The English Flower Garden

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Drawing from The English Garden showing "The Wild Garden: view in Moat Mead, Gravetye Manor, with Poet's Narcissus in bloom in early summer 1891, planted five years."
Drawing from The English Garden showing "The Wild Garden: view in Moat Mead, Gravetye Manor, with Poet's Narcissus in bloom in early summer 1891, planted five years."

In The English Flower Garden, William Robinson (1838 - 1935), an influential landscape designer and garden writer, laid down the principles that revolutionised the art of gardening. Robinson's source of inspiration was the simple cottage garden, long neglected by the fashionable landscapists. In The English Flower Garden he rejected the artificial and the formal, specifically statuary, topiary, carpet bedding, and waterworks—comparing the modern garden to "the lifeless formality of wall-paper or carpet." He had a profound respect for nature's infinite diversity, and promoted creepers and ramblers, smaller plantings of roses, herbaceous plants and bulbs, woodland plants, and winter flowers.

Robinson compared gardening to art, and wrote in the first chapter:

The gardener must follow the true artist, however modestly, in his respect for things as they are, in delight in natural form and beauty of flower and tree, if we are to be free from barren geometry, and if our gardens are ever to be true pictures....And as the artist's work is to see for us and preserve in pictures some of the beauty of landscape, tree, or flower, so the gardener's should be to keep for us as far as may be, in the fulness of their natural beauty, the living things themselves.[1]

This book was first published in 1883, a compendium of articles by Robinson and other writers that included contributions from his close friend Gertrude Jekyll. The chapter on "Colour in the Flower Garden", except for the first few paragraphs, was written by Jekyll.[2] The last and definitive edition was published in 1933. During Robinson's lifetime, the book found increasing popularity, with fifteen editions during his life. For fifty years, The English Flower Garden was considered a bible by many gardeners.[3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ The English Flower Garden: Design, Arrangement, and Plans, by William Robinson, 4th edition, London, John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1895, p. 8.
  2. ^ William Robinson: A Portrait, by Betty Massingham, from Garden History, 1978. The Garden History Society.
  3. ^ The English Garden: A Social History By Charles Quest-Ritson

[edit] External links

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