventies, eighties. There were many different kinds, so they could have had their origins around the whole globe – China, Japan, North America, Turkey, Morocco… Most bearded irises are the products of hybridization, and my grandmother grew a fair number of those, which have to be considered of no fixed abode, I suppose. The square ponds at both ends and at the centre of the canal had stands of blue bulrushes, and there were water lilies everywhere. Glimmering between the water-lily pads were goldfish – oriental no doubt. And munching on the green weed at the sides were droves of tadpoles, very definitely native.
Beyond the high yew hedge of the iris garden was the kitchen garden, a rectangular site of about half an acre, sloping up to a brick wall that supported a line of ancient plums. The archetypal kitchen garden, it now seems. A place that you could slowly nibble your way around, in high summer: the forest of raspberry canes, including the rare and succulent yellow variety; huge juicy ruby gooseberries; crisp raw peas; last year's apples, stacked away on shelves in the gloriously aromatic apple house; plums, golden-fleshed Victorias, small sharp purple ones; sun-warm tomatoes from the greenhouse, with yellow ones again a speciality.
This was also the source of flowers for the house. Ranks of dahlias and chrysanthemums for cutting, a cliff of sweet peas. There were exuberant stands of mint, rosemary bushes, mounds of thyme. You pinched and sniffed as much as you nibbled. A deeply sensual place, the kitchen garden, everything going to extremes, it seemed – the great swags of apples on the lines of espaliers that flanked the central path, the rampant banks of potatoes, plumes of asparagus.
It had its dark privacy, also – the gardener's potting shed, into which one must not go. Through the open door there was the glimpse of a battered wicker armchair with earth-stained cushion, a shelf with tins of tobacco, a thermos, newspapers. And to the door were pinned the shrivelled and mummified corpses of moles, like a gamekeeper's gibbet – pour encourager les autres, I suppose.
Any garden is a combination of structure and furnishings. Golsoncott owed its furnishings to the distant efforts of those who have roamed the globe in search of plants, driven by scientific curiosity, commercial zest or a combination of the two. To think of this is to see the place overlaid by images of other times and other worlds. All these botanical immigrants, so familiar, so apparently domestic, assume a compelling new presence. They are strangers in our midst, with a tale to tell. And amongst them roam shadowy figures, stereotyped by their era, because that is the only way in which we can see them. Buttoned into stiff Victorian costumes, or tricked out in seventeenth-century gear like John Tradescant the Younger, who brought from Virginia the Aquilegia canadensis, which shot up all over the place, as briskly Somerset as the primroses, you would think.
The structure of the place was rooted in its own time, with concessions to elsewhere. The most significant gesture was the ha-ha, providing a four-foot drop from the lawn to the pasture beyond, where horses or cattle grazed. The ha-ha is a country-mansion device, and Golsoncott was not that, so there was an element of aspiration or ambition about it, but also practicality. It kept the animals out of the garden, and allowed the view from the veranda and the rose-garden terrace to sweep away down to the copse and the stream garden without the intrusion of a hedge or wall. One theory about the origins of the ha-ha has it derived from the military defensive system of a ditch dug in front of a hedge or fortification. As for its name, this is the explanation given by the author of the influential La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage, published by A. J. Dezallier d'Argenville in 1709 and translated into English by John James shortly after:
At present we frequently make through views, called Ah, Ahs, which ar
e openings in the walls [of the garden], without grilles, to the very level of the walks, with a large and deep ditch at the foot of them, lined on both sides to sustain the earth, and prevent the getting over, which surprises the eye on coming near it, and makes one cry Ah! Ah! whence it gets its name.
Absurd but persuasive.
