gardenhistorygirl

George Orwell's Garden History: "A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray"

2012-01-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

"Some years ago a friend took me to the little Berkshire church of whichthe celebrated Vicar of Bray was once the incumbent. (Actually it is afew miles from Bray, but perhaps at that time the two livings were one.)In the churchyard there stands a magnificent yew tree which, according toa notice at its foot, was planted by no less a person than the Vicar ofBray himself. And it struck me at the time as curious that such a manshould have left such a relic behind him.

The Vicar of Bray, though he was well equipped to be a leader-writer onTHE TIMES, could hardly be described as an admirable character. Yet,after this lapse of time, all that is left of him is a comic song and abeautiful tree, which has rested the eyes of generation after generationand must surely have outweighed any bad effects which he produced by hispolitical quislingism.

Thibaw, the last King of Burma, was also far from being a good man. Hewas a drunkard, he had five hundred wives--he seems to have kept themchiefly for show, however--and when he came to the throne his first actwas to decapitate seventy or eighty of his brothers. Yet he did posteritya good turn by planting the dusty streets of Mandalay with tamarind treeswhich cast a pleasant shade until the Japanese incendiary bombs burnedthem down in 1942.

The poet, James Shirley, seems to have generalised too freely when hesaid that "Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in theirdust". Sometimes the actions of the unjust make quite a good showingafter the appropriate lapse of time. When I saw the Vicar of Bray's yewtree it reminded me of something, and afterwards I got hold of a book ofselections from the writings of John Aubrey and reread a pastoral poemwhich must have been written some time in the first half of theseventeenth century, and which was inspired by a certain Mrs Overall.

Mrs Overall was the wife of a Dean and was extensively unfaithful to him.According to Aubrey she "could scarcely denie any one", and she had "theloveliest Eies that were ever seen, but wondrous wanton". The poem (the"shepherd swaine" seems to have been somebody called Sir John Selby)starts off:

Downe lay the Shepherd Swaine
So sober and demure
Wishing for his wench againe
So bonny and so pure
With his head on hillock lowe
And his arms akimboe
And all was for the losse of his
Hye nonny nonny noe. . . .
Sweet she was, as kind a love
As ever fetter'd Swaine;
Never such a daynty one
Shall man enjoy again.
Sett a thousand on a rowe
I forbid that any showe
Ever the like of her
Hye nonny nonny noe.

As the poem proceeds through another six verses, the refrain "Hye nonnynonny noe" takes on an unmistakably obscene meaning, but it ends with theexquisite stanza:

But gone she is the prettiest lasse
That ever trod on plaine.
What ever hath betide of her
Blame not the Shepherd Swaine.
For why? She was her owne Foe,
And gave herself the overthrowe
By being so franke of her
Hye nonny nonny noe.

Mrs Overall was no more an exemplary character than the Vicar of Bray,though a more attractive one. Yet in the end all that remains of her is apoem which still gives pleasure to many people, though for some reason itnever gets into the anthologies. The suffering which she presumablycaused, and the misery and futility in which her own life must haveended, have been transformed into a sort of lingering fragrance like thesmell of tobacco-plants on a summer evening.

But to come back to trees. The planting of a tree, especially one of thelong-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity atalmost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root itwill far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good orevil. A year or two ago I wrote a few paragraphs in TRIBUNE about somesixpenny rambler roses from Woolworth's which I had planted before thewar. This brought me an indignant letter from a reader who said thatroses are bourgeois, but I still think that my sixpence was better spentthan if it had gone on cigarettes or even on one of the excellent FabianResearch Pamphlets.

Recently, I spent a day at the cottage where I used to live, and notedwith a pleased surprise--to be exact, it was a feeling of having done goodunconsciously--the progress of the things I had planted nearly ten yearsago. I think it is worth recording what some of them cost, just to showwhat you can do with a few shillings if you invest them in something thatgrows.

First of all there were the two ramblers from Woolworth's, and threepolyantha roses, all at sixpence each. Then there were two bush roseswhich were part of a job lot from a nursery garden. This job lotconsisted of six fruit trees, three rose bushes and two gooseberrybushes, all for ten shillings. One of the fruit trees and one of the rosebushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is fivefruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve andsixpence. These plants have not entailed much work, and have had nothingspent on them beyond the original amount. They never even received anymanure, except what I occasionally collected in a bucket when one of thefarm horses happened to have halted outside the gate.

Between them, in nine years, those seven rose bushes will have given whatwould add up to a hundred or a hundred and fifty months of bloom. Thefruit trees, which were mere saplings when I put them in, are now justabout getting in their stride. Last week one them, a plum, was a mass ofblossom, and the apples looked as if they were going to do fairly well.What had originally been the weakling of the family, a Cox's OrangePippin--it would hardly have been included in the job lot if it had been agood plant--had grown into a sturdy tree with plenty of fruit spurs on it.I maintain that it was a public-spirited action to plant that Cox, forthese trees do not fruit quickly and I did not expect to stay there long.I never had an apple off it myself, but it looks as if someone else willhave quite a lot. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the Cox'sOrange Pippin is a good fruit to be known by. Yet I did not plant it withthe conscious intention of doing anybody a good turn. I just saw the joblot going cheap and stuck the things into the ground without muchpreparation.

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is thatI have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant themnowadays--when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. Ifyou plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and whocares a damn for his grandchildren? Nor does anybody plant a quince, amulberry or a medlar. But these are garden trees which you can only beexpected to plant if you have a patch of ground of your own. On the otherhand, in any hedge or in any piece of waste ground you happen to bewalking through, you can do something to remedy the appalling massacre oftrees, especially oaks, ashes, elms and beeches, which has happenedduring the war years.

Even an apple tree is liable to live for about 100 years, so that the CoxI planted in 1936 may still be bearing fruit well into the twenty-firstcentury. An oak or a beech may live for hundreds of years and be apleasure to thousands or tens of thousands of people before it is finallysawn up into timber. I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one'sobligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestationscheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at theappropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.

And, if even one in twenty of them came to maturity, you might do quite alot of harm in your lifetime, and still, like the Vicar of Bray, end upas a public benefactor after all."

In 1936, Orwell moved to a small cottage called the "Stores", pictured above, in the tiny village of Wallington, Hertfordshire. He spent hours working in the garden, and ten years later published A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray in the Tribune, 26 April 1946.

The Vicar of Bray is a satirical song about a 17th century cleric who repeatedly changed his theology to suit whoever was in power and thus retain his living; the exact vicar who inspired the song is unknown.

In spite of Orwell's optimism about the continuity of his garden, his biographers (Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: the transformation) record that "according to a later occupant of the house, which is now known as Monk's Fitchett, the survival rate was not high, and there is nothing left to show of Orwell's tenancy but a few of the roses in front of the house."

I think there should be signs that say
"(Insert famous personage) GARDENED HERE."

The Cabbage that is King: Brassica oleracae longata

2012-01-13T07:37:00.000-08:00

Or, the curious case of the seven-foot tall cabbage, which brought two seedsellers and one Reverend Laycock of Hampshire into Westminster County Court in 1898. The sellers of seed were seeking to collect £24 from the good Reverend for cabbage seeds with which they had supplied him; he was countersuing because the resulting plants were, well, not as described.

He had a full 200 acres--20,000 plants in all--of strange, tree-like stalks with cabbage heads waving like leafy nests at the top. One can only imagine his consternation as the plants shot past normal cabbage height to three feet tall, then four, five, six and "grew on until [they were] seven feet above the ground”.

At this description disbelieving laughter ensued in court, until Rev. Laycock produced Exhibit A: a cabbage that was in fact “seven feet from the root”, about 4ft of which was “stout bare stump, then a cluster of leaves from which several shoots ascended”.

This is the sort of courtroom drama that you rarely see on Law and Order. "Your honor, I would like to submit as evidence this gigantic cabbage."

Cue the expert witness, a horticulturist who identifed the beast as Brassica oleracae longata. Tree cabbage or giant cow cabbage or long-jacks or Jersey Kale is found on the Channel Islands, where it has historically been grown for, wait for it...walking sticks.

Kew's Economic Botany Collection contains several of them, described as large, lightweight, and highly varnished, a product which was exported from the islands in annual quantities of as many as 30,000 in 1906, when "one could behold in almost every farm or garden this useful cabbage plant..here you may see a dozen of them sheltering the door of a little hut, there a big cluster grown to supply the cattle with food...you may notice them placed in a line along the edge of a garden, forming a picturesque and tidy border and a quaint kind of fence".

The production of walking sticks had started on the islands more than 40 years previously. To yield a strong, straight stem the lower leaves were stripped off as the plant grew, providing food for the table, wrappings for butter and cheese, and an excellent and now forgotten fodder for sheep or cattle.

Philip Miller's Gardener's Dictionary of 1835 asserts not only that the plant can grow up to sixteen feet tall (other sources list eighteen and even twenty feet), but also that sixty plants would provide sufficient fodder for a cow for an entire year, and that it lasted four years without fresh planting since only the side leaves were used. Sheep fed upon the walking stick cabbages were said to produce wool of the finest silken texture up to 25 inches long.

Cabbage stems were also usd for roofing small buildings by the islanders, but their most lucrative transformation was into the walking sticks. After several months (years? accounts differ) drying of the stems with the roots still attached, the sticks were smoothed, varnished, embellished and sold to tourists for a shilling.

They'll set you back more than that, £37 now, from Philip and Jacquelyn Johnson, the last makers and purveyors of cabbage walking sticks on the Islands, who were featured on the BBC's Countryfile in an episode on Jersey broadcast in 2010 (the link is to the full episode; go to 8:50 to see the cabbages).

Our Reverend Laycock, though, remained undettered by any new economic potential for his strange crop. Accompanied by more courtroom laughter, he asserted that he had desired cabbages, not walking sticks! The judge fined the seedsellers £21 for breach of contract.

Sources:

--I first learned of the 'walking stick cabbage' in D.G. Hessayon's Armchair Book of the Garden, Transworld Publishers, London, 1983, p. 186.

--The tale of the court case, and the first image is from an article by Paul Chambers in the Fortean Times, which references The Daily Graphic, 26 April 1898. It is also listed as being printed in The Farmer's Magazine in 1836. The image also serves as the frontispiece of the book The Giant Cabbage of the Channel Islands, a Guernsey historical monograph from 1974 by Southcombe Parker published by Toucan Press. I love that there is an entire book on giant cabbages and can't wait for my copy to arrive in the mail.

--An excellent 'plant portrait' of the walking stick cabbage, from which the 1906 quotes are taken, is available from Kew as originally published in Economic Botany 54(2) pp. 141-143, 2000.

--Advice on growing walking stick cabbage can be found here and here. A recent report on growing (and cooking) it is here.

--Seeds may be ordered from any number of online purveyors.

Crooked Forests

2011-08-20T21:39:00.000-07:00

A forest of about 400 pine trees in Western Poland all grow with a 90 degree northward bend at the base of their trunks. The patch, within a a larger forest of straight growing pine trees, was planted in approximately 1930, and it is assumed that their peculiar growth habit is due to some mechanical intervention, though the reason behind it is unknown. A commenter on the original post (at discoverynews) said he was taught to do this by his grandfather, with the intent of making saplings grow ready-shaped for canes. So perhaps this was a cane forest interrupted by World War II.

The twisted trees of Saskatchewan Canada are more mysterious. The grove of deformed aspens is on private land, and though the Friends of the Crooked Bush speculate that the trees could be due to meteorites or even UFO's, a more likely explanation seems a rare genetic mutation such as that causing contortion in the Henry Lauder's Walking Stick (Corylus avellana 'Contorta'). When vegetatively propagated and grown at locations in Manitoba, the Saskatchewan aspens retain their crookedness.

But my favorite crooked tree story is this one from my home state of Oklahoma, and the Land Run town of Shawnee (which oddly enough also happens to be the birthplace of Brad Pitt):

"In a whimsical moment" Shawnee residents Frank Witherspoon and Gule Rinneger went down to the banks of the North Canadian river, dug up two elm saplings, and brought them back to town in a one-horse hack. Witherspoon decided that he would form an arch of the two trees by tying them together in front of his newly built house. Witnesses said that the plants were more than six feet tall, and that he tied them together as high as he could reach, using ropes and burlap to bind them. In spite of the mischief of neighborhood children, who used to cut the bindings, he was successful in his efforts to grow the trees into a knot.[source]

They grew more closely attached through the years, bending together with age. In 1930, their picture appeared in the syndicated "Believe It or Not" column of Robert Ripley, and again in the book "Nature Woodland Wonders" in 1945. The Oklahoma state highway commission included them in its booklet, "New Thrills Ahead." at about the same time; they were by that time just a few feet away from State Highway 270 and a regular stop for travelers. I can't find any information on when they went at last; but I'm sure they went together.

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

1960s Landscapes in the Help

2011-08-16T19:56:00.000-07:00

Nearly a year ago, now, I got a request through the blog for more information about the early 1960s landscape, about which little (so far!) has been written. It was for a film, for the exterior setting of a ranch house in the American South in which lived a couple with one young child and one on the way and who were aspiring to social status. This was the house:

The foundation plantings are right but they would have been new and raw in 1960; small and tentative, as aspirational as the couple in the house. One of the most telling features of the landscape is actually the pole light; its white cap is just visible in the above photo near the front door. Lighting not just the house but the yard was definitely a luxury, and became a tell-tale sign of class in the 1950s. Watch for it in the movie; the set designers appropriately show the light emphasized with garish annuals around its base.

I also recommended some newly planted rose bushes surrounded by box...Jacqueline Kennedy had renovated and replanted the White House Rose Garden in the early 1960s and her influence on American women was pervasive. You can see the rose garden in the first part of the Kennedy home movie below. But that recommendation didn't make it into the movie.

(for a look at the White House gardens over time, see the lovely series of historical photographs of the Rose Garden (the West garden) and the East Garden at the White House museum.)

So I sent this advice, and promptly forgot about it. But the movie has just been released…it was The Help, about the struggles of the black women who worked in the households of well-to-do whites in Jim Crow Mississippi.

I watched it today in a movie theatre in the most prosperous square miles of Nashville Tennessee, right across the parking lot from the offices of the Junior League. When you see the movie you’ll understand what that means. The mid-day crowd of ladies-who-lunch was of a social type peculiar to the American South; of a piece with the women depicted in the film except with sleek bobs instead of 1960s bouffants. The strands of pearls were still in evidence, and the yard lights still glow over their front sidewalks. But on this day their laughter was at times too loud to have come from a comfortable place.

Hay in the Landscape

2011-05-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

I grew up with this painting on the wall of my parent's home; a gigantic haybale constructed by my great-grandmother Rose's family on the plains of Colorado. That's her, in overalls and straw hat, on the right. The utterly practical act of cutting, stacking, and storing grass against the winter leads naturally to a sculptural intervention in the landscape on a scale to strike envy into the heart of the modern 'land artist'...who might in their fondest dreams wish for the opportunity to dot acres of shorn fields with squares and circles and bishops hats that sparkle with morning dew and stretch into shadows at sunset.

Familiarity has made it invisible and mechanization has made it uniform, but I remember my farming forbears talking alot about the hay, taking pride in the quality, and the extent, and in the baling. Talk of haying still often includes tales of near-death experiences accompanied by a puffed-out chest, wild gesticulation, and nods of assent all around. Everyone knows it is difficult, and only for the strong.

Like many vernacular landscape traditions though, hay can be ignored by historians drawn more to famous garden makers and exotic orangeries, in spite of haying's rich documentation in landscape art.

Alan Ritch's site "Hay in Art", though no longer being actively updated (so be warned that some links are broken), is devoted to the unique imagery of hay as it is shorn, stacked, stored and strewn...from the choreographic scythers in the 15th century Limbourg Brothers Book of Hours (June), to the twentieth century architectonic images of Australian William Delafield Cook

And stopping at all points in between, including hay as a background to Rosalind Russel pin-ups photos and of course all of those impressionists who loved the diffused light off a haystack. Of particular note is the essay on "Countryside around Dixton Manor", an unattributed painting c. 1715, whose panaroma of the countryside includes a comprehensive depiction of the haymaking ritual (including Morris dancers!) as conducted in the fields not far from the Cheltenham Art Museum where it now resides.

Ritch also describes his visits to hay-making localities--an interesting sort of way to select travel destinations--including the dream-like landscapes of Maramureş, in the northwest of Romania. He calls the region 'hay-heaven' which seems apt:

Maramures is apparently one of the only regions where hay is still treated in the medieval fashion, and is the subject of a kickstarter project by photographer Davin Ellicson to document the lives and traditions of 'Europe's Last Peasants', including haymaking (that's his photo below), before the culture is absorbed by modernity. I'm supporting it...you can do so as well at the above link.

Garden History Images of the Week: Mexican landscapes in the Codex pictorius Mexicanus of Ignacio Tirsch

2011-04-06T21:08:00.000-07:00

These images are so beautiful that they actually make me feel the pangs of nostalgia--for a Mexico I never saw and never will see. Circa 1762, they are the work of Father Ignacio Tirsch, Jesuit missionary to the Baja peninsula, who over the five years of his sojourn there created a portfolio of forty-eight drawings rich in garden history; recording both productive and decorative landscapes, as well as native flora. The entire volume--architecture, costumes, flora and fauna--is a treasure of the Czech National Library, online at manuscriptorium (click on 'facsimile' to see the images).

Atomic Gardening lecture June 7, 2 pm

2011-03-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

Dear readers,
Just a quick note to let you know that I'll be speaking about the Atomic Gardens at the Garden Museum in London on June 7 at 2 in the afternoon. You can register here: http://atomicgardening.eventbrite.com/

I'd love to see you there!
More soon,
gardenhistorygirl
P.S. The fabulous Fernando Caruncho will be speaking that evening...register for both!

On Rainbow Fountains and Rainbow Portraits

2011-03-11T10:24:00.000-08:00

Though I’m continuing work on the Atomic Gardens (and always working on Art Deco Gardens), I’m trying to time travel back from the twentieth century to the seventeenth, as I am due in June to talk about one of my most favorite places: the great garden at Wilton House, as built by Isaac de Caus in the 1630s. It was the first garden I ever wrote about. Having crossed the Atlantic with a very large suitcase to reach a student room approximately the size of an American jail cell, having told my befuddled department chair that I was going to take a year off from the lab to study garden history, and having read on the plane my tutor Timothy Mowl’s Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape, which was to be our text for the course, I was captivated by this description of one of Wilton's garden fountains, a 'mystery of garden history':

Monsieur de Caus had here a contrivance,
by the turning of a cocke, to shew three rainbowes,
the secret whereof he did keep to himself; he would not let the gardener,
who shewes it to strangers,
know how to doe it; and so, upon his death, it is lost.
--John Aubrey, The Natural History of Wiltshire, c.1656

Making three rainbows was a pretty advanced trick for the time period, before Descartes and Newton had unwoven the mysteries of the bow. Fountains purposely designed and sited to make rainbows were something of a garden fad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when along with other hydraulic effects like weeping statues, chirping birds, and surprise jets of water they made the garden grotto a popular diversion and a great occasion for flirting. Doubled rainbows are relatively common, but I knew that to make a triple threat Isaac would have needed a mirror, and on a trip to Wilton House I found one, hanging in a rather dark corner of the Upper Cloisters.

Knyff made a grand painting of the Wilton grounds about 1700, and added insets of the most important garden features. Isaac's garden is already all but gone, and the grotto has been moved to a new location but is still intact; the inset shows an interior space with ball balanced atop a water jet and a curiously painted roof:

The dark lines are columns, with capitals, and above them an arching roof that was described as being like a crown or coronet in appearance, and in which we can see a green four-square garden plot, and off in the corner, some small trees and a road. The roof of the Grotto was a mirror. Knyff had painted it reflecting the ground plane outside.

The painting is now hanging in a much more prominent location in the house, which is pleasing.

So I knew how Isaac made the rainbow, but I still wanted to understand what it meant. Our perception of the rainbow is so tied up with Newton’s that we’ve forgotten that people used to think there were only three colors (or maybe four or five) or that they were a reflection, in the heavens, of the essential elements of the earth, and platonic philosophy, or that a triple rainbow, in particular, was used by Dante to symbolize the Trinity. To understand the symbolic significance of the rainbow and what it meant to its viewers I needed to go deeper into the past, back into the Elizabethan era. And there one cannot help but run smack dab into this:

The Rainbow Portrait of QE1.

It is famously enigmatic; no one knows who painted it, or when, or why, or what it means, and it resides still in splendor at Hatfield House, built by Elizabeth’s Secretary of State Robert Cecil in 1611, though it's not clear when and how he acquired the portrait. My dear friend Valerie drove me all the way there to stand in front of it for far too long, and lean in to see its white rainbow far too close, so that we were followed around through the rest of the house by a plainclothesman.

Adding to the mystery of a sketchy provenance is the painting’s torturous symbology: a serpent with a jewel in its mouth, a cloak of embroidered eyes and ears, a cryptic motto; all of which have been given equally contortionist interpretations by scholars. And never do they twist so much as when they try to explain its seminal motif: a rainbow held in the hand of a supreme ruler--an image unique in art--which gives the portrait its long-held title and yet it hardly seems a rainbow at all, just a ghostly apparition of what should be a brightly colored self.

So what is a rainbow without color? What can it mean? The idea that perhaps the pigments in the bow alone had faded (though the rest of the portrait blazes with color) has been broached and discredited. What is a rainbow without color, a white rainbow?

A moonbow.

The rainbow is of course simply the product of light refraction and reflection when passing through a raindrop. Any light source will do, the moon as well as the sun, though it must be bright. It is only our own perceptive powers that cause it to fade: the limited ability of the human eye to detect color at night makes the bow seem pale and ghostly.

The unknown artist of the Rainbow Portrait (which should really be called the Moonbow Portrait) has rendered his white rainbow with exquisite sensitivity, showing the impression of spectral bands that are brightest in its central region (remember Newton's ROYGBIV so the center is green) and even giving it a greenish hue; an uncannily accurate representation for the sixteenth century. He could not have known that the maximum color sensitivity of the eye is in the green wavelengths.

Moonbows are rare. While you may see many solar rainbows in your lifetime, most of us will die without ever having seen their lunar counterparts. Coupled with the unusual accuracy of the bow’s portrayal, it begs the question of whether the moonbow in the painting might reflect an actual meteorological event, something special that someone connected to the painting had seen. And who, who in the Virgin Queen’s circle saw a moonbow?

On the tenth of September about midnight...a large and perfect rainbow by moonlight, in the shape and bigness of those formed more commonly by the sun, though in colours not so various, but chiefly inclining to a pale or whitish flame.
--The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh

There is much more to say--about Elizabeth’s symbolic associations with the moon and the painting’s other cryptic symbols and its motto and who might have painted the portrait, and why the National Gallery ‘could not find a place’ for my paper on the topic--but this is enough, dear readers, to show where a little garden history can take you.

[P.S. If you're really interested you can read the two papers I've published about Wilton:

"Proof of the Heavenly Iris: The Fountain of Three Rainbows at Wilton House, Wiltshire”

Garden History. 35-1, 51-67 (2007) and “Producing Pleasantness: The Waterworks of Isaac de Caus,

Outlandish Engineer”, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 29-3,169-191 (2009).

I would love to invite you to the Wilton lecture but it is already full with a waiting list even.]

The Landscape with Too Few Lovers

2011-02-14T01:26:00.000-08:00

For your Valentine's Day, New Zealand artist Colin McMahon's "Landscape with Too Few Lovers", from his 1958 Northland Panels. Hope your landscape is full of lovers today!

Garden History Image of the Week

2011-01-27T09:46:00.000-08:00

A child's drawing of a sod-house homestead in Nebraska, c. 1885. [via the grovefamily genealogy site]

Corn in the front yard was not the norm on homesteads, but the sod house was always intended to be a temporary dwelling anyway, just until money could be raised for the lumber to build a proper wood frame home. The symmetry, in age and placement, of the two trees makes it likely that they were intentionally planted.

My own great-great grandmother lived in a sod house on the plains of Colorado.

The Garden that Climbs the Stairs: Verb Gardens

2011-01-04T15:10:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking lately about this garden, a temporary 2009 installation at BilbaoJardin by Balmori Associates of New York, because of how rare it is to see a garden portrayed as doing anything but predictably
grow
-ing
-n
-er
-s

as if we didn't know that already.

What does it mean to make a garden that is [insert verb here] speaking, studying, playing, arriving, pushing, pedaling, blushing, juggling? Can a garden--not a garden element, but the whole landscape--stand and stare, wobble, whistle or whirl? If you could make a verb garden, what would it be?

Modern Pressed Flowers

2010-12-29T21:12:00.000-08:00

Via dezeen, the timeless art of pressed flowers transformed into three dimensions by designer Ignacio Canales Aracil:

"The flowers are held together without any structure or glue, they stand and stick together as the straw in a hat after being dried and pressed all at once. The roughness of the process which requires lots of physical effort contrast with the delicacy and fragility of the finished sculpture."

Georgian Shrubberies and Google Ngrams

2010-12-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

Shrubberies at Carlton House as engraved by Woollett, c. 1760

I work some in the eighteenth-century but tend to find it tiresome because this epoch more than any other gives rise to scholars who obsess over small details and like to argue about them. One of these is--ahem--the origin of the "shrubbery". Say it with me: "shrubbery". Now say it five times fast. shrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubberyshrubbery. That's how it feels to be in a room with shrubbery scholars. I KNOW! Like you, I thought shrubbery was invented by the Knights who say Ni! Au contraire, mon frère. You have much to learn.

"Now think of the gaiety of a Shrubbery ! —unlike to the monastic melancholy of the old wood walks ; and herein you may plant all the neat trees I have before mentioned, with ponds at proper distances, for gold fish, and benches with Latin mottos—to puzzle the ladies; besides temples dedicated to the heathen gods!" Just think of it! Goldfish! Heathen Temples! Puzzling Ladies! Do read the whole of Horace Walpole's satire of the "Modern Taste" in gardening, c. 1780 here; it's only a page long, with f's for s's adding to its delight.

More enlightening is a description in "The complete fabulist" by G. Grey: "In the quarters of a shrubbery, where deciduous plants and evergreens were intermingled with an air of negligence, it happened that a Rose grew not far from a Laurustinus." (also c. 1780; don't believe the Google books date as there is a known error on the book's frontispiece)

Or this of the shrubbery at the Leasowes, c. 1775: "The scene now changes to an open lawn, where the path waves up to the house and shrubbery, laid out in taste, and agreeably bushed by clumps of evergreens and flowering shrubs; a small lawn in the midst, has a statue of Venus, well executed, and the pedestal gives us these beautiful lines..."

and a helpful summary is the description of the poet William Cowper's landscape at Weston (c. 1793): "The shrubbery..was very generally admired, being a delightful little labyrinth, composed of flowering shrubs, and adorned with gravel walks, having convenient seats placed at appropriate distances."

So. Mixtures of evergreens and deciduous flowering shrubs arranged in a 'theatrical' style (by height, basically) adjacent to open lawn, winding walks, appropriately placed features to engage the eye, inspire the mind, and rest the body...that's basically it. But the real reason I'm wading into the discussion of shrubberies--where believe me angels fear to tread--is to point out the usefulness of a new google tool for historians, garden or otherwise.

As if making the world's literature fully word-searchable for free wasn't enough, Google labs will now analyze the number of appearances of a word, or a combination of words, in literature over time, and call it an Ngram. How much do we love Google? According to today's New York Times, this opens up a a new field of linguistic and cultural investigation: culturomics. Below is the appearance of the word 'shrubbery', which analysis I shall refer to forthwith as gardenhistoromics:

You can see that the word 'shrubbery' is basically non-existent prior to 1750 (okay, there are five references listed 1700-1750 but I know all of them to be misdated; you do have to watch Google on the early dates), with budding usage 1780ish (note the above references), and then really takes off in the early 1800s, which is basically when widely-published J.C. Loudon begins to not only codify the shrubbery as a garden feature, but to use the word as an alternate for 'shrub'.

That is the most obvious origin of the word, and so it is tempting to think it was just a simple linguistic analogue. But here again the Ngram can help, because it can show two words at once. I've confined the data in this set to between 1700-1800 so it isn't compressed by the huge spike in the nineteenth century. It indicates a lack of correlation between the words, with 'shrub' (the plant, in red) clearly pre-dating 'shrubbery' (the garden feature, in blue), which in its time would have been New Word of the Year! like 'bromance' or 'webinar'. Or 'culturomics'. Note especially that 'shrub' usage actually drops BELOW 'shrubbery' usage between 1780-1790, the critical period for shrubberies and the approximate dates of the references I've quoted. Just 10 years. What do we have here ladies and gentlemen? A fad.

If you're saying things like, "but how is this affected by the increase in number of books published", then you have the mind of a scientist and you'll be happy to know that Google normalizes by the number of books published per year. But also the data from the graph can be downloaded as csv files and corrected for any number of variables. This is so cool.

UPDATE: Alert reader Adam has pointed out that this can also be affected by OCR errors, especially because of the whole 'is it an f or an s' issue in page scans of old literature. I did make the assumption that such errors would affect 'fhrubs' and 'fhrubberies' equally; to do otherwise would require examining the individual files.

Atomic Gardens

2010-12-02T07:53:00.000-08:00

In March 1959 an unusual group of scientists, government officials, and lesser worthies assembled for a dinner party in the dining hall of the Royal Commonwealth Society, London. Unbeknownst to them, one of the courses was a strange strain of American peanuts: ‘NC 4x’, ‘North Carolina 4th generation X-rayed’ peanuts, produced from seeds that had been exposed to 18,500 roentgen units of x-rays in order to induce mutations. The irradiated peanuts were unusually large--big as almonds, according to those in attendance, outshowing the British groundnuts served alongside--and had reached the dining table through the generosity of their inventor Walter C. Gregory of North Carolina State College, who sent them as a gift to Mrs. Muriel Howorth, Eastbourne, enthusiast for all things atomic.

Disappointed with the reaction of her guests, who were less than appreciative of the great scientific achievement present at table, Muriel afterwards “began inspecting [the] uncooked nuts wondering what to do with them all…I had the idea to…pop an irradiated peanut in the sandy loam to see how this mutant grew.” The “Muriel Howorth” peanut (for she had already named it after herself) germinated in four days and was soon two feet high. She called the newspapers.

Almost immediately there were interviews and television appearances, AP reporters in the driveway and sightseers peering into the glasshouse to get a look at the plant. Its portrait was commissioned and put on display at the Walker Galleries in London. Garden writer Beverley Nichols came to call:

"Yesterday I held in my hands the most sensational plant in Britain.

It is the only one of its kind. Nothing of its sort has ever been seen in the country before.

To me it had all the romance of something from outer space.

It is the first ‘atomic’ peanut.

It is a lush, green plant and gives you a strange, almost alarming sense of thrusting power and lusty health.

It holds a glittering promise in its green leaves, the promise of victory over famine."

Muriel was a great former of societies (about 12, near as I can tell, over her lifetime..she was invariably President), and she immediately constituted the Atomic Gardening Society and published a manual, Atomic Gardening:

"I now felt that by some stroke of luck which is difficult to ascribe to chance, I had been given the opportunity—so much longed for—to bring science right into the homes of the people. I organized an ATOMIC GARDENING SOCIETY to co-ordinate and safeguard the interests of ATOMIC MUTATION EXPERIMENTERS who would work as one body to help scientists produce more food more quickly for more people, and progress horticultural mutation."

The Atomic Gardens grew out of post-WWII efforts to use the colossal energy of the atom for peaceful pursuits in medicine, biology, and agriculture. 'Gamma Gardens’ at national laboratories in the US as well as continental Europe and the USSR bombarded plants with radiation in hopes of producing mutated varieties of larger peanuts, disease resistant wheat, more sugary sugar maples, and African violets with three heads and a singular atomic entrepreneur named C.J. Speas irradiated seeds on his Tennessee farm and sold them to schoolchildren and housewives, among them Mrs. Muriel Howorth.

Atomic Gardens are my current research project, and will soon result in a publication as well as a presentation to take place on February 28, 2011 at the rescheduled (after last year’s volcanic ash debacle) study day on the Landscape of the 1950s. They are just recent enough that there are those still alive who may remember what was at least enough of a cultural moment to to form the plot device for Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.

If you know anyone that participated, that was involved in laboratory research, or grew the seeds, or was a ‘Mutation Experimenter’, please get in touch…the history of one of gardening’s weirdest moments needs to be captured before it’s too late! (And if you want to hear more, sign up for the 1950s study day at the University of Bristol...)

A Girl's Garden, Robert Frost

2010-11-17T17:46:00.000-08:00

Vincent van Gogh. Memory of the Garden at Etten (Women of Arles), 1888. Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

I have been singing in my university's choir these past semesters, the only grown-up who joins the students (though any member of the university can do so) and delighting all the fall in this lesser known poem by Robert Frost, accompanied here by the van Gogh that seems to repeat its tale. Music by Randall Thompson.

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, "Why not?"

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, "Just it."

And he said, "That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm."

It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plow;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.

She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider-apple
In bearing there today is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, "I know!

"It's as when I was a farmer..."
Oh never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.

The Garden History of Heiress Huguette Clark, Part Two

2010-09-30T06:14:00.000-07:00

Sometime on their coast to coast travels, the family stopped in at the rootstock of their great wealth: Butte, Montana. They were photographed there around 1917; Huguette, age 11, and her 15 year old sister Andree. The girls were isolated together in their cocoon of wealth, and Huguette seems never to have recovered from her sister's death from meningitis just two years after the photo was taken.

They are standing at an outlook over Columbia Gardens, 68 acres which then-Senator William A. Clark purchased in 1899 and spent $125,000 to improve to serve as a family recreation park for the citizens of Butte.

"During my late teens, I often danced the night away at the Columbia Gardens Pavilion. The Gardens, an oasis on the edge of a mining camp, was a magical place with hundreds of acres of gardens, lawns, and thrill rides. The Pavilion’s dance floor—the largest west of the Mississippi—occupied fifteen thousand square feet. An evening in that elaborate pavilion, with its many windows opening to the hanging flower baskets and surrounding gardens, was a delight. One danced to the live music of Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James. America’s big bands were attracted to the nation’s Mining City and to its antithesis, the green lawns and gleaming white buildings of the Columbia Gardens." (Pat Williams, Drumlammon Views, Spring 2009)

Butte-Silver Bow Public Library

Clark is supposed to have been ungenerous, a hoarder rather than a sharer of his riches, but he was a local hero for making the Gardens as a retreat for citizens of a city "blasted by the poison fumes from the smelteries in the neighborhood....he [Clark] saw grass fade under the withering touch of the fumes and the branches of the green trees turn to gray, brittle fingers of the decaying body...the arsenic contaminated air of the busy city...to spend frequent afternoons in the groves of the Gardens is to enhance one's desire to live and to forget that Butte is such a terribly dusty, smoky, barren place."

from "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens"

He did own the streetcar line that carried visitors to the garden, though (he owned all the streetcars in town) and there were 150,000 visitors the year it opened in 1899, and 375,000 in 1902 when Adolf H. Heilbronner wrote "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens" (available in its entirety at Google books). Those visitors could traverse woodland walks with streamside "alluring spots", rustic seats and bridges; dine al fresco in the picnic grove, stop by the zoo and aviary, or visit the Chinese pagoda and the fish fountain. They could ride a boat down a gigantic 'chute' and into the lake, play on the swings, see-saws and carousel, eat at the cafe, try their hand at the shooting gallery or see a moving picture show. If more enamored of nature than attractions one could embark on a mountain climb into the Rockies, whose dramatic scenery hovered just behind. Soon, there was a baseball diamond (center field has never had a better view) and later a roller coaster.

from "Sights and Scenes and a Brief History of Columbia Gardens"

And yet even with all this, "...the overshadowing feature, so regarded by the great majority, is the immense floral display. Columbia Gardens, as a pleasure resort, is famed from sea to sea and from Labrador to the Rio Grande River and in foreign countries, as the home of the prettiest collection of flowers in the Northwest...today there are in the Gardens and hothouses more than 150,000 different kinds of growing plants, including most delicate products of the tropics, which are housed in the large glass nurseries. The hothouses are on the list of attractions most enjoyed by the visitors, for here are shown a variety of plants of the most classic order."

"In the hothouses are seeded the thousands of pansies that ultimately adorn the flower plots throughout the Gardens. This climate is congenial to the pansy, which, at the Gardens, grows to enormous size, some measuring as large as three inches in diameter. Fifteen thousand pansy plants were transplanted this season, which yielded millions of vari-colored blooms."

The children were allowed to pick the pansies on certain days, an event preserved as one of the many postcards of Columbia Gardens that can be found scattered around the web.

found at Penny Postcards from Montana

The pansies were the primary component of the millions of flowers planted out into pictoral beds in a naive, folk-art style. There was a gigantic harp, an anchor, US flags and a butterfly, all superintended by head gardener Victor Siegel, a German immigrant to Butte.

The butterfly was one of most remembered sights of Columbia Gardens, which were permanently closed on Labor Day in 1973 in spite of the strenuous objections of Butte residents. The Anaconda Company, which had purchased the Gardens from Clark famiy heirs in 1928, wanted to expand their mine and took not only the Gardens but the neighborhoods that had over the century grown up around them. In 2004, the city of Butte restored the butterfly, though they were unable to do so at its original location, which is now a mine pit.

by darwinsbulldog at flickr

So were Huguette and Andree allowed to partake of the park's delights rather than just pose at its edge? I think so...Clark was justly proud of his what he had made, one of several donations to the city including Montana Technical College and the Paul Clark home for orphaned boys, and said "The Columbia Gardens is my monument. Of my many business enterprises it is the one I love best, and it is practically the only one on which I lose money."

It must have been a scandal, though: Clarks only granddaughter, Katherine Culver Clark, had been photographed on the swings for Heilbronner's book. She looks to be perhaps five in 1902....the same year that Andree was born to a new supposed bride who was younger than Clark's daughters. Huguette did not follow until 1906. It is unlikely that the town residents would have forgotten.

Katherine Culver Clark on the Columbia Gardens Playground,
from Sights and Scenes of Columbia Gardens

The Garden History of Heiress Huguette Clark, Part One

2010-09-15T17:43:00.000-07:00

There’s been a kerfuffle on the internet lately about Huguette Clark, the still-living daughter of a copper baron who was eligible for service in the Civil War, and who in spite of a great fortune that funds silent shuttered estates stays alone in a hospital at the age of one-hundred-and-four.

Her sudden celebrity has led to lawsuits against her attorney, accountant, and bankers for improperly handling her estimated $500 million fortune…some actions brought by distant relatives who have suddenly (conveniently) appeared on the scene. All of this seems unlikely to add happiness to an aged woman who long ago chose a deeply private, even reclusive, life for her own reasons.

A MSN piece by Bill Dedman has largely searched out Huguette’s biographical details in an online article that started the Huguette furor. I thought I’d see what remnants could be found of a gentler place: the gardens she knew.

(The biographical details and dates in this piece are taken from Dedman’s article.)

Huguette’s first garden was Central Park itself. By the time she was born in 1906, her father had already made a fortune in the Montana copper mines, bought a senatorial seat, and lost his first wife. Speculation was rampant as to why the Senator was now building a massive new abode in New York City, but the answer became clear in 1904 when he acknowledged Anna, nee La Chapelle as his second ‘wife’, and the already two-year old Andree as his daughter. At the time of their unrecorded vows, he was 62 and she was 23. Their new house was a bombastic accretion that billowed from corner to corner of its its Fifth Avenue lot and had its own private coal train. No space was wasted on a garden, but right across the street was the Central Park of the early century. It is unlikely that Huguette was allowed to join the rabble on its newly installed playgrounds. But perhaps she was taken to sail boats at the Conservatory Water which was just down from the house.

The William C. Clark house at 5th and 77th in New York City (New York Historical Society)

Boats on the Conservatory Water at Central Park c. 1900 (wikimedia commons)

William C. Clark established the family’s bicoastal presence when he bought their Santa Barbara estate from Eleanor Graham, wife of a Tulsa oil man gone bust, in 1923. Huguette was 16. The 23 acre estate encompassed an Italianate house with extensive gardens, and its name, ‘Bellosguardo’, was probably chosen as much for its European cachet as for its translation--‘beautiful place’--though it did, and still does, command an astonishing Pacific view. New oil millionaires frequently used Italianate architecture, gardens, and art to cover backgrounds with more determination than education and draw attention away from boots still wet with the muck of the gusher fields. It was a way of joining themselves to the club of old, east coast money, whose self-assured members had taken on those lofty stylings. And besides, Edith Wharton, arbiter of all that was tasteful, had written of the real, Italian, Bellosguardo. It was a choice within easy reach, like naming your child after a movie star, or a president.

Bellosguardo Gardens c. 1920, from the USC Digital Archives

Before the Graham’s marriage went bad and their finances even worse, Bellosguardo had been abuzz with Santa Barbara social life and far more documentation exists of the garden from this era than that of the Clarks' own. Nevertheless, this is how Huguette would have initially known the place, with terracing and classical balustrades and faux-roman sculptures. Its setting, if not its architecture, is sublime. It may be the terrace below the house that can be seen in stills from In the days of Trajan, a silent film shot there in 1913 for which its classicism was ideal—Mrs. Graham was a lover of theatre and an early supporter of the film industry. (I haven’t been able to obtain this film, but see Silent Era Filmmaking by Robert Birchard). It also gives a glimpse of the lush semi-tropical plantings that were judged ‘a marvel of landscaping skill’, according to Santa Barbara historian Michael Redmon.

View of Bellosguardo c. 1920, from the USC Digital Archives

Still image from Days of Trajan (from Silent Era Filmmaking by Robert Birchard)

They had been created by Austin Strong, an associate of Francis Wilson (architect of the Graham’s villa) and a fascinating, peripatetic character who grew up in Hawaii, New Zealand, and in Samoa with his step-grandfather—none other than Robert Louis Stevenson. He studied landscape architecture at Harvard, designed Cornwall Park in Aukland and practiced briefly in California before chucking it all to become a playwright in 1905. The Graham’s gardens, those the Clarks knew for the first nearly ten years of their residence in the house, must have been one of his final commissions.

So though the reports about Huguette often feature prominently the house and garden in their current state (as below, they are conveniently visible from the air) it was the earlier landscape of Austin Strong, and the Francis Wilson house, that she may have known best. They, not the existing house and garden, were the setting of her ill-fated marriage and would be torn down, for a fresh start in more ways than one, not long after. More soon.

Found Functions: Math in the Garden

2010-09-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

Searching for fractals in the landscape is by now common, but Nikki Graziano, a student in both math and photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology has expanded the hunt to include functions. When she "finds a function" in nature, she uses a graphing package to generate (something close to) its mathematical equivalent, and overlays it on the photograph for a new way of seeing. (Thanks, Ryan!)

Cool Garden Rooms. And Prophetic Chickens..the Garden History of Livia Drusilla

2010-08-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

The heat has broken, just today, at last. But watching my garden go yellow with fever over these past three weeks of 100+ degrees and rotisserie winds has left me ready to burrow into the cool earth and thinking of the Villa Livia, where a windowless, subterranean room adorned with a cool blue sky and eternally unwilted plants served as a refuge from the Roman summer sun.

Villa Livia is thought to be part of the dowry of the inimitable Livia Drusilla (58 BC-AD 29), wife of Octavian, mother of Tiberius, who wielded enormous though unofficial power during the Republican era. Considered the model of the Roman matron, she was given the unusual freedom to handle her own finances and became the first woman to appear on provincial coinage in 16 BC.

Fifteen kilometers north of Rome, her suburban estate offered a commanding view of the Tiber valley as well as a place of relaxed entertaining--and subtle power-broking--for a woman who was said to avoid excessive jewelery or pretentious costume and to handsew clothes for her husband the emperor even while serving as his trusted political advisor.

And she kept chickens. Famous white chickens. AND she provided the storied laurel crowns of the champions of Rome. Pliny's Natural History records the legend that on the day of Livia's marriage to Augustus an eagle flew over the garden of the villa and dropped its dinner into her lap: a white chicken holding a branch of laurel in its beak. Livia rescued the chicken, and planted the laurel. The lone fowl became a chicken farm (the villa's nickname was 'white hens') and the laurel a lush grove whose branches crowned the heads of triumphant Roman generals.

Was it the laurel's evergreenery that inspired the everblooming underground garden? Its illusory landscape covered all four arms of the soothingly cool room, depicting birds, small fruiting trees and flowering plants in simultaneous bloom. According to Gardens of Italy by Ann Laras, twenty-four species are represented, a beautiful record of desirable plants in the Roman garden c. first century B.C.: the strawberry tree, bay laurel (of course), oleander, holm oak, English oak, Cornelian cherry, myrtle, harts-tongue fern, early dog violet, crown daisy, stinking chamomile, Italian cypress, quince, stone pine, pomegranate, opium poppy, cabbage rose, and date palm. The underground garden room was discovered in 1863 and the frescoes removed in 1955 to the National Museum in Rome. The rest of Livia's landscape--a peristyle garden, a broad terrace, and perhaps hanging gardens watered by her personal connection to the aqueduct (true luxury)--is currently under excavation.

photos from Wikimedia commons.
See the white hen?

Both of Livia Drusilla's wedding day gifts were portentous. Because the laurel sprig she planted had flourished, it became customary for each Caesar to plant their own laurel at the Villa Livia after a triumph, and it was said that before the death of a prince his laurel tree was observed to wilt and wither. According to Suetonius' Lives of the Twelve Caesars, soon before the demise of Nero--Livia's great-grandson and the last of the race of Caesars--not only the laurels but the beautiful white hens gave up the ghost:

"Now the forest was dried to the very roots, and all the pullets were dead, to the very last."

Also the temple of the Caesars was struck with lightning and the heads of the statues all fell off at once. But really it was the chickens. Chickens as harbingers of apocalypse. I like that.

When there is no There there

2010-06-27T03:23:00.000-07:00

(the "gardens of William Morris" at the Red House, Bexleyheath.

Little is known of Morris' actual garden at the site.)

I've had several occasions lately to ponder what makes a historic garden 'real'. In less transient forms of art, made in the comparatively eternal (to gardens at least) mediums of paint and stone the difference between a 'real' and a 'fake' can be readily distinguished and doesn't change over time. What is done by Picasso is always Picasso. But if Picasso made a garden, and it fell into disrepair, and a hundred years later (or two or three) it was re-created, is it still a Picasso?

What would never be accepted in a painting or a sculpture must be accepted in the will-o-the-wisp world of the garden, simply because there is no other choice. If we didn't re-create historic gardens, didn't renew them, or replant them, sometimes even re-imagine them, we wouldn't have any. They go away too soon, through the insensitivity of subsequent owners or of their own accord and the will of nature to return to the wild, or as the scientist in me reminds, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, that of the ever-increasing entropy. (Thus an inevitable emphasis in garden history on garden buildings, because they stay, at least sometimes.)

(The Turkish tent at Painshill Park in Surrey has been both re-created and re-sited, its original location being now in other ownership)

But the task of the garden historian is, perhaps even more than to renew or replant or re-imagine, to re-interpret, because in the garden art as in all others there is no point but to be understood. A plant may be appreciated, even experienced, but a planting scheme can be understood, and a delicate bridge formed to the past--swaying though it may be with uncertainty--to the designer of the scheme and the owner of the house and their fashions and failings and taste and their reasons for being and planting the garden. Why make a garden? Why re-make one?

(At the Philbrook museum in my hometown of Tulsa, the nouveau riche owner once had yuccas planted in his Italianate parterres. Should they still be there?)

The difference between an homage and a forgery--a fake--is what the work is said to be. The student who paints a 'Picasso' to learn a style is simply admiring until he claims that his own hand is that of his master. The best way to keep a historic garden real is to simply be honest about what is known and what is not, and what has been changed or altered or remade.

Too often at historic properties the fact that the garden isn't completely "real" is treated as an unsavoury secret, offered up--a bit shamefacedly--by a guide only when the visitor enquires, as if in some sort of admission of guilt.

The missed opportunity is to interpret the past by celebrating its renewal, uncertain as that may be.

The Moor Park Apricot, part 1

2010-05-14T05:34:00.000-07:00

Today, I bought a Moor Park apricot for my garden.

"It was only the spring twelvemonth before Mr. Norris's death that we put in the apricot against the stable wall, which is now grown such a noble tree, and getting to such perfection, sir," addressing herself then to Dr. Grant.

"The tree thrives well, beyond a doubt, madam," replied Dr. Grant. "The soil is good; and I never pass it without regretting that the fruit should be so little worth the trouble of gathering."

"Sir, it is a Moor Park, we bought it as a Moor Park, and it cost us--that is, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but I saw the bill--and I know it cost seven shillings, and was charged as a Moor Park."

"You were imposed on, ma'am," replied Dr. Grant: "these potatoes have as much the flavour of a Moor Park apricot as the fruit from that tree. It is an insipid fruit at the best; but a good apricot is eatable, which none from my garden are."

"The truth is, ma'am," said Mrs. Grant, pretending to whisper across the table to Mrs. Norris, "that Dr. Grant hardly knows what the natural taste of our apricot is: he is scarcely ever indulged with one, for it is so valuable a fruit; with a little assistance, and ours is such a remarkably large, fair sort, that what with early tarts and preserves, my cook contrives to get them all."

(Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; engraving from Pomona Londinensis by William Hooker, 1818)

Today, I bought an apricot for my garden.
It cost $19.99, and was charged as a Moor Park.

Emily Dickinson's Herbarium

2010-05-08T20:02:00.000-07:00

My nosegays are for Captives

Dim – long expectant eyes –

Fingers denied the plucking,

Patient till Paradise –

To such, if they sh'd whisper

Of morning and the moor –

They bear no other errand,

And I, no other prayer.

I remember once telling a friend who was getting a PhD in English literature that Emily Dickinson was my favorite poet. She literally sniffed. It was the first time I realized that not everyone thought as highly of the belle of Amherst as I did, and that claiming her as a favorite apparently marked me as a bit provincial and unenlightened.

Provincial or not, all 1,789 of her poems will be read chronologically as part of The New York Botanical Garden's new Exhibit, “Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers". The NYBG are not the first to think of the close connections between Emily's poetry and the garden; she was better known in her own community as a gardener/botanist than as a poet, and there are at least a couple of books that have previously explored the same ideas (see Emily Dickinson's Gardens: A Celebration of a Poet and Gardener by Marta McDowell, and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson by Judith Farr).

The exhibit, which includes a recreation of Emily's garden (or a least the sort of garden she might have had, since firm historical information isn't available), as well as pairings of flowering plants with the poems that give them mention, will also include Emily's herbarium of over 400 plants, now in the collection of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

If you can't get to New York you can turn online the pages of the book Emily started at age fourteen, when she wrote to her friend Abiah Root (I want a friend named Abiah Root!) that "...most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here."

It's the most beautiful herbarium I've ever seen; meticulous, beautifully arranged, carefully notated in a small intense hand. I chose one of her early poems--in spite of its imperfect rhyme--to accompany this post because so many of the pressings are arranged as nosegays rather than as botanical specimens; perhaps like those Emily was wont to send along with poems to friends. Artfully placed stems and stalks seem destined to occupy a buttonhole rather than butcher's paper.

Of particular poignancy are the botanical specimens forwarded by friends to this woman who lived in virtual seclusion for much of her life: a leaf from Heidelburg castle, a fern from the Elysian fields in Greece, a stalk from the Garden of Gethsemane.

They are generally one to a page, unlike Emily's own collections, which lie at close quarters nearly--but not quite--claustrophobic, with a compression of detail that leaves one breathless but not quite faint, which is just the feeling I always get from her poetry . A sun-faded copy still sits on my bedside table, ignoring sniffs from those who know better.

Call for Applications: The 2010 ADAM Architecture Travel Scholarship

2010-05-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in the last post that my investigations of the Art Deco garden were funded by a travel grant from Robert Adam Architects (now ADAM Architecture). In 2010, for the first time, the travel scholarship is open to international applications. It provides £1500 for research and travel into a significant issue related to architecture (includes landscape architecture!) and urban design.

I can't say enough about how significant it was to my research to have the funding to visit several European countries, as well as British archives in search of "Gatsby's Garden", as I entitled my investigations...if I ever do get to publish that book on the Art Deco landscape (no publisher has picked it up as yet! call me!), it will be in large part due to their early investment in my work, and you'll not meet a nicer group of architects.

Full details at the ADAM Architecture site...the deadline is May 14th!

Man Ray in the Garden

2010-05-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

The artist Man Ray is best known as an experimental photographer but figures in garden history for his documentation, both still and film, of the innovative landscapes commissioned by Charles Vicomte de Noailles and his wife Marie-Laure. At the center of a group of avant-garde writers, poets, and painters, they commissioned two high art deco gardens, both intense and jewel-like. At Hotel Noialles in Paris, modern parterres by the brothers Andre and Paul Vera featured colorful gravels and low bedding plants bursting out of a mirrored wall in lines closely following optical ray diagrams. The Vera's drawings for the gardens exist, but Man Ray's photo (above) is the only documentation of their installed form, which differs from the original plan.

On the hills above Hyeres, their Riviera retreat, architect Robert Mallet-Stevens built Charles and Marie-Laure a cubist villa that must have shocked the traditional neighborhood surroundings, which can be seen during the approach to the house in a surrealistic short film shot by Man Ray in 1929. Narcissistic though it is (Charles and Marie-Laure are of course the stars), it provides a fascinating glimpse into the time in which the landscape was constructed, as well as into the gardens themselves as simply one more art object in a house of many, and far more valuable, others. The Countess' collecting inspired that of Yves St. Laurent, and one of the shots in the film shows a long series of sliding mesh doors in a hallway...these stored her artwork, which presumably was changed regularly throughout the house.

No wonder then, that Man Ray doesn't linger on shots of the gardens, his focus being largely his patrons. But we see the terrace with its framed views and stacked porthole planters....

...and the stepped ziggurat garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian glimpsed through windows from the house.

Guevrekian's garden was a variation on the one he had designed for the '25 expo, and the Jacques Lipchitz sculpture at the triangular site's apex rotated as had the silver sphere in his earlier jardin d'eau et de lumière. The garden in Paris is gone, but the Villa Noialles is now an arts center and open to the public. The garden has been recreated, though without the yellow tulips with which it was originally (inappropriately!) planted. It also had orange trees next the house, and the terraces seem too arid in their absence. Thanks to a travel grant from Robert Adam Architects, I visited the site in '07 as part of my study of art deco gardens.

Who will climb up these terraces, indeed. Man Ray's Les Mystères du Château de Dé was, at 27 minutes, his longest film. You can watch it on vimeo.

Landscapes of the 1950s

2010-03-05T08:01:00.000-08:00

Also, I'll be speaking about 'atomic gardens' at a study day on landscapes of the 1950s to be held at my alma mater, the University of Bristol on April 24. I'd love to meet my UK readers so register soon by sending an email to the conference organizer, Dr Katie Campbell, at katie@gardenhistoryinstitute.co.uk.

Here's the brief from the website of the Institute for Garden and Landscape History:

This study day takes a cross cultural look at Britain in the 1950s to see if the decade produced a unique and distinctive style. The title recalls a response to the Skylon, the futurisitic sculpture that epitomised the 1951 Festival of Britain; predictably, the phrase was soon applied to the nation itself. While America emerged from the Second World War as 'the Affluent Society', Britain had to buckle down to a period of ‘reconstruction and regeneration’. It was the era of milk bars and dance halls, slacks and cigarettes, spies and sputnik, cocktails and carnivals; it saw the rise of the Cold War and the death of the Debutante. The Festival of Britain, followed two years later by the Coronation gave rise to a self-conscious patriotism and by 1957 Harold Macmillan could finally assure his people, ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ Examining key figures in visual arts, architecture and garden design we will attempt to tease out preoccupations, themes and motifs to determine if there really is a 50s style, and if so, what it looked like.

[photo is the 'Skylon' installation from the 1951 Festival of Britain]

2010 Garden History Society Essay Prize

2010-03-05T07:45:00.000-08:00

The essay prize of the Garden History Society was established to encourage vibrant, scholarly research in the field of garden history. It is open to any student registered in a bona fide university or institute of higher education, or any student who has graduated from such an institute in the past twelve months.

Submissions must be 5000–6000 words and the only restriction on subject matter is that it must be of relevance to garden history. Deadline for the 2010 competition is April 30.

The prize includes a cheque for £250 (to be awarded at the GHS Annual Summer Garden Party), free membership of the society for a year and consideration for publication in the peer-reviewed, scholarly journal Garden History.

Note that the prize is not restricted to UK citizens or residents. Past winners include yours truly...full information (including rules and entry forms) at the GHS website!

The Gardens of Bakhchisaray Palace and the Fountain of Tears, Crimea

2010-03-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

My native land abandoned long,

I sought this realm of love and song.

Through Bakchesaria's palace wandered,

Upon its vanished greatness pondered;

All silent now those spacious halls,

And courts deserted, once so gay

With feasters thronged within their walls,

Carousing after battle fray.

Even now each desolated room

And ruined garden luxury breathes,

The fountains play, the roses bloom,

The vine unnoticed twines its wreaths,

Gold glistens, shrubs exhale perfume.

The shattered casements still are there.

Within which once, in days gone by,

Their beads of amber chose the fair,

And heaved the unregarded sigh;

The cemetery there I found,

Of conquering khans the last abode,

Columns with marble turbans crowned

Their resting-place the traveller showed,

And seemed to speak fate's stern decree,

"As they are now such all shall be!"

Alexander Pushkin

Bakhchisaray, which literally means palace in a garden, was the capital of the Crimean Khanate from the early 16th century until it was annexed by Russia in 1783. One of few images of its antique gardens is a plate depicting tower-tall arbors (top), from "Meyer's Universum", a compendium of the world published by Carl Joseph Meyer in 1860. The palace was originally built by Mengli Giray in the early 16th century and functioned as both the residence of the Tatar Khans and the administrative headquarters of the Khanate, evolving over time into a complex of buildings and garden courtyards.

In one still stands the "Fountain of Tears" (c. 1763), immortalized by Puskin in his 1824 poem The Fountain of Bakhchisarai, but attached even prior to the poet's visit with romantic tales of a Khan in love with a captured maid and the eternally weeping fountain he commissioned as a memorial upon her death. Pushkin makes the heroine a devout Polish girl, sitting aloof from the pleasures of the harem and its garden.

Though little known in the West, the story and its setting are beloved in Russia, inspiring in addition to the painting by Karl Briullov a ballet, an opera, and film based on Pushkin's tale. Bakhchisaray is today a museum of Crimean Tatar history and decorative arts.

Still do the gurgling waters pour

Their streams dispensing sadness round,

As mothers weep for sons no more,

In never-ending sorrows drowned.

In morn fair maids, (and twilight late,)

Roam where this monument appears,

And pitying poor Maria's fate

Entitle it the FOUNT OF TEARS!

Roundhay Garden Scene, 1888

2010-02-13T09:59:00.000-08:00

Did you know the earliest surviving motion picture takes place in a garden? No, nor did I!

All of 2.11 seconds long (when viewed at modern frame-rates), the brief garden promenade was shot by French inventor Louis Le Prince in 1888, using a single lens camera and George Eastman's paper film, several years before competing inventors such as Thomas Edison ( 1891) and Auguste and Louis Lumière (1892) produced their own moving pictures.

It features Louis' son Adolphe as well his parents-in-law Joseph and Sarah Whitley, whose home Oakwood Grange in Roundhay (Leeds), Yorkshire was the site of the historic scene.

Regrettably, its brevity allows little insight into the landscape where it was filmed, and Oakwood Grange was demolished in 1972 to make way for a housing estate. So sad to have lasted so long into the modern era before it was felled...I am doing some research on an eighteenth century gardener and was disappointed to find that his home had lasted until the 1960s, only to fall victim to urban re-development before anyone knew to care who had inhabited it.

Updates on Bellwood Hall, Upson County, Georgia

2010-02-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

Southern historians are a nice group of people...I've been the recipient of several updates and new information on Bellwood, the Georgia plantation I discussed some time ago in a series of posts (see the swept yard, the gazebo, the house and its axis, the wilderness),

First, from Mary Alnutt, who lives nearby, came information on the house's demise and this photo (near the house's location but uncertainly connected to it). The Hall was destroyed by fire sometime in the late 1800s according to Loula Kendall Rogers, daughter of the physician who built Bellwood, who wrote in a volume of poetry she published: "Just at the close of our fall term at Gordon Institute, as twilight shades enshrouded the earth, there came the sad tidings that Bellwood, the beautiful home of my childhood, was destroyed by fire."

Mary let me know that the little house in front of Bellwood, which I speculated may have been slave quarters, was actually Dr. Kendall's medical office.

David Paterson sent this 1858 photograph of the house, which as he noted, is in contrast to the idealized portrait at the top of the post, and which was also painted by Loula of her beloved home. It is inscribed on the back: ""Bellwood Upson Co. Ga. The old Kendall Home. A true type of the old Southern Plantation house. The fence was only put up until a new one was built, and the carriage drive improved, like the pastel picture." [added underneath in the shakier handwriting of old age:] "This Picture was taken when I was a child. Loula Kendall. 1850."

David asked if I knew anything about the 'Christmas tree' looking racks in the front yard near the house, and I confess I don't. Any ideas from you native Southerners? (click on the photo for an enlarged view...you can just see the Kendalls standing on the front porch)

Mary Nowell, who recently presented extensive research on Loula Kendall Rogers to the Upson County Historical Society, also got in touch with Bellwood's part in the Civil War: "Wilson’s Raiders came to...the Kendall home, Bellwood Hall, for 3 days. Loula was there along with her mother, Louisa and grandmother, Winifred Lane Rogers. They hid their supplies, horses and mules. The raiders found it all and they took it all. One of the raiders pointed a pistol at Loula’s chest and demanded even more."

Loula gave him her jewelry, but asked that they preserve the Hall, where she remembered her childhood as 'one long summertime'. It survived the war, as did Loula's legacy: 21,000 items of family and local history are now in the Special Collections Department at Emory University.

Garden History Image of the Week: Garden of Caterpillars by Ernst Kreidolf

2010-01-04T06:20:00.000-08:00

from the online exhibition of 'Creepy-Crawlies' at Princeton University's Cotsen Children's Library:

"This is the caterpillar garden of Herr Hermelin, the ghostly white figure in the lower left-hand corner. He visits the pen every morning before breakfast, so he can admire their gorgeous coloration, stroke their backs, and make sure that each of his beauties is getting its favorite vegetation and is feeding well."

Kreidolf (1863-1956) was one of the most important Art Nouveau book illustrators in the German-speaking world. The anthropomorphized plants and animals inhabiting the pages of his Sommervogel are among his most haunting creations."

Forest of Angels

2009-12-25T06:04:00.000-08:00

A heavenly landscape for this day of angels...Charles Voysey's "Angelic Forest", c. 1927.

Merry Christmas to all!

Archives of American Gardens at Flickr

2009-12-18T18:58:00.000-08:00

Impossibly lovely images from the Archives of American Gardens. A small selection of their 8000 images, including these historic glass lantern slides from the 1920s and 1930s, is now online at flickr. The collection also forms the basis of the book The Golden Age of American Gardens: Proud Owners * Private Estates 1890-1940 by Mac Griswold and Eleanor Weller.

The second image is of Arcady, formerly in Santa Barbara but now lost to garden history, and my namesake.

The WaterLandscape of Rouen in 1525

2009-12-16T15:10:00.000-08:00

Most of us (most of us reading this blog, anyway) live in a time and place where the flow of clean water on demand--for washing, drinking, sewage--is taken for granted. It's hard to imagine access to water being limited to stale cisterns and brackish wells (with no provision for sewage at all), but it explains why the first flow of acqueductal water into a sixteenth century city was greeted with processions of dignitaries, banners, blessings, and prayers of thanksgiving. And why, in 1525, Jacques Le Lieur felt compelled to record the entire course of that water through the city of Rouen in a seventeen foot long panoramic watercolor.

It ran past cathedrals and gardens, through mills and fountains, and Le Lieur drafted them all, creating a compelling record not just of the watercourse but of the city surrounding it, including its landscape, in his Livre des Fontaines, images of most of which are online at the library of Rouen.

Le Lieur's 'book' is the only record of its kind from the period, in France or elsewhere, and is still studied as an early example of urban planning and public hydraulics. You can buy a copy of Livre des Fontaines (in French) here.

For the Garden Historian who has Almost Everything

2009-12-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

And if like me your favorite garden historian doesn't have quite everything (but is rich, rich in friends!), then perhaps something south in price from the lovely Porter telescope is appropriate. (Disclaimer: I have no connection to any of these purveyors, so nothing to gain)

Sundial made from recycled cups from the UK's Save-a-Cup scheme, at the gardenboutique (garden clock also available)

Handcrafted modernist birdhouses by the Austrian firm raumhochrosen, representing twentieth century buildings in their home state of Vorarlberg

Garden spheres from Los Angeles nursery Pot-ted

c. 1890 French terracotta edging tiles from thethompsonstudio

1820s oak garden gate, just £140 at salvo uk

Beautiful copper trowel (personalizable!) at implementations (also uk, but shippable)

silver spoon garden markers by buttermilkhollow at etsy (or DIY!)

c. 1715Vitruvius Britannicus garden plans from leggeprints. This is Belton, Lincolnshire, listed at $400.

And don't forget to include a membership in the Garden History Society or the Folly Fellowship or a subscription to Historic Gardens Review...

For the Garden Historian who has everything...

2009-12-07T21:25:00.000-08:00

...the Porter Garden Telescope. Russell Porter was an artist, engineer, and amateur astronomer/telescope maker, and in the 1920s in Springfield, Vermont he made some number (at least 53, according to the highest serial number found, but the exact count is unknown) of what must surely be the most beautiful telescope ever manufactured, designed specifically for the garden. Only 14 are known to survive, one in the Smithsonian museum.

Porter combined all he knew of art and science in an art nouveau style masterpiece made like an unfurling flower with a mirror at its heart. The bronze housing was designed to remain outside, mounted on a plinth like a traditional garden sundial (if oriented correctly it could in fact operate as one) and the optical components were removable, to be used for viewing biplanes and other heavenly apparitions if the weather was fair and kept safely inside if not.

An original Porter sold for $18,000 at auction in 2007. It was an absolute steal...the reproduction being manufactured by Telescopes of Vermont according to specifications in Porter's original patent, sells for $59,000.

[Period images are from stellafane, the home of Springfield Vermont Astronomy, which owns several of the original Porters. They are seeking the watercolor (second image above), which was stolen from their collection. Modern photos are from Edmund optics, who provide the optical components for the reproduction telescope. Images of one of the original garden telescopes can be seen at a fansite here]

Landscapes of George Tanaka

2009-11-28T19:02:00.000-08:00

George Tanaka (1912-1982), born in Vancouver to Japanese parents, was largely self-taught. He apprenticed with a Nisei gardener, and then studied architecture and landscape architecture on his own, reading books and periodicals in the public library, and eventually developing a unique blend of his oriental heritage with the raw naturalism of the Canadian landscape. In a speech to students and faculty of Humber College, Toronto in 1981, Tanaka said: "the materials of Nature - the rocks, the stones, the trees, the plants, the water and the earth itself - are used as the 'Design-Tools' by which the landscape-forms take shape. The use of Tension in design as between diverse elements: the hard element against the soft; the rugged rock against the flowing curve of a pathway, for example, gives the design a spirit of tension and an aesthetic quality. Whatever the qualification of the design problem, the results are to find a happy Balance and Harmony in all of the elements. Nothing is left to casual chance or to irresponsible placement."

"All of the hopes and dreams, and even the fears, that played a part in my total experience, has influenced me."

from the special collections at the University of Guelph; repository of the archives of Canadian landscape architects.

Garden History Quote of the Week - Georgia O'Keefe on Flowers

2009-11-18T15:23:00.000-08:00

"Everyone has many associations with a flower--the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower--lean forward to smell it--maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking--or give it to someone to please them. Still--in a way--nobody sees a flower--really--it is so small--we haven't time--and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.

So I said to myself--I'll paint what I see--what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it--I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers."

Patrick Dougherty's Stickworks

2009-11-17T12:18:00.000-08:00

Landscape artist Patrick Dougherty has a new photographic catalogue of his extraordinary creations, available on his website. I was going to put this on my Christmas list, but I just couldn't wait so I've already ordered it...

One of his latest installations is the "Summer Palace", above, at the Morris Aboretum of the University of Pennsylvania. They blogged the process of its creation, documenting the growth of the 25 foot high structure from thousands of sticks.

"Dougherty arrives at the site of each new installation with no preconceptions as to what he will create. Instead, using locally gathered natural materials, he draws inspiration from the surrounding environment to design a large-scale structure that when completed, may remind visitors of a nest, cocoon or even a fairy tale dwelling. Each of his sculptures is designed and executed without the use of nails or other supportive hardware, and the result is a creation that may resemble something artful that was shaped by a powerful wind that swept across the landscape."

Garden History Image of the Week

2009-11-16T05:30:00.000-08:00

found at the blog takebigbites

Garden History Image of the Week: Jardin Botanico, Asuncion, Paraguay

2009-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

Found while flea-marketing with my sister...this c. 1920s image of the rose garden at the Botanical garden of Asuncion. On the back it reads, "This is the real beauty spot of Paraguay. Our schoolchildren often go here for pictures. The garden is in the care of a German scientist."

According to a biography at the website of the Ibero-American Institute, Dr. C. Fiebrig (1869-1951) was offered two botanical jobs in 1910, "a proposal to work in the German Colonial Office for Eastern Africa and the offer of a chair in Paraguay at the National College and School of Medicine. Fiebrig, who already lived since 1907 in San Bernardino, Paraguay, decided to accept the post offered him the Paraguayan government [because] this offer also included the proposal of then President, Dr. Manuel Franco, to create a botanical garden."

Created from over 600 ha of the former estate of dictator Francisco Solano Lopez on the outskirts of Asuncion , the garden opened in 1914 and Fiebrig remained its director until xenophobic fears forced him out of the country in 1936. "The Botanical Garden not only had a port near the Paraná River, but also had its own train station with a network of 60 km of well maintained roads and a large swimming pool. Gradually Fiebrig also created a zoo, a herbarium, a Botanical Museum, and finally, the Cotton Institute. The latter contributed essentially to finance the entire complex."

45 plant species and 18 animal species bear the eponym 'fiebrigii' in honor of the botanist, but his masterwork, a 2700-page manuscript on the botanical ecology of the South American continent, languishes unpublished in his native Germany, at Berlin's Ibero-American Institute. You can still see his garden, though.

(above is the most recognizable of the species that bear his name, the cactus Rebutia fiebrigii)

I Could Do This! Copper Pavers and Silver Orbs in the Pond

2009-09-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

Inspired by two other installations at the Chatsworth exhibit/sale for the uber rich...

Copper pavers: I couldn't afford solid copper but I'm thinking a piece of copper sheeting over standard concrete pavers? Stainless steel or Cor-ten would also be nice; the liquid adhesives designed for concrete should work well to make the attachment. Great for the paths in the newly installed (but still unfinished!) potager.

Silver orbs in the pond: these are hand-polished stainless steel (hollow, obviously). Given that similar orbs (machine-polished) are readily available from on-line purveyors (google 'silver garden globes'), I wonder at bit at its inclusion in the auction...I suppose the placement of the orbs counts as the art? Still, lovely for a party and I think I can rely on my own artistry to place them in the garden pond-that-used-to-be-a-buffalo-wallow, now brim-full with early fall rains.

The original works are 'Narcissus Garden' by Yayoi Kusama and 'Cuprux' by Carl Andre.

UPDATE: Reader Jamie has sent a helpful comment to this post, which I've added below...the information on the aural and interactive qualities of the installation is especially enlightening. Thanks, Jamie!

"Yayoi Kusama did an installation of thousands of those silvery balls floating on the good-sized indoor lake within the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia a few years ago.

As well as being lovely to look at, they made the most pleasant, deepish-hollow sound as they gently knocked together. And, best of all, all the children visiting had wonderful fun pushing the balls around. The Queensland gallery tries very hard to make itself as child-friendly as possible and allows kids the chance to touch things when it won't do any harm. It was a delightful scene.

We bought one of the balls while at the gallery and it sits in a stainless steel bowl filled with water in our garden, still in very good condition after all these years. Every time I see our little silver ball I think of that charming installation."

Garden History Image of the Week: New view of Chatsworth

2009-09-28T09:25:00.000-07:00

Joseph Paxton's 1844 'Emperor' Fountain at Chatsworth as seen by '225.5º ARC X 5' by Bernar Venet. Part of "Beyond Limits", a Sotheby's selling exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture currently installed on the grounds. Get your bid in by November 15, if you're so inclined.

The Emperor fountain, with a maximum height of 296 feet, is entirely ego-powered, having been commissioned by the Duke of Devonshire in 1843 to surpass the fountains of Peterhof in anticipation of the impending visit of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. The work, including digging an eight-acre reservoir 110 meters above the house to supply the water under gravity-pressure, proceeded even at night under the light of flares and the project was completed in just six months. Alas, the Tsar never came.

But the water pressure was used to provide Chatsworth's electricity from 1893 to 1936, and after the installation of a new turbine in 1988 currently produces about a third of house's daily requirements; a thoroughly modern use of what was once just a garden fancy. I'm wondering if any other gardens have put their historic hydraulics to such a use...if you know of one, get in touch!

Arne Quinze's Cityscape, Brussels, 2008

2009-09-24T09:24:00.001-07:00

Thanks to reader p.Ol Ghekiere for pointing out that the pavilion previously featured in the posting on nests was not in fact in Berlin, but in Brussels; a work by the Belgian artist Arne Quinze.

The temporary installation, entitled Cityscape, stood for a year (2008) in Brussels' luxury district, before it was dismantled and the wood recycled.

According to the artist, Arne Quinze: 'CITYSCAPE resembles a frozen movement; speed caught in time...If you look at it from a distance, pure movement seems to keep the volatile structure in the air. Sunrays play with the wooden beams; a game of light and shade creates ever-changing patterns. Its immense size - 40 meter long and 25 meter wide - absorbs you. "

Fascinating views of the nest-like construction process are from the artists' website.

Garden History Image of the Week...Le Jardin Japonais

2009-09-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

To add to the previously posted history of Japanese dish gardens, this lovely image by Icart published in the French magazine L'Illustration in 1932.

El Jardin Borda, Cuernavaca, Mexico, c. 1908

2009-09-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from Viva Mexico!, by Charles Macomb Flandrau, 1908:

"Early in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. By his fortunate mining venture at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas...he made a fortune of forty million pesos. One of these millions he spent in building a church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at Cuernavaca."

"It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, and even it it were not one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French passion for formalizing the landscape--for putting Nature into a pretty strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed."

"The situation, the flora...the walls, the fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds...all combine to give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican, but French only in a...remote manner..."

"It hangs precipitously on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad it is not), and the dense, southern trees--mangoes and sapotes and Indian laurel--with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an opaque and somber canopy...In its impermeable shade there are long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence--arbors of roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play and splash."

"In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal gardens in the United States--finer than the Borda ever was. Under the pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy--their careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least another century. If they have everything that Joseph's garden lacks, they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery...[of the] Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda is tiny, but history has strolled in them both and they both seem to have beautiful, secret sorrows."

El Jardin Borda, used by the Emporer Maximilian as a summer home during his short and ridiculous reign in the 1860s, once hosted Austrian, French, and Mexican nobility who went rowing in the moonlight on its artificial lake.

Now taken over by the state and used as an outdoor theatre and market, a 1987 renovation seems to have vanquished the overgrown atmosphere that captivated Charles Macomb Flandrau.

Flandrau was a wealthy and well-traveled eldest son of fine family, an acquaintance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a celebrity already by age 26 for his Harvard Episodes (detailing the escapades of privileged young men such as himself within the ivied walls) before he went south to visit his brother's coffee plantation and write Viva Mexico. His mention of American formal gardens having the 'color of wealth' is undoubtedly a reference to the Italianate landscapes being created up and down the East Coast by the noveau riche of the American Country House era, with whom he was well acquainted.

A series of 1904 photographs by C.B. Waite in the Rene D`Harnoncourt Photograph Collection at the University of Texas captures the Mexico Flandrau writes of, though unfortunately at low resolution, including the two small photos of the Borda garden as was, below.

Eric Ravilious' Garden for Wedgwood

2009-08-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

I've admired the work of British illustrator Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), but only recently became aware that he designed two garden-based series of china for Wedgwood, who were trying to be more hip and with-it by using Britain's most popular illustrator. Both designs feature his characteristic style of black and white line drawings with monochrome washes of color, and unusually, show real people relaxing in a garden animated by tools. It's a stark difference from the idealized gardens of most decorative arts portrayals in which neither workers nor their implements are visible, and the gardens apparently trim and weed themselves.

Garden Implements (1939) was a lemonade set featuring barrels of gardening tools, watering cans, a wheel barrow, a beehive, a greenhouse with lettuces, even a compost bin. There was also a limited edition of matching fabric, which has become extremely rare.

"He insinuated a wry innocence, a sense of slight strangeness that characterises all of his work. In his watercolours he brought his 'innocent eye' to English rural subjects, bending rules so to speak to produce delicate fantasies out of well known entities such as greenhouses and watering cans."

[Photos and quote from the British Council Collection and meg-andrews.]

Ravilious was a student of Paul Nash, who produced a set of woodcuts to illustrate Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus (he of the Quincunx, previously blogged). Nash's "Paradise Garden" (1928) is the first photo below, and its close relative, Ravilious' "May" (1925) is the second.

The genealogy continues with the work of contemporary printmaker Angie Lewin, who credits Ravilious both stylistically and literally in her works: 'Moonlit Cup' features the cup and saucer from Ravilious' Garden pattern.

I bought some notecards by Angie when I was last in the UK and have been doling them out carefully (only the best of friends...) until I can get more on my next visit.

Florence Yoch and the gardens of Gone with the Wind

2009-08-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

Another hometown connection has been prominent lately...I've been reading Landscaping the American Dream: The Gardens and Film Sets of Florence Yoch : 1890-1972, which was written by Florence's nephew James Yoch, who is the only other garden historian I know of from my home state. We chattered on last year at a charity dinner; one meets so few fellow garden historians that there is always too much to say and too little time, and really all that is known about Florence Yoch is contained in his book.

Working in Pasadena and West L.A. in the 1920s and 1930s, Florence designed the landscape of film mogul David O. Selznick's home as well the landscapes of some of his greatest movies, most prominently the garden setting of Tara in Gone with the Wind (1939). I'd never thought about its landscape before knowing she designed it, which perhaps speaks to how well she captured the blend of rusticity and refinement that characterized the great country houses of the American south. Nothing jars; the design is so appropriate that it disappears.

Like all of her movie gardens, the landscape of Tara was created on a studio set in Hollywood, not on location. Florence went to Georgia in preparation, to study its native plants, and then worked "to take California trees, shrubs and vines and do tricks with them so as to make passable likenesses to Georgia trees, shrubs and vines". The budget for the garden installation was $16,000, an astonishing sum for the final years of the Great Depression.

She also created the desert oasis of Algiers in The Garden of Allah (1927)--traveling to North African to record authentic details like 'huge blue agave silhouetted against sand wash'-- the farmlands of China for The Good Earth (1927), and produced 10,000 daffoldils in simultaneous bloom in a fictitious Welsh forest for How Green Was My Valley.

Her use of assymmetrical masses of plant material to frame a scene as well as her attention to changes of level in the ground plane was brilliant in both her movie sets and her real-life landscape designs.

To even her vision of Tara, though, I prefer her landscapes for the 1936 version of Romeo and Juliet: Italianate ruins in a meadow outside Verona, the cypress adorned cemetery of the final tragic moments, and the enclosed garden of the Capulets where the balcony scene speaks its wherefores.

Here, she wisely deviated from the expected garden of clipped and formal historic proportions and instead turned to the balanced assymetry that was her special talent, using a pair of unmatched canals and 'including a single urn, a statue, and a freestanding column [to] suggest the singularity of the lovers'.

When director George Cukor was asked if he gave Florence directions for the landscape designs, he sniffed 'Of course not.'

I was unable to find good photos of these sets, though they're included in the book, so I recommend you curl up and watch the movie this weekend, as I will be. Have a lovely one.

P.S. Do you have any favorite movie gardens? I'd love to hear about them....

Cherokees at Wilton House and garden, 1762

2009-07-14T13:19:00.000-07:00

Those of you who know me personally may be surprised that I haven't blogged much about Wilton, being that it usually looms large in my garden history conversations.

The first garden history essay I ever wrote was about the seventeenth century gardens at Wilton House, it became my first publication in the field and my latest article, just out in the current issue of Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, revisits Wilton and its designer once again. I can hardly bear to pass through Salisbury on the train without stopping, drawn back to the landscape where Philip Sidney wrote his Arcadia and his sister Mary welcomed that man Shakespeare, where Isaac de Caus made a fountain of three rainbows and carried out Inigo Jones' noble remodeling scheme, and where in 1736 Robert Morris and the 9th Earl, the architect earl, made the Palladian Bridge that remains the best feature of the park, its other glories being long since gone.

I know Wilton's history rather well. So I was surprised to discover a new bit of information via my own home-town and its wonderful Gilcrease Museum, home to the world's most comprehensive collection of art and artifacts of the American West, including those of Native Americans.

It seems that in 1762, three Cherokees visited the gardens of Wilton House.

They were Stalking Turkey, Pouting Pidgeon and Mankiller, and they had come to London to discuss the prospects for a lasting peace with King George III in the company of one Lt. Henry Timberlake, whose memoirs provide the only account of the visit. They had their portraits painted by Reynolds and Parsons (the portraits are at the Gilcrease), visited the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, and received a whirlwind tour about the country, with Wilton House as one of the stops. Timberlake's account is sparse:

We stopped at Exeter, where the Indians were shewed the cathedral, but, contrary to my expectation, were as little struck as if they had been natives of the place.

They were much better pleased the next day with Lord Pembroke's seat at Wilton, till they saw the state of Hercules with his club uplifted, which they thought so dreadful that they begged immediately to be gone.

The Hercules would have been the impressive specimen above, a 'colossal' which is engraved in James Kennedy's 1768 Description of the Antiquities and Curiosities in Wilton House. According to James it was in the Great Hall at the time, not the garden, but the Cherokee guests would most certainly have been taken there as all visitors were, something in the manner of the 1776 engraving below.

Next time I am at Wilton, crossing the Palladian bridge, I'll imagine them there.

[Lithograph of the three Cherokees, 1762, From the collection of Gilcrease Museum, GM 3576.429]

If you're in the area of the Gilcrease, an exhibit about the delegation runs through the end of the year.

Toronto Gardens?

2009-06-18T11:04:00.001-07:00

Just flagging up that I'll be in Toronto in a couple of weeks for a conference...any garden suggestions? I'll make sure to visit the music garden (above) designed by Julie Moir Messervy in conjuction with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, but would love to hear of others my readers could recommend.

I could do this! Wood Slice Mosaic Paving

2009-06-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Simply set in sand at the Portland Flower Show earlier this year. Originally observed and photographed by katyelliot; found via materialicious.

Japanese Dish Gardens

2009-06-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

[Meiji era woodblock print of a dish garden from Fuji Arts ]

A comment by reader chookie on the post of the Kingsnorth garden in miniature sparked a search for information on Japanese dish gardens, a variant of the bonsai for which there was a minor mania in early twentieth century America. Their popularity was likely due to the Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was the first exposure of many Americans to Japanese art and architecture, and created a sensation that influenced the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Instructions for Japanese dish gardens were printed in newpapers and magazines, and some can be found online. My favorite is the advice from a 1914 article in the NYT, reproduced above.

The origins of the dish garden are obscure, at least in English-language documentation, but I think the c. 1848 scenes I posted some time ago as bonsai would more accurately be dish gardens, since they include a complete tableau rather than simply a specimen tree.

A 1921 House Beautiful article by Marion Brownfield notes that "celebrated Japanese artists have designed prints especially to be copied for these toy gardens, and that the making of them is an artistic hobby, equally popular with the gentle upper-class ladies of Tokyo, great statesmen, poets, and writers"

And she elaborates on the use of snow scenes: "White powder is sometimes used for a snow scene, as snow-capped Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of Japan, is a favorite scene to carry out in a Japanese landscape garden – large or small. "

Also available online is a 1920 article from American Forestry, which asserts that the origin of the dish garden was as a model for landscape architects: "For several centuries the leading landscape gardeners of Japan have made miniature models of their work so their customers might see how the proposed gardens would look; very much in the same way an American architect will make a prospective drawing of a house, except in this case the garden is made perfect in every detail, except that it is in miniature. "

"For a number of years an annual contest or exhibit of these toy gardens has been held in the city of Kioto, at which the leading landscape gardeners of Japan exhibit their work. A great demand has grown up among the tourists who visit the land of the cherry blossom for copies of these miniature gardens to take back with them to America. In response to this growing trade demand, one of the large Japanese nurseries has opened a branch near New York City, where one of their expert garden designers devotes his entire time in constructing miniature gardens for the American public."

Thus the New York Times article; for those who couldn't afford the purchase! The grainy pictures included with the American Forestry article (below) may be examples from such a Japanese nursery of miniatures.

(more info in an 1892 article in the Atlantic Monthly, courtesy of Google Books)

Garden History Quote of the Week

2009-06-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

"Democrats favored the formal European approach while Republicans opted for the picturesque English style."

from a discussion of the highly politicized process of selecting a design for Central Park, as described in Witold Rybczynski's "A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century".

Ah, for a time when political parties argued over preferred landscape styles....

And the outcome?

"The six Republicans, together with the reform Democrat Andrew Green, all cast their votes for the same project: Greensward.

Vaux and Olmsted had won."

[vintage postcard images of Central Park from my files; original source unknown]

The Viele Map

2009-05-28T12:07:00.001-07:00

"In connection with this brief account of the origin of the Central Park, it seems appropriate here to notice the topographical atlas of the city of New York, prepared under the direction of General Egbert L. Viele, exhibiting the elevations and depressions of the island and the old water-courses. This map was first exhibited and described in a paper read by Mr. Viele before the Sanitary Association of the city in 1859. He gave a rapid account of many small streams which formerly existed in the lower part of Manhattan Island, but which had been filled up as the city grew. Many of these streams had produced swampy places, and he declared that five of the little parks in the city—St. John's, Washington, Tomp- kins, Madison, and Gramercy—were located entirely or in part in swamps created by these streams. Some of the streams which ran through Central Park have been utilized or smothered."

I'm always interested in things just off the center....small towns outside of big ones, second-place entries, moons, also-rans. In the story of Central Park, the also-ran was Egbert Ludovicus Viele (1825-1902), whose entry in the design contest lost out to that of Olmsted and Vaux. Such a rosey-blowsy name sits uncomfortably on an old Civil War general who was close to Abraham Lincoln (read his remembrances of Lincoln here); an engineer who created the "Sanitary & Topographical Map of the City and Island of New York", now known simply as the Viele map. As in "I've got water on my site, get me a copy of the Viele map!" which according to the New York Times has been heard at the Central Library. From a patron wearing hip waders.

Viele's map is a beautiful document, highly detailed, fancifully colored, 'long as a Buick' according to one admirer, and still consulted in engineer's offices across Manhattan. According to a document by a colleague on deposit at the New York Public Library, Viele constructed the map from older pre-development maps and his own surveys and overlaid it with the city's current streets; gathering the watercourse information soon before it would have been lost forever under the new city fabric of bricks and mortar.

"In essence, the map shows Manhattan as the watery idyll it once was. On the map, Minetta Stream runs under Washington Square. Uptown, near First Avenue and 103rd Street, water pools and collects in a large pond. A creek zigzags under the intersection of Broadway and 25th Street." (Stephen Kurutz, NYT)

Viele made the map out of concern for proper sanitary practices, having seen so many die in the War for its want and believing, as most did at the time, that "nearly one half the deaths occurring on the earth are caused by fevers in different forms, and that the principal cause of fever is a humid miasmatic state of the atmosphere, produced by the presence of an excess of moisture in the ground from which poisonous exhalations continually arise, vitiating the purer air." He may have been wrong about the miasmas, but proper drainage did in fact eliminate stagnant breeding sites for the mosquitoes and bacteria that we now know caused many nineteenth century deaths.

Modern retellings of the complex and twisting route to the construction of Central Park invariably cast Olmsted in heroic halo, with Viele as mustachioed villian (he eventually sues, claiming that Olmsted and Vaux plagiarized some of his own ideas). But his map, delicate in pink and green with designations of Marsh and Meadow, humanizes him, and New York's structural engineers continue to bless his name.

Above images are from the David Rumsey map collection; there is also a version at the New York Public Library site. The map is accessible from Google Earth, "allowing anyone with free time on their hands to figure out whether or not their apartment is built over what used to be a fetid marsh", as seen at ecotone projects.

Garden History image of the week...Kingsnorth Gardens, Folkestone in miniature

2009-05-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

From the Science and Society Photographic Archives, originally published in the Daily Herald in the 1950s:

‘Mr and Mrs Grace of Kingsnorth Gardens, Folkestone have made a model of Kingsnorth Gardens, one of Folkestone's main beauty spots, which is just opposite their house. They have faithfully reproduced the gardens in miniature - complete to the smallest detail, including tiny trees, curving paths, fences, gates, lawns and even tiny fountains which actually play.'

I actually think this is a lovely idea...Versailles, anyone?

Garden History image of the week...Victorian plant markers

2009-05-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

From a sale of Victoriana (including some garden items) by Simon Chorley auctioneers. I must start saying that my plants were 'found in Highnam wood'.

Anne Roberts, Feir Mill Designs

2009-05-14T08:53:00.001-07:00

A modern garden artist who worked in the tradition of Thomas Wright until her recent death was Canadian Anne Roberts, whose Toronto design studio Feir Mill created summerhouses, pavilions, temples, gazebos and distinctive architectural pieces from freshly gathered timbers in the 'rustic tradition' for a client list that included Woody Allen, Martha Stewart, and Steve Jobs.

Unlike Wright, who designed for woodland glade and rocky outcrop (and created them where they did not naturally exist), Anne's work settles comfortably into flat open spaces.

Ontario, like my own native Oklahoma, is prairie land.

Thomas Wright, Arbours and Grottos

2009-05-06T11:23:00.000-07:00

I've just walked back from the library with my latest treasure.

One of the benefits of working for a university is the ability to get almost anything through interlibrary loan, and after a bit of effort, my wonderful librarians have obtained a copy of Thomas Wright's "Arbours and Grottos" for me. The facsimile, as only a few copies of the original are known to exist. If you have deep pockets, vol.1 "Arbours" is available at Ursus books for $7,500, which is also one of the only on-line sources for its images. Even the facsimile version has become expensive enough that many libraries won't loan it out. If you happen to see one at a boot-sale, snap it up.

Considered one of the first 'pattern-books' for garden landscapes, Wright's "Arbours and Grottos" shows constructs in an ornamental rustic style we now tend to associate with the Victorian period, though he wrote in 1755. And his own title for the work was much more grand; it was a 'Universal Architecture'.

Wright wasn't just being decorative. His utilization of rough wood elements was an embodiment of the Vitruvian principle that architecture is an imitation of nature--a return to the tree trunks from which stone columns were derived, an attempt at the re-integration of the built environment with its natural roots that architects still seek to achieve. Modern eco-architects like to think they're doing something new.

So do physicists, and Wright was both. Much like super-string theorists today, Wright wanted to develop an integrated and orderly theory of the universe. Unlike them, he expressed his ideas in landscapes with celestial references in addition to writing "Universal Vicissitudes of the Seasons" (1737), "Synopsis of the Universe, or the visible World Epitomized" (1742), and "An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe" (1750) in which he posited the first theory of the Milky Way.

Wright continues to be far better known as an astronomer and mathematician than as a designer, and his landscapes survive only in remnants: at Halswell House in Somerset, ruined grottos are extant (and being preserved), but a Druid House similar to those in the 'Arbours' volume lasted through the centuries only to be felled for its wood in the 1950s.

Wright's design for a garden barge, intended so that Frederick Prince of Wales could travel the Thames in floating sylvan style, was alas never built.

(bigger image available at the Columbia Library Special Collections site)

The first shall be last and the last shall be first,

2009-05-04T17:21:00.001-07:00

and the winner of the Garden Bench giveaway is one Long Haul Trucker, who sent in a comment a mere 2.5 hours before the contest ended! That's randominity for you...congratulations LHT, and I'll be in touch.

Thanks to everyone who entered, and most especially those of you who 'delurked'. The pleasure of the contest for me was seeing who more of my readers are. I wish I could give you all a garden bench and a quiet garden history chat upon it.

'til then,
your gardenhistorygirl

Garden Bench Giveaway!

2009-04-29T17:11:00.000-07:00

I have heretofore resisted requests for advertising on the blog, but how could I say no to giving away something to my readers? All you have to do is leave a comment telling me which of the below benches you would most like to receive:

Renaissance Double Bench (C-1320)

Parquet Double Bench (C-1020)

Parquet Triple Bench (C-1030)

Windmere Double Bench (C-1420)

The benches are provided by teakwickerandmore, purveyors of patio furniture.

I do have to know your email address to get in touch with the winner; if you don't have a public blogger identity, you can either leave your email address in the comment (use a coded form like name [at] emailservice [dot] com), or if you're not comfortable with that email it to me privately. But you still have to leave a comment as to which bench you would like!

Apologies to all my international readers, but the bench can only be shipped to a US address.

The giveaway will be open through the weekend; until Sunday May 3 at 12:00 midnight my time (USA Central).

Enjoy!

P.S. I neglected to specify that one winner will be selected at random when the contest closes. (Someone thought everyone got a bench...sorry about that!) One name picked out of a hat. I'll use my nice straw garden hat with the black ribbon.

Seeking a publisher

2009-04-23T16:06:00.000-07:00

Can I say that the nanobattery encyclopedia article has gone to the editor? Yes, and with relief. But it seems that my garden history writing is not as in demand as my scientific writing (though it is infinitely more tedious) because I arrived home to two rejection letters. Author friends tell me that this is not very many, really, but still, I have decided to put it into the ether of the internet and the hands of my readers: if anyone out there is (or knows) an agent or publisher who would like to hear more about a book on Art Deco gardens, Gatsby's gardens, the mostly lost gardens where F. Scott Fitzgerald went to parties and Josephine Baker danced and Man Ray took pictures, gardens of jazz and blue and speed and light, just get in touch.

(Teaser images below)

Oh, and if you need, say, a nano-solar cell made I can do that for you too.

Stanway

2009-04-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

We had some car trouble and were late getting out to Stanway, so by the time we arrived there was no one in the courtyard and you never notice how many doors there are on a house like that until you’re not sure which one to open.

Hilary had told us that when she couldn’t find him, she simply walked around shouting “Wemyss!” until he stuck his head out of some window but even for this American (who doesn’t hold with the whole ‘your lordship’ business…it offends my democratic sensibilities) that seemed a bit indecorous. At least on first meeting. But it would have been a sight, especially if the window was one of those painted metallic gold to reflect the red-gilt color of Stanway’s Cotswold façade. I’ve never seen a more beautiful stone.

We were there for the landscape, not for the house, though I soaked up all of it I could when after perusing maps and speculating about the significance of various clumps of trees we went through to the kitchen for tea. It’s a proper house, Stanway, with pale floors and dark paintings and newspapers scattered about the twin settees with pagoda canopies, and the uneven stone and settling oriel window a Jacobean pile should have. Some of England’s stately homes have been renovated until they’re pickled. At Stanway, you can still feel the house breathing.

Charles Bridgeman (1690-1738), ever orderly, had a fondness for lakes like soup bowls, and it is likely he who installed the circular water atop the hill behind the temple. A telling sign of the movement toward naturalism in the English landscape can be seen in William Kent’s conversion of a similar lake Bridgeman had made at Claremont:

Bridgeman on the left, Kent on the right.

At Stanway, Charles Bridgeman’s successor in the landscape was not Kent but most likely Thomas Wright (1711-1786), ‘wizard of Durham’, astronomer, mathematician, architect and garden designer , with a fondness for Shapes of Significance like triangles and pyramids. Which is why we were there, my garden history pal Judy being something of an expert on Wright. He (if he it was) added the cascade, so that with the opening of a sluice gate water from the lake streamed down the hill to a canal at its base.

The waterworks had been treated roughly over the years, and were re-excavated by the present Earl Wemyss, who once ran up the hill and struggled to open the sluice gate so Princess Margaret could see the cascade (she remained unimpressed). Not all owners of historic properties are interested in their landscapes, an exasperating but unchangeable part of practicing garden history. You can’t make someone care. But Stanway is in good hands.

On returning home

2009-04-04T10:29:00.002-07:00

I always seem to pay a price for my vacations...the nanobattery encyclopedia article lies on my desk unfinished, the scanning electron microscope must be fired back into life, and the garden is speckled with spring weeds. I keep part of my prairie plot unmowed, and rampant self-seeding into the flower beds is the result.

But I will procrastinate on it all, for just one more afternoon, to tell you what-I-saw-in-London and savor it again myself.

Down a busy street in Richmond, a sign painted on a brick wall beckons with the promise of something special this way. Past the narrow alley the landscape opens up onto the Petersham meadows, and down the lane is a nursery straight out of a Merchant Ivory film set.

In addition to impossibly beautiful garden ornaments and handmade candles smelling of 'Marie Antoinette's Dreams' there is a restaurant (expensive) where the waitresses wear wellies and a cafe (reasonable) for lunching outside. Petersham nurseries is in danger of losing its planning permission due to the increasing vehicle traffic; visit by public transport if you can. Instructions for supporting their application for permanent planning permissions are on their website.

Stumbled upon in central London, next to the old city walls, the herb garden of the Worshipful Company of Barbers, with useful information about how to stay awake in church

We were on our way to the Barbican, actually, whose water garden by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon far-off garden historians will someday study as a quintessential example of a 1970s landscape:

And that great lady, Kew was wearing a couple of new necklaces. The treetop walkway:

and the new Sackler bridge by John Pawson with its sublime curve: this is minimalism I can believe in.

More about the rest of my trip later; for now it is on to an interlude of weeding and an evening of writing about nanobatteries.

Runnymede

2009-03-18T04:54:00.001-07:00

I am back in London with friends, garden friends who take me nice places. Last visit we went to Runnymede, and I've been meaning to post about it since the China trip, actually, when I saw the rockwork garden floors of the sort that inspired Geoffrey Jellicoe's pathway in which 60,000 granite setts surge like a crowd toward the memorial stone.

Runnymede is, of course, a much wider landscape than the small section devoted to the memory of John F. Kennedy. But the memorial garden has often been in my thoughts as one of the most emotional landscapes I have visited, and not just because of its attachment to a slain American president of whom I have no first-hand memory.

It does its job as a landscape extraordinarily well, leading both foot and eye in a gentle manner that only suggests a response, but elicits a greater one than gardens that are far more imposing in their purpose.

Jellicoe did indeed conceive the memorial as a journey, a procession, a pilgrim's progress, that starts in an unmowed meadow and leads through a stile gate, up a hill under heavy tree cover, to a glade at the top where the white memorial stone floats wraith-like under a single tree, an American scarlet oak that is distinctively different from the many English oaks in the wider park. It turns blood-red in autumn.

From here, Jacob's ladder steps go to the crest of the hill where two platforms (one for a king, one for a queen) look out over the valley that birthed the Magna Carta.

But though the view is lovely this part of the monument (the platforms) is I think less effective, simply because it lacks the bumpy, organic granite setts that provide the essential texture in what is basically a modernist landscape. Jellicoe insisted that the setts be laid in a random, flowing pattern in which each block appears to have an individual character, likening them to people at a football match to help his masons understand what to do. Without them, the memorial would still be a masterful layout of space, but soulless. Power to the people.

Vintage Gardens and Gardeners on Flickr

2009-03-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

The study of garden history can be inadvertently elitist, simply because the documentation of gardens of the wealthy is comparatively so extensive. Other than the odd photos or family accounts that make their way into archives, there are few sources for records of the gardens of a more average sort; those by people not wealthy or significant enough to have their gardens documented outside the family.

So the flickr photoset 'Vintage Gardens and Gardeners', administered by lovedaylemon, is an invaluable garden history asset. Period books and magazine show what advice was being given as to garden design, but photos are the essential evidence for how gardens were actually decorated, planted and used.

The photoset is a wonderful record of tools and implements, dress and manner, not just how gardens were planted but how they were used. And the faces, beaming out from their beautiful and personal landscapes, which are clearly treasured, make me teary.

I can't say enough about the value of this archive. If you have family or found photos of vintage gardens and gardeners, I would urge you to post them with this flickr set (include as much information about location and date as you know). Let them become a part of garden history. Garden historians everywhere will thank you!

From the top, an elaborate Victorian parterre in a style often associated with a much grander house than that pictured. Families in what was probably their favorite place in the garden: a woven willow summerhouse in the first photo and a sunny bench in the second.

And finally, a topiaric Adam and Eve...note the apple in Eve's hand and the serpent rearing his ugly head. I wonder if they were inspired by Pope's description?

[all photos from the group admin, lovedaylemon]

Unexpected Garden

2009-03-01T15:26:00.000-08:00

Contemporary topiary of the urban guerilla variety by Madrid based artist SpY, via itsnicethat.

Map Regressions, Time Travel and the Mikhailovsky Garden

2009-02-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

The Summer Gardens and the Mars Field. A project of architect J-B. Leblond, 1716-1717

The general layout of the Mikhailovsky Garden and the Labyrinth Garden by architect F.B. Rastrelli, 1750

The Third Summer Garden and its surroundings according to the third General Layout of St. Petersburg. Copied from an 1820 layout, prior to the renovations below.

The Mikhailovsky Garden according to K.I. Rossi’s report layout, 1822

Map regressions are a standard tool of the garden historian. They're like time travel really--all the historical geographical records are assembled and registered to definite landmarks so that changes in the landscape features over time become visible.

This isn't easy; much of the information is incomplete at best. Some 'maps' may be only hand-drawn sketches without scale or compass markings. A map of a neighboring property or an old photograph might show only a piece of the garden. Government documents often mark roads and bridges and bodies of water, but no garden features. Textual descriptions can be hard to relate to facts on the ground. And registration of features, especially in amateur maps, can be inaccurate.

Royal gardens are better documented than most, however, and it is the lucky garden historian that ends up with as complete a record as the series above, for the Mikhailovsky gardens in St. Petersburg, originally laid out by architect J.B. Leblond for Peter I in 1716-1717.

Any garden historian worth their salt could put the series of maps above in relative order from earliest to latest, but I was surprised to discover their actual dates of construction (as listed above). Each layout lags about fifty years behind adoption of the same styles in England, an expression, perhaps of the literal and symbolic distance of the Tsars from the cultural centers of Europe. The small, disconnected geometric gardens in the first map are in the manner of the seventeenth century, not the eighteenth, and by 1750 the English landscape was already well on its way to the open and sweeping style not seen in the Mikhailovsky garden until 1820. (Note especially the naturalization of the bodies of water)

This is of interest to garden history, but map regressions are often prepared in anticipation of a garden restoration and so the problem in the twenty-first century becomes which garden to recreate?

It is a serious question in historic landscapes, which have multiple layers of time and meaning. Often, the most recent style is the easiest one to which to return. Traveling further back in time could require the removal of the top layers--layers that might include mature trees, or extant landscape features like ponds to which contemporary visitors have become attached.

Rarely, though, a connection to some serious historic event, or the need to provide the proper setting for a significant piece of architecture, make the return to a more distant time an appropriate choice.

In the Mikhailovsky garden, a reconstruction project carried out by the State Institute of Architecture in St. Petersburg in 2001 returned the garden to its most recent designed layer, the naturalistic English landscape park of 1822. Its map will someday serve to mark the layer of the twenty-first century for a garden historian of the future.

The Leopold Bench: Updated

2009-02-23T05:55:00.000-08:00

a contemporary color and setting for the aforeposted Leopold bench, by De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop

Langston Hughes' Children's Garden, Harlem, 1955

2009-02-20T18:08:00.000-08:00

From The Life of Langston Hughes, by Arnold Rampersad, found at cityfarmer

"In the backyard at 20 East 127th Street, (Mr. Langston’s home) where the lawn in the summer of 1954 was dense and green, a gardener named Mr. Sacred Heart, a follower of the evangelist Father Divine, planted some flowering shrubs. In front of the house, at Langston’s request, someone planted Boston Ivy that crept up the walls and eventually luxuriated, so that everyone knew in which house on the street had lived the poet Langston Hughes. But most of the patch of earth beside the front steps, about six feet square, was barren from years of trampling by neighbourhood children, who had little time for flowers. Langston decided to rescue it, and teach the children a tender lesson at the same time. He named the plot their garden.

From Amy Spingarn’s home upstate in Dutchess County came nasturtiums, asters and marigold. Under his supervision, aided by Mr. Sacred Heart, each child chose a plant, set it, and assumed partial responsibility for weeding and watering the garden. On a picket beside each plant was posted a child’s name. Proud of the garden, which flourished, and prouder still of his children, Langston was photographed at least once beaming in their midst."

How could you go wrong with a gardener named Mr. Sacred Heart?

Cupid in the Garden

2009-02-12T19:55:00.000-08:00

From the previously posted English Emblem Books project comes this selection from the Emblemata Amatoria of Philip Ayres (1638-1712) which utilizes several garden motifs, including the symbol of a sunflower turning its head to the sun. Ayres was a minor English poet and a friend of Dryden's, and though not his equal in verse, the Emblemata of Love is uniformly charming.

The last picture shown is "The Powerfull Attraction" :

Where e're shee be, the difstance nere so great
mounted on sighs, thither my winged soul
does take its flight, and on her motions wait,

True as magnetick needle to its pole.

Happy Valentine's Day!
arcady

Char Bagh

2009-02-06T08:54:00.000-08:00

Dividing a walled garden into equivalent quadrants is a natural geometric impulse, and the resulting four-square form appears in the garden history of most cultures.

The 'Char Bagh' (meaning, literally, 'four gardens'), though of Persian origins, has become most closely associated with the Mughal empire, an Islamic dynasty that ruled between 1526 and 1858 in territories now divided among Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and northern India. The beautiful image above is a leaf from a Mughal manuscript now in the collection of the British Museum, c. 1590.

Most ancient gardens are metaphors for Paradise,and the Char Bagh is no exception, as perhaps best described in the mysterious volume of Sir John Mandeville's travels into the East, c. 1370:

"And this Paradise is enclosed all about with a wall...and in the most high place of Paradise, even in the middle place, is a well that casteth out the four floods that run by divers lands. Of the which, the first is clept Pison, or Ganges, that is all one; and it runneth throughout Ind or Emlak, in the which river be many precious stones, and much of lignum aloes and much gravel of gold. And that other river is clept Nilus or Gison, that goeth by Ethiopia and after by Egypt. And that other is clept Tigris, that runneth by Assyria and by Armenia the great. And that other is clept Euphrates, that runneth also by Media and Armenia and by Persia. And men there beyond say, that all the sweet waters of the world, above and beneath, take their beginning of the well of Paradise, and out of that well all waters come and go."

In an arid climate the ideal of heaven as a well-watered and verdant oasis was of special importance, and the quadrants of the Char Bagh are most often divided by canals (if large) or rills (if small) representing those four rivers of Paradise. The quadrants themselves are generally, but not always, symmetrical, and may be filled with loose, informal plantings that sometimes take on additional symbolic significance--cypresses for death, almond trees for life.

The ultimate example is perhaps the garden of the Taj Mahal, its quadrants centered upon the great mausoleum, resting the departed beloved in a vision of paradise. [drawing, c. 1750, from the collection of the Arthur M. Sackler gallery at the Smithsonian]

Mughal gardens have been the object of much scholarly research in recent years, being (arguably) the most active area of garden history research during the 1990s, and resulting in an excellent website on the subject at the Smithsonian.

Hanging Gardens of Rock City, 1970

2009-01-31T16:26:00.000-08:00

Photo collage, touched with green crayon, by Liliane Lijn, who 'imagined a utopia of green walkways across the rooftops of Manhattan'.

Found at the British Museum, see a larger version here.

Update: Thanks to reader Martha for letting me know that this is part of a series by Lijn, and can be seen on her website, which is full of interesting work.

Quincunx

2009-01-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

"Quid [illo] quincunce speciosius, qui, in quamcumque partem spectaveris, rectus est?"

"What is more beautiful than the well-known quincunx which, in whatever direction you view it, presents straight lines?"

It is snowing today, and I am contemplating the garden, whose basic lines are much more visible with a blanket of white covering distracting details. The parts of the garden that are too bare become all too obvious, and the northwest corner seems suddenly barren. I think it needs a quincunx. Perhaps of possumhaws.

Once alerted to their presence, the modern reader might see fractals everywhere; alchemist/physician Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) saw quincunxes. Not just in gardens, or in orchards, where they were and still are a traditional planting formation, but in Roman battalions and the crowns of the ancients, in the tail of the beaver and the scales of fishes and the skin of man (look closely at the skin on the back of your hand...it's there).

He believed that the quincunx had been the shape of the garden of Eden (with the tree of life in the center), the plan upon which Noah planted his vineyards, and the favored arrangement of Cyrus the Younger of Persia, who was both a leader of armies and a tiller of the soil. He wrote a book about it; the Gardens of Cyrus (available online, though I've yet to wade through it myself).

"The doctrine of signatures – the belief in naturally occurring symbols in plants and minerals which have been set there by God to indicate their medicinal properties – had been vigorously revived first by the Paracelsian medics of the sixteenth century, and taken up more generally by various theological writers, particularly in Italy in the seventeenth, who studied signatures as religious messages...For Browne, however, the quincunx, a kind of signature, has no exact meaning of this kind but rather functions more generally, in the sheer weight of instances, as a joyful reassurance of God's watchfulness, design, and purpose in the world. Browne is not attempting to mysticise the quincunx beyond recognising in its variety and ubiquity the wonder of the creation."

[source: The Literary Encyclopedia]

Browne was one of the 'first favorites' of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and since it is late here and the snow is still falling I will leave you with his words on the subject, far more elegant than mine, and go off to contemplate the possumhaws:

"But it is time for me to be in bed, in the words of Sir Thomas, which will serve you, my dear, as a fair specimen of his manner.—' But the quincunx of heaven—(the Hyades or five stars about the horizon at midnight at that time) —runs low, and 'tis time we close the five ports of knowledge : we are unwilling to spin out our waking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth praecogitations, —making tables of cobwebbes, and wildernesses of handsome groves. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.' Think you, my dear Friend, that there ever was such a reason given before for going to bed at midnight ;—to wit, that if we did not, we should be acting the part of our Antipodes! And then ' the huntsmen are up in America.'—What life, what fancy !—Does the whimsical knight give us thus a dish of strong green tea, and call it an opiate! I trust that you are quietly asleep—
And that all the stars hang bright above your dwelling, Silent as tho' they watched the sleeping earth !
S.T.C. 1804

Inspired by Nests...

2009-01-18T22:09:00.000-08:00

...one of the true delights of the garden.

the photography of sharon beals

indoor-outdoor chair by gaspardlive

pavilion in Berlin

children's playswing gerard moline for droog

stick play pavilion by Martin Environmental Design

and it is of course impossible not to think of Andy Goldsworthy...

I could do this! The Leopold Bench

2009-01-14T11:16:00.000-08:00

Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac is, along with Thoreau's Walden, a classic in American ecological literature. In it, Leopold (1887-1948) --who founded the field of Wildlife Ecology, was instrumental in establishing the first official "wilderness area" in the United States (the Gila National Forest), and helped to create The Wilderness Society--recorded the passage of seasons as he and his family renovated what was a worn out, depleted farmstead on sandy river soil. It is now considered one of the earliest examples of an ecological restoration.

On weekends away from Aldo's post at the University of Wisconsin, they planted native trees and flowers and noted the doings of animals and birds and slowly remodeled the chicken coop (which was filled with frozen manure when they first got the farm) for human habitation; it is now the only chicken coop on the National Register of Historic Places. It is still called simply 'the Shack', and the site is preserved by the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Tours are available May through October.

(photo from the digitized collection of Leopold's papers at the University of Wisconsin)

That's the bench on the right. They're still common in America at church camps and summer cabins, and only require a few simple cuts. I'm no carpenter, but I think even I could do this. Recommendations gleaned from the internet are to alter the plan slightly by using a four foot board for the seat (more room for a companion!) and utilizing a wider board for the seat. We're bigger people, on average, than in the thirties.

Simple instructions available at the US government's EPA site. In the spirit of Leopold, make it from recycled lumber if you can.

Helvetica in the Garden

2009-01-10T07:51:00.001-08:00

The PBS special on the typeface Helvetica that aired this week made me think about text in the garden; here, a 2007 temporary crossword puzzle installation by studio msk7 at the Berliner Gendarmenmarkt.

photos by msk7 and Gertrude K. and derSven via flickr

The fantasmic topiary of Pearl Fryar

2009-01-06T08:46:00.000-08:00

“Gardening books will tell you that some of these things in my garden can’t be done, but I had never read them when I got started. Not knowing ahead of time that something is supposed to be impossible often makes it possible to achieve. I didn’t have any limitations because I really didn’t know anything about horticulture. I just figured I could do whatever I wanted with any plant I had.”

In the 1980s, Pearl Fryar and his wife went looking for a new home in Bishopville, S.C., and after being spurned by a neighborhood that feared an African American couple wouldn't keep up their yard, he set his sights on being the first black recipient of the local garden club's Yard of the Month award. Utilizing plants salvaged from the dump of the local garden center, Pearl began cajoling them into fantastic organic shapes, often working at night under spotlights until he had three acres of a walkable, three-dimensional garden work of art where, it has been said, "Dr. Seuss meets Salvador Dali".

When he started, he didn't know what 'topiary' was, and had no training in either art or horticulture, which was all to the good.

Bishopton has taken him to its heart now, his sculptures line Main Street, and you can ask anybody in town where the topiary garden is. In the best tradition of art, his topiary work has gone viral, spreading through classes at the local college and mentoring of young people and other folks in town are now sculpting their own hedges. What must be the best-landscaped Waffle House in the country has granted the Fryars free meals for life in exchange for his wizardry in their streetscape. The “Pearl Special” is one scrambled egg, grits, and toast.

There is now a book and a DVD about Pearl Fryar's topiary art (and a NYT article), and he has installations at the Phillip Simmons garden in Charleston (Simmons is another outsider artist worthy of your attention, a blacksmith whose work is now being preserved), and the South Carolina State Museum has accessioned mature works, transplanted from his garden, into their permanent collection. Pearl's home garden has been designated a Preservation Project of the Garden Conservancy.

Much more information at the south carolina tourism site, and an account of a personal visit to Fryar's garden here.

According to Pearl's official website "All are welcome and if you find me at home, I’ll stop whatever I am doing to visit with you and tell you about my work and why I create topiary sculpture." If you go, you'll be in good company; Rosemary Verey visited Mr. Fryar at home twice, but she died in 2001 before he could accept her invitation to walk the royal grounds with Prince Charles. What a garden meeting that would have been!

Alexander Pope's Catalogue of Greens, 1713

2009-01-04T01:38:00.000-08:00

By the eighteenth century, the English garden was tending towards the natural (though it was not yet a 'natural' we would recognize as such), and topiary fell distinctly out of fashion. Alexander Pope's satire on the subject is well-known, but I will repeat it here anyway for those of you who perhaps have not seen it, and for those who have, it never fails to delight. So clever, that Alexander.

For the benefit of all my loving countrymen of this curious taste, I shall here publish a catalogue of Greens to he disposed of by an eminent Town- Gardiner, who has lately applied to me upon this head. He represents, that for the advancement of a politer sort of ornament in the Villa's and Gardens adjacent to this great city, and in order to distinguish those places from the meer barbarous countries of gross nature, the world stands much in need of a virtuoso Gardiner, who has a turn to Sculpture, and is thereby capable of improving upon the ancients of his profession, in the imagery of Ever-greens. My correspondant is arrived to such perfection that he also cutteth family pieces of men, women, or children. Any ladies that please may have their own effigies in Myrtle, or their husband's in Horn-beam. He is a Puritan wag, and never fails, when he shows his garden, to repeat that passage in the Psalms, 'Thy Wife shall be as the fruitful Vine, and thy Children as Olive-branches round thy table.'

I proceed to his catalogue.

Adam and Eve in Yew; Adam a little shattered by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in the Great Storm; Eve and the Serpent very flourishing.

Noah's ark in Holly, the ribs a little damaged for want of water.
The Tower of Babel, not yet finished.

St. George in Box; his arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the Dragon by next April.

A green Dragon of the same, with a tail of Ground- Ivy for the present.

N. B. These two not to be sold separately.

Edward the Black Prince in Cypress.

A Laurstine Bear in Blossom, with a Juniper Hunter in Berries.

A pair of Giants, stunted, to be sold cheap.

A Queen Elizabeth in Phyllirea, a little inclining to the green sickness, but of full growth.
Another Queen Elizabeth in Myrtle, which was very forward, but miscarried by being too near a Savine.
An old Maid of honour in Wormwood.
A topping Ben Johnson in Laurel.

Divers eminent modern Poets in Bays, somewhat blighted, to be disposed of a pennyworth.
A quick-set Hog shot up into a Porcupine, by being forgot a week in rainy weather.
A Lavender Pigg, with Sage growing in his belly.
A pair of Maidenheads in Fir, in great forwardness.

(accompanied by Pope's drawing of Twickenham church, as seen over the naturalized treeline of his own garden, from the library of grandee Horace Walpole and now in the collection of the Yale University Library.)

Topiary: Martial Art?

2009-01-03T07:39:00.000-08:00

In my latest fit of manuscript writing I came across an intriguing reference to early topiary forms being derived from sentinels. As castles devolved into houses rather than fortifications, the tradition of a guard standing watch was retained in harmless, but still imposing, evergreen form.

I haven't been able to confirm this by any other references but many of the older topiary forms are in fact distinctly soldier-like. The topiary at Levens Hall in Cumbria, shown here, is some of the oldest in the world, dating to the late seventeenth century, though it has been re-cut over the years.

Older English topiary work tends to be strongly anthropomorphic; Levens also featured forms representing Queen Elizabeth I and her ladies in waiting, attired in bulbous green hoop skirts. The twelve apostles in yew were a perennially popular theme. The Asian topiary tradition, on the other hand, is distinctly different than that of Europe--the favorite motif being cloud-like forms--and topiary has a much less significant place in youthful American garden history, which has no castle antecedents, than in the ancient traditions of England and France, which was the source of the sentinel reference.

Perhaps it is why topiary still seems so appropriate at gates and entrances, stiffly standing guard.

Garden History Subscriptions

2008-12-17T09:58:00.000-08:00

Subscriptions are another easy gift choice for the budding garden historian...I've already mentioned the journal of the Garden History Society, which you receive by becoming a member, an excellent value at £43.

I would also highly recommend Historic Gardens Review, which I especially love for its wide-ranging coverage (Table of contents from the current issue below), and its Optimist and Pessimist feature, about good and bad news in historic garden preservation. A subscription is $60 ($40 for students) and supports the work of the Historic Gardens Foundation. HGR also welcomes submissions by 'enthusiasts'...if you have a historic garden in your hometown, writing an article is an excellent way to help publicize and preserve it.

Historic Gardens Review Issue 20:

Editorials and News From horse chestnuts to horticultural schools and much more.
Letters On Hartwell House, a threatened Jellicoe garden, and the Mughal gardens of Srinagar.
Optimist Good news from Italy, Scotland, Sicily, England Germany and the USA.
Pessimist Bad news from Croatia, Sicily, Ireland, Cambridge and Liverpool.

Features:
The Prairie and the City Janet Waymark tells about Jens Jensen's work on Chicago parks.
Lyrical Landscapes Ted Fawcett on how English and Chinese poets have praised gardens.
A Thorny Subject Charles Quest-Ritson asks why roses bred in the 1920s and 1930s are so hard to source.
Teardrops on the Cheek of Time Katie Campbell writes that the plains of northern India boast some of the world's most elegant tomb gardens.
English Influences Rory Stuart on how two Italian gardens (Palazzo Guerrieri and Villa Rizzardi) blend formality and English ideals.
Redefining a Duo Bella D'Arcy takes a fresh look at the Jekyll-Lutyens partnership.

Reviews:
Garden Reviews Assessing famous gardens in England and France.
Book Reviews From China to Italy, tennis courts to politics, and Hex to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Garden History books for Christmas

2008-12-16T21:13:00.000-08:00

I've had a request for suggestions as to garden history books for Christmas gift-giving, and am much behind on answering it. But there's always overnight shipping!

My own garden history reading at this point tends towards scholarly tomes with not nearly enough pictures. But for someone just beginning an interest in the field, my favorite is a little book called "The Garden: Visions of Paradise" by Gabrielle van Zuylen, published by Thames and Hudson. It is out of print, but readily available used, and is the best overview of time periods and styles that I've read. My only complaint is that it is in a small format and I wish the illustrations were bigger.

One of the pleasures of being a garden historian is seeing gardens everywhere, and another small format book, 'flora: gardens and plants in art and literature' by Edward Lucie-Smith, published by Evergreen, covers a wide range of time periods and geographies in a non-academic way (art books can be so overwrought). Mostly pictures, with limited text attached to each one.

If you're interested in the modern era (history begins with the last moment, after all), Katie Campbell's Icons of Twentieth Century Landscape Design, published by Frances Lincoln, is the beautifully written story of twenty-nine sites, from the Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye to Luis Barragan's Los Arboledas, that have changed the way we look at outdoor spaces.

Finally, the book on my own Christmas wish-list is In the Garden by Beth Dow, whose lovely photography has featured in the blog before, and for which she has been awarded the grand prize in the Photography Book Now competition: "a portfolio of her large platinum-palladium prints that 'examine tensions of mass, light, and perspective in highly cultivated landscapes." At $80, it is a more affordable route to her art than one of her actual prints, for which I am still saving up. Order it at blurb.

Habit de Fontainier

2008-12-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

Very sorry to be away so long...I've just finished 9,000 words on a seventeenth century Fontainier--fountain engineer---for publication next spring. An exhausting thing to accomplish so close to Christmas. I blame this guy (from Nicholas L'Armessin's delightful Album des metiers, 1680).

Fountain engineering was a recognized profession in the Renaissance and early modern period, and itinerant fontainier traveled Europe installing waterworks for courts and courtiers. The automata they created, copper 'bodies' that moved and in some cases spoke, are considered forerunners of modern robotics, and Descartes was inspired by garden automata to compare the human body to a machine in his 1630 Treatise on Man. Popular types were siphon fountains, which could be used inside and made to flow with wine rather than mere water, birds that sang by hydraulic action, statues that wept, water organs, and giochi d'acqua, or water jokes, that surprised garden guests with sudden drenchings from hidden spouts. It sounds annoying, but I can personally attest that on a hot day in August in Florence, a little water joke is much appreciated.

The water-wonders were often housed in cave-like grottos, derived from the Greco-Roman tradition of the nymphaeum, which became a fashion all across Europe in the seventeenth century. A description from the intrepid Celia Fiennes, who went 'through England on a Side Saddle in the time of William and Mary', and visited the grotto of Wilton House, Wiltshire, in 1685:

Grottoe is att ye end of the garden just ye middle off ye house - its garnished with many fine ffigures of ye Goddesses, and about 2 yards off the doore is severall pipes in a line that with a sluce spoutts water up to wett the strangers - in the middle roome is a round table and a large Pipe in the midst, on which they put a Crown or Gun or a branch, and so yt spouts the water through ye Carvings and poynts all round ye roome at ye Artists pleasure to wet ye Company - there are figures at Each corner of ye roome that Can weep water on the beholders and by a straight pipe on ye table they force up ye water into ye hollow carving of ye rooff like a Crown or Coronet to appearance but is hollow within to retaine ye water fforced into it in great quantetyes yt disperses in ye hollow Cavity over ye roome and descends in a Shower of raine all about ye roome - on each side is two little roomes which by the turning their wires ye water runnes in ye rockes - you see and hear it and also it is so contrived in one room yt it makes ye melody of Nightingerlls and all sorts of birds wch engages ye Curiosity of ye Strangers to go in to see, but at ye Entrance off each room is a line of pipes that appear not till by a Sluce moved - it washes ye spectators designed for diversion.

And now I am done, for awhile, with fountains.

(read Celia Fiennes' entire travel journey online here. See more of the original L'Armessin prints, or purchase the Fontainier for Christmas for a mere £1250 at the Shapero gallery.)

Speaking Picture Gardens

2008-10-25T05:41:00.001-07:00

The emblem is thought to have its roots in the impresa; that device by which people of wealth created a peculiarly personal mythology by selecting an image and a corresponding motto to represent their character, personality, or aspirations.

In the 1530s Andrea Aliciato, a Milanese jurist, extended the impresa’s combination of visual and textual symbolism to general and societal, rather than personal themes in his Emblematum liber, a book of 'speaking pictures'. By the end of the 16th century emblem books were being composed and published throughout Europe, and had become an important means of disseminating the ideals of Renaissance society.

One of the most popular of the English emblem books was George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635), targeted at the new middle classes with a strong emphasis on images and mottoes that encouraged thrift, endurance, diligence, and honesty.

It is the engravings of the 'speaking pictures', not the explanatory prose, that are of the most interest to garden historians.

The emblem books reflected the material culture of their time, and the detailed engravings found in Wither’s Emblemes are a fascinating microcosm of period costume, architecture, activities, and especially gardens. Because many of the emblems are portrayed in an outdoor setting, around them can be seen garden structures such as arbors and trellises, formal planting and bedding schemes, fountains, seats and statuary. Practical horticultural practice is evident in the edgings and enclosure of flower and vegetable beds as well as the presence of laborers who are engaged in plowing, planