I am afraid that Price got personal before he was done with Brown: ‘I have heard numberless instances of his arrogance and despotism, and such high pretensions seem to me little justified by his work. Arrogance and imperious manners, which, even joined to the truest merit and the most splendid talents, create disgust and opposition, when they are the offspring of a little narrow mind, elated with temporary favour, provoke ridicule, and deserve to meet with it.’ And this swipe at the great Capability would have been widely read. Peacock certainly drew inspiration from the Essay, allowing his character Sir Patrick O’Prism to use a phrase of Price, at one point, when denigrating the use of ‘clumps’, like ‘so many spots of ink, flicked at random out of a pen’. Though the landscape architect in Headlong Hall is based rather more on Repton, who did indeed display an awareness of the picturesque, and is let off by Price with a mild remonstrance: ‘Mr Repton (who is deservedly at the head of his profession) might effectually correct the errors of his predecessors, if to his taste and facility in drawing … he was to add an attentive study of what the higher artists have done, both in their pictures and drawings.’ This leniency may have been a recognition that Repton was at least making some effort in the direction of the picturesque, or, perhaps, caution where someone still alive and vocal was concerned.
Jane Austen was certainly familiar with the concept of the picturesque. The matter is raised in Northanger Abbey, when Catherine Morland is walking near Bath with Henry Tilney, the young man she will eventually marry, and his sister: ‘The Tilneys were viewing the country with the eyes of persons accustomed to drawing, and decided on its capability of being formed into pictures, with all the eagerness of real taste … In the present instance [Catherine] confessed and lamented her want of knowledge; declared she would give any thing in the world to be able to draw; and a lecture on the picturesque immediately followed, in which his instructions were so clear that she soon began to see beauty in everything admired by him, and her attention was so earnest, that he became perfectly satisfied of her having a great deal of natural taste. He talked of fore-grounds, distances, and second distances – side-screens and perspectives – lights and shades; – and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar, that when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.’
These various publications – both descriptive and fictional – give a good idea of the intensity of discussion around the concept of the picturesque in the late eighteenth century. It all seems rather bizarre today – such passionate stances, the challenges to the discerning traveller, let alone to the fashionably inclined landowner – and the more so in that since then the word itself has quite lost its loaded quality. To describe something or somewhere today as picturesque has an almost pejorative connotation – there is a whiff of thatched cottages. The term has moved away from its implications of artistic perfection to a suggestion of mere charm, though with a hint of the contrived. And I’m not sure that anyone now would really want their garden called picturesque.
Today’s stately home has to earn its keep, and the owner is probably more concerned with box-office appeal than anything else, for which a good garden may indeed be an asset, but cutting-edge fashion is less of a requirement than some remarkable feature, such as topiary yew hedges, spectacular water or intricate landscaping. And the same applies lower down the garden scale; at the time of writing, I have just made my first Yellow Book garden visit of the year, and came away not with a garden fashion suggestion but an entirely practical one – that a grouping of pot-grown tulips of different varieties looks just as fine if the pots are basic black plastic ones rather than fancy pots – such is the interest of the tulips that you somehow don’t notice the pots. Indeed, fashion is not an issue for the Yellow Book, thanks be, which accounts for its range and its success: a display of every imaginable kind, size, shape and quality of garden.
When gardening fashionably you do not really consider that that is what you are doing, and probably it was always so, except where the wilder excesses of the eighteenth century were concerned. Any gardener is constricted by what is available, and what can be afforded. Availability depends on when and where you are gardening, and how you set about it will indeed be directed by the influences of the day – it will be fingered by Gertrude Jekyll or William Robinson or Vita Sackville-West or what was featured on Gardeners’ World this week – but it never feels quite like that. It feels more like opportunity than fashion, so that having labelled this section as dealing with the fashionable garden, I find myself backing off; gardeners, I think, are opportunists, not slaves to fashion. Most know a good thing when they see one, and are flexible and pragmatic enough to change course if that looks expedient. I like to think that many a late-Victorian gardener would have heaved a sigh of relief at the suggestion that there was life beyond carpet bedding.
Time, Order and the Garden
To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time. You garden today for tomorrow; the garden mutates from season to season, always the same, but always different. In my vegetable gardening days, while digging a trench for the potatoes I would remember the Majestics I grew last year, and wonder how the Maris Pipers I am putting in today will compare. In autumn, I plant up a pot of ‘Tête-à-Tête’ daffodils, seeing in the mind’s eye what they will look like in February, and comparing them with ‘Hawera’, which I found grew rather too tall last year. We are always gardening for a future; we are supposing, assuming, a future. I am doing that at eighty-three; the Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ I have just put in will outlast me, in all probability, but I am requiring it to perform while I can still enjoy it.
The great defiance of time is our capacity to remember – the power of memory. Time streams away behind us, and beyond, but individual memory shapes, for each of us, a known place. We own a particular piece of time; I was there, then, I did this, saw that, felt thus. And gardening, in its small way, performs a memory feat: it corrals time, pinning it to the seasons, to the gardening year, by summoning up the garden in the past, the garden to come. A garden is never just now; it suggests yesterday, and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress.
