William Robinson (gardener)

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William Robinson (1838 - 1935) was a practical gardener and journalist whose ideas about "wild gardens" spurred the movement that is still recognized as the "English cottage garden," an outgrowth of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

He advocated more natural and less formal looking plantings of hardy perennials, shrubs, and climbers, and reacted against the High Victorian patterned gardening, which used tropical materials grown in greenhouses, though in actual practice he was not averse to discreetly using some half-hardy plant materials. He railed against standard roses, statuary, sham Italian gardens, and other artifices common in gardening at the time. His garden style can be seen today at Gravetye Manor, West Sussex, England, though it is more manicured than it was in Robinson's time.

Robinson left his native Ireland in 1861, after working as a private gardener and at the National Botanic Garden at Dublin, to take up a job at the Botanical Gardens of Regents Park, London, where he was in charge of the herbaceous ground and specialized in British wildflowers. In 1866 he left Regents Park to write for The Gardener's Chronicle and The Times, and also represented the leading horticultural firm of Veitch. He became a fellow of the Linnean Society at the age of 29 with the sponsorship of Charles Darwin, and began writing many publications, beginning with Gleanings from French Gardens in 1868, The Parks, Gardens, and Promenades of Paris in 1869, and Alpine Flowers for Gardens and The Wild Garden in 1870. In 1871 he launched his own gardening journal, simply named The Garden, which over the years included contributions from notables such as John Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gertrude Jekyll, William Morris, Dean Hole, Canon Ellacombe, and James Britten.^[1]

His most influential books were The Wild Garden, which made his reputation and allowed him to start his magazine The Garden; and The English Flower Garden, 1883, which he revised in edition after edition and included contributions from his lifelong friend Gertrude Jekyll, among others. She later edited The Garden for a couple of years and contributed many articles to his publications, which also included Gardening Illustrated (from 1879).

The first meeting between him and Gertrude Jekyll was in 1875; they were in accord in their design principles and maintained a close friendship and professional association for over 50 years. He helped her on her garden at Munstead Wood; she provided plants for his garden at Gravetye Manor, an Elizabethan house on a large property which he was able to acquire in 1884 from the profits of his writings and garden design work. Its gardens have been restored in its current role as a hotel and restaurant. Jekyll wrote about Robinson that:

...when English gardening was mostly represented by the innate futilities of the "bedding" system, with its wearisome repetitions and garish colouring, Mr William Robinson chose as his work in live to make better known the treasures that were lying neglected, and at the same time to overthrow the feeble follies of the "bedding" system. It is mainly owing to his unremitting labours that a clear knowledge of the world of hardy-plant beauty is now placed within easy reach of all who care to acquire it, and that the "bedding mania" is virtually dead.^[2]

Contents 1 The Wild Garden, 1870 2 See also 3 Notes 4 External links

[edit] The Wild Garden, 1870

In The Wild Garden^[3] Robinson set forth fresh gardening principles that expanded the idea of garden and introduced themes and techniques that are taken for granted today, notably that of "naturalised" plantings. Robinson's audience were not the owners of intensely gardened suburban plots, nor dwellers in gentrified country cottages seeking a nostalgic atmosphere; nor was Robinson concerned with the immediate surroundings of the English country house.^[4] Robinson's wild garden brought the untidy edges, where garden blended into the larger landscape into the garden picture: meadow, water's edge, woodland edges and openings.

The hardy plants Robinson endorsed were not all natives by any means: two chapters are devoted to the hardy plants from other temperate climate zones that were appropriate to naturalising schemes. The narcissus he preferred were the small, delicate ones from the Iberian peninsula. Meadowflowers included goldenrod and asters, rampant spreaders from North America long familiar in English gardens. Nor did Robinson's 'wild' approach refer to letting gardens return back to their natural state—he taught a specific gardening method and aesthetic. The nature of plants' habit of growth and their cultural preferences^[5] dictated the free design, in which human intervention was to be kept undetectable.

Without being in any sense retrograde, Robinson's book brought attention back to the plants, which had been eclipsed since the decline of "gardenesque" plantings of the 1820s and 30s, during the use of tender annuals as massed color in patterned schemes of the mid-century. The book's popularity was largely due to Robinson's promise that wild gardening could be easy and beautiful; that the use of hardy perennials would be less expensive and offer more variety than the frequent mass planting of greenhouse annuals; and that it followed nature, which he considered the source of all true design.^[6]

The book was dedicated to Robinson's friend S. Reynolds Hole, dean of Rochester, the "Dean Hole" of garden history, a connoisseur of hardy roses; a chapter on "Wild and other Roses in the Wild Garden".

[edit] See also

• Garden hotels

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Capsule biography
• Ralph Hancock website
• History of Horticulture website: William Robinson
• The Wild Garden Google Books version