The stock feature of the seventeenth-century grand garden was the parterre giving way to a vista. There was an echo of that at Golsoncott: the rose garden was not a parterre, but it played the part of the formal area adjacent to the house, beyond which an open space leads the eye away towards the distance. The basic geometry of power-gardening lingered on long after the emphasis of garden design had turned towards the demands of humbler acreages. The Victorian building boom created hundreds of thousands of new gardens, along with a middle-class clientele keen to embellish their personal space. John Loudon's The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion of 1838 targets this new concept in gardening – the very title is wonderfully emotive. He is advocating the charms of existing gardens rather than offering original designs, but classifies garden styles succinctly into picturesque, gardenesque and rustic. Picturesque harked back to the eighteenth-century stately home vision – the manipulation of natural scenery into 'that particularly suitable for being represented by painting'. Gardenesque was a new and apt term, implying garden design calculated to display to their best individual trees, shrubs and plants, along with attention to such features as smooth green lawns and well-constructed paths and walks. Rustic is the natural look displayed by the gardens of labourers' cottages. In this last, and in the fact that he saw it as an appropriate style for introduction into the gardens of the gentry, Loudon is anticipating William Robinson, who could be little short of ecstatic about cottage gardening.
Golsoncott had a whiff of all three forms, I now see, along with its touch of folie de grandeur by way of the ha-ha. Today, much garden taste is directed by television programmes; enthusiastic thirty-somethings exhort from the screen and have the nation rushing into its back garden to paint the fence purple, slap down some decking, create a water feature. Eighty years ago, my grandmother would have been directed by Country Life, garden books, and what she saw around her. But also by the accretions of garden practice, which declared that you could not hold up your head in polite gardening society without a good lawn, a rose garden, seasonal bedding, a herbaceous border, and maybe a pergola and a lily pond if you were in serious competition.
My grandmother installed some of these features at Golsoncott but above all she turned to Robinson and Jekyll. I know she did, because we have her copies of their books. Her edition of Robinson's The English Flower Garden is the 1889 seventh edition (the first edition was 1883). It is somewhat the worse for wear now, as well it might be after a hundred years, a fine gold-tooled poppy on the front of its dark-blue binding, and within a pungent combination of swingeing opinions, confident and persuasive advocacy of the Robinsonian theory of gardening, and vigorous practical advice. The one quality that garden writers seem to have in common is an implacable self-confidence, rising to didacticism. One cannot but feel that Robinson set the pace. And why not? If you have strong views and a determination to transmit them, you will get nowhere with understatement. Robinson saw all around him the rigidities of Victorian gardening, the formality derived from Sir Joseph Paxton and others, the obsession with bedding out – ‘pastry-work gardening’ – and the whole Crystal Palace style. He was not categorically opposed to seasonal planting; his bugbear was the admired high Victorian expression of the form:
Only scarlet Geraniums, yellow Calceolarias, blue Lobelias, or purple Verbenas were used; and the following year, by way of a change, there were Verbenas, Calceolarias, and Geraniums, – the constant repetition of this scarlet, yellow, and blue nauseating even those with little taste in gardening matters, whilst those with finer perceptions began to inquire for the Parsley bed, by way of relief.
The system thrives yet today, of course, in municipal gardening, and can be studied up and down the country in parks, memorial gardens and on seafronts and urban roundabouts.
Robinson was born in Ireland in 1838 and was foreman in the gardens of Ballykilcavan, Stradbally, by the time he was twenty-one. But he was soon over in England, working in the Royal Botanic Society's gardens at Regent's Park. Here he was in charge of the herbaceous section but also, significantly, responsible for a wild garden, in the service of which he got to know native plants and how they appear in the wild, along with cottage garden practices. It was this experience and observation that was crucial to the formation of his taste for the natural look:
I saw the flower gardener meanly trying to rival the tile or wallpaper men, and throwing aside with contempt all the lovely things that through their height or form did not conform… And so I began to see clearly that the common way was a great error and the greatest obstacle to true gardening or artistic effects of any kind in the flower garden or home landscape, and then made up my mind to fight the thing in any way open to me.
Into battle. Robinson's initial weapon was his weekly journal the Garden, into which he sunk all his savings. And, crucially, it was through this that he met Gertrude Jekyll, who became one of the contributors. The combination of their views and talents would determine the nature of gardening in these islands for decades to come.
Jekyll wrote the chapter on ‘Colour in the Flower Garden’ in The English Flower Garden. There were other collaborators, but the robust tone of the book comes from Robinson himself. Here he set out his theory of gardening – ‘the best kind of garden should arise out of its site and conditions as happily as a primrose out of a cool bank’. He told his readers how to do it and equally how not to do it, as specified in combative chapter heads: ‘AGAINST STYLES, USELESS STONEWORK, AND STEREOTYPED PLANS’, ‘USE IN THE GARDEN OF BUILDERS, AND OTHER DEGRADED FORMS OF THE PLASTIC ART’. He cited and illustrated existing grand gardens that demonstrated the various points he was making, and identified very precisely what you should plant where, if you were planning to toe the Robinsonian line. Armed with The English Flower Garden, you could put your own domain on the cutting edge of fin-de-siécle horticultural style.
But a domain it had better be. Robinson's proposals demand space. Despite his fervent championship of the cottage garden style, his eye is on wide acres, not the suburban and villa gardens envisaged by Loudon (of whom he much approved, seeing the latter's more enlightened style as having been quenched and sidelined by the Paxton school). The more patrician gardener could learn from the ‘rustic’ use of informal groupings, climbing roses against house walls, old country favourites like hollyhocks, larkspur and lupins. The ideal Robinsonian garden required plenty of room – for those wide grassy walks with swathes of spring bulbs, the tree groupings, the great borders of herbaceous plants and shrubs, the sweeping lawns and, above all, for those wild gardens, which might be woodland areas, or broad stretches of grassland with specimen trees and naturalized plantings. The wild garden was a brave new concept, back then; at the beginning of this century it is in the forefront of garden fashion, fitting in nicely with environmental and ecological concerns and the gardening good taste that favours the small-flowered, delicate and miniature and abhors all that is large, double, heftily trumpeted or smothered in blossom. It is instructive to watch those television garden gurus determinedly trying to cram a wild garden into the toe of a fifty-foot suburban plot.
Gertrude Jekyll is altogether more temperate than Robinson. Indeed, her contribution to the debate over design and formality versus plantsmanship and artistry was to inject the voice of sweet reason. You could make use of both. Robinson became locked into an ideological battle with Reginald Blomfield, whose publication of The Formal Garden in England in 1892 was a calculated challenge to Robinsonian theories. Blomfield argued for the essential role of architecture in garden design, with the horticulturist as merely the servant of the designer; ‘landscape gardening’ he dismissed as an ineffectual manipulation of nature. Robins
on's The English Flower Garden is full of diatribes about the intrusive role of the architect in gardening. Polarized positions, with no room for compromise, and nicely illustrative of the state that garden theorists can get themselves into when the blood is up. Jekyll brought sanity to the situation by developing a philosophy of gardening which incorporated the best of Robinsonian ideas but also emphasized the essential partnership between overall design and architectural elements – the hard landscaping, they call it nowadays – and the skill and knowledge of the horticulturalist.
Gertrude Jekyll is the epitome of the indomitable and unstoppable late Victorian woman. Photographs show a small, dumpy person – unassuming but, one senses, formidable. Born in 1843, she studied at the South Kensington School of Art, where she came under the influence of William Morris, and formed a strong affinity with the Arts and Crafts Movement. And indeed she was always an artist first and foremost – or maybe craftswoman is the better term – bringing to the disposition of plants and the structure of a garden her distinctive eye for colour and form. She was a colourist by instinct; the emphasis is on colour groupings and gradations in the 250 garden plans that she drew up during her heyday as an esteemed garden consultant – one hesitates to use the word designer since she never referred to the activity as anything but gardening. She was a plantswoman par excellence, and while she did indeed have a range of favourites, some of which have become hallmarks of Jekyll style, the image of a palette devoted entirely to soft pinks and blues, or the white and silver combination, is a misrepresentation. She used strong colours with relish; the planting schemes for her gardens are warm with yellows and reds. The point was colour combination and gradation, along with shrewd attention to the architecture of plants themselves: soft mounds of clipped santolina, the shapely frame of tall eryngiums. And an insistence above all on the successful marriage of plant and setting.