The garden – any garden – is in a state of unstoppable change. Each day, each week, each leaf, each bud, each flower – moving inexorably on to its next incarnation, the spring sparkle forgotten by the time of the summer show, that too fallen away before smouldering autumn. Then dead of winter, but one determined rose with a flower at Christmas.
I can’t imagine living – gardening – somewhere with an unvarying climate. Well, I suppose I have lived thus, in fact: the Egyptian winter temperature is in the mid-sixties – you reached for a cardigan, at most. Summer, of course, soared to the nineties and beyond; the gardener’s problem was water, water. Not an unvarying climate – a Mediterranean climate, I think – but one without recognizable seasons, except for hot summers and rather cooler winters. I know that when I came to England at the age of twelve I was aghast at the English winter: how did people endure this degree of cold? I had never before met the requisite garments: woolly jumpers, Chilprufe vests, a thick coat. Normal dress, in my experience, was a cotton frock, month in and month out. And where was the sun? When it appeared, it was a tepid affair, quite unrelated to Egypt’s blistering globe.
I acclimatized, slowly, and have long since come to relish a properly seasonal climate: that reliable, progressive change, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, and everything else that it does. Made for gardeners, a temperate climate; appreciation is intensified, enjoyment heightened because you know the tulips won’t be here for long, make the most of them, but, never mind, there is summer to come – roses, roses all the way. Our climate builds in that sense of gardening anticipation: it is the ever-rolling stream, sequential, cyclical, and meaning that there is never time to get tired of anything in the garden because it is always a temporary pleasure, and would we feel the same about the roses if the
y blazed on and on, in relentless flower, all of them hurtling through Christmas, instead of that one defiant unseasonal bloom? Several mild winters and the virtually frost-free climate of my London garden have meant that a large central pot of geraniums has now overwintered three times, turning themselves into perennials. They are on their fourth summer, and I am a bit tired of them.
Certainly, for me, part of the appeal of gardening is this ambivalent relationship with time; the garden performs in cycles, it reflects the seasons, but it also remembers and anticipates, and in so doing takes the gardener with it.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
Did Eliot garden? The poem has sunflower, clematis, lotus, and ‘the moment in the rose-garden’. Whether he did or not doesn’t really matter – suffice it that whatever else ‘Burnt Norton’ is about, to my mind it is about garden time.
Anticipation is central, where garden time is concerned. Gardening anticipation is an exaggerated form of the looking-forward element that we all reach for, cling on to, the beacon somewhere ahead, the promised day, the expected friend, lover, child, parent. With expectation to be savoured meanwhile, the foretaste, the shadow, but with its own enticing pleasure.
Tulips, for me, right now in August. The tulips in the mind that I shall have in the garden next April and May. I have gone mad, run amuck, ordered seventy tulip bulbs, fired up by the canny example of a garden we visited this year that grew them packed close in large pots, the pots then grouped and clumped, and the effect was stunning. So I am appreciating twice over: now, and again then, when the tulips materialize: garden time. Oh, and the whole satisfying process of planting the bulbs; three bites of the cherry.
The garden reorders time. And to garden is to impose order. Any gardener does that, anywhere, requiring this to grow rather than the couch grass, the bindweed, the dandelion and the hairy bittercress that would do so otherwise; gardening is a manipulation of nature, the creation of an ordered state where nature would insist on disorder. It is the conquest of nature, the harnessing of nature to a purpose, initially practical, and later aesthetic.
In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the pioneer families in Nebraska create gardens in the middle of the rolling red grass of the prairie, little islands of order amid the endless reach of the untouched landscape – big yellow pumpkins, rows of potatoes, and within a decade or so they have established orchards, cherry trees with gooseberry and currant bushes between the rows and a grape arbour with a seat. It is an extraordinary image – you can imagine the gardens, visualize them, so eloquent in what they say of pioneer life.
Of Willa Cather’s twelve novels, I have always found My Ántonia the most powerful, and its strength lies in the images that it conjures up of pioneering life in the nineteenth century. She was drawing on her own experience; born in Virginia in 1873, she moved with her family when very young to Nebraska, to a place where, as she says in My Ántonia, ‘There was nothing but land: not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made.’ She had known early pioneers like the Shimerdas, Ántonia’s family, living in sod houses, built of earth; writing of those like them she conjured up the whole history of the pouring of the old world into the new, the peasant societies of Europe, who, along with migrants from within America, opened up the West. They ploughed up the prairie, and that symbolic plough lights up one of her most arresting passages: ‘The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share – black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.’ The Cather family moved soon from their first settlement into Red Cloud, the small prairie town where Willa spent her teenage years, and which she made into the fictional prairie town in My Ántonia, and today it is the centre of the Willa Cather Foundation, a shrine to one of America’s most significant writers.
A similar image crops up in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s children’s books about a pioneer family, Little House on the Prairie. ‘Every day they all looked at that garden. It was rough and grassy because it was made in the prairie sod, but all the tiny plants were growing. Little crumpled leaves of peas came up, and tiny spears of onions. The beans themselves popped out of the ground. But it was a little yellow bean-stem, coiled like a spring, that pushed them up. Then the bean was cracked open and dropped by two baby bean-leaves, and the leaves unfolded flat to the sunshine.’
I remember reading that to my children in a hotel room somewhere in France, during a summer holiday trip, and we were all completely transported to another time, and another place. Laura Ingalls Wilder, like Willa Cather, had personal experience on which to draw. She was born in 1867 in the Big Woods area of Wisconsin, and the family moved from there to Kansas, and later to Minnesota and eventually Dakota. In all of these places they lived the pioneering life, and later, as a married woman, Laura led a farming life in Missouri, and began to write the series of books for children that were eventually to become a multimillion-dollar mass-marketing enterprise. Today there are Laura Ingalls Wilder museums in Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa and Kansas, offering Laura Days, gift shops, memorabilia. She is an industry, effectively, but never mind – none of that can detract from the vitality of her work, narratives that so beautifully evoke an elsewhere, and the people who were there, books that no child should be without. Or adult; I read them still.
The pioneer garden was practical, essential, part of the whole grinding process of taming virgin territory for human use and habitation. In Europe, this had happened during what the archaeologists call the Neolithic revolution, the movement from hunter-gathering to farming, the deliberate planting of crops for harvesting that would mean that people could stay in one place. References to Neolithic gardening as such are hard to find (yes, I have tried), but there must have been points when farming shaded away into gardening, the establishment of little plots near the hut, the habitation, for those useful herbs and legumes, which would themselves sometimes shade from the purely utilitarian to the decorative. Some Neolithic habitation owner would have noticed a plant with an attractive flower: let’s dig it up, and have it where we can see it. All right, pure fantasy, but Neolithic pottery is patterned, often elegantly so, there is Neolithic jewellery, clearly intended for personal adornment, all of which suggests an aesthetic sense, a need to go beyond mere necessity. I want to think of the first gardeners, back in the Stone Age, imposing order where order there was none, making a place that was pleasant to look at.
So, further powers of the garden: to refute time, to impose order. Both of which sound too grandiloquent; any garden is itself only tenuously in existence, it depends entirely on whoever is in charge of it. If neglected or abandoned, it will melt away before the onslaught of nettle, bramble and ivy, leaving only a memory stain in the form of those ancient Egyptian planting holes, or the surviving bony structure of hard landscaping in a later age. After my grandmother’s death, that was what happened to her Somerset garden; her daughter, the artist Rachel Reckitt, had neither the time nor the urge to garden, and also had an ultra-environmentalist belief that any growth that has put itself somewhere should be allowed to remain. The hard landscaping survived – the rill, the sunken rose garden – but the flower beds dissolved under grass and much else, and saplings sprang up all over the place and were given occupational rights. In the kitchen garden, some long low grassy mounds remembered the asparagus beds, a few overgrown gooseberry bushes and the lines of unpruned espalier apple trees remained in determined but challenged production. It was a garden in retreat, proving the point that a garden is evanescent, it can fade in months, vanish in years.
In that sense, it would seem that time shoulders a garden aside, which is true enough, but the garden’s power of defying time is something different – it is what the garden, the activity of gardening,
does for you, me, for anyone. Gardening, you escape the tether of time, you experience that elision of past, present and future.
Time may obliterate a garden; it does not so much have its way with individual growths. When my grandmother laid out that garden, in around 1920, she planted a wisteria up the house. By the late 1940s, when I was spending all my school holidays there, it embraced two sides, poking its tendrils in at the windows, swamping them in blue when the flowers were out. By the time my aunt died, in 1998, and the house had to be sold, the thick grey limbs of the wisteria reached many yards away from the original stem, wrapping the house. So, a wisteria that was a good seventy years old. Probably not a record – apparently there is one on a cottage near Bridport in Dorset that is said to be a hundred – but the wisteria was the one tenacious element of the original garden planting. A subsequent owner had it hacked right back; I hope that its stem fights on.
There are numbers of long-lived garden plants. The rose is capable of hanging in there for decades, if unmolested. In our Oxfordshire garden there were two huge old shrub rose bushes (I never did manage to identify which they were), planted by the lady who had laid out the garden in about 1950, so around twenty-five years old. They were still flourishing when we left in 1998, so by then nearly fifty, and having received little or no attention except for an occasional attack on dead wood. The rhododendron is apparently about as tenacious as anything, can live for hundreds of years, and is so invasive that it will smother all other growth and create a rhododendron wilderness which can only be eradicated with heavy machinery. I have never cared for them, and, learning this, I think I understand why; along with being altogether too showy, there is something aggressive about them, a triffid-like quality. No, thank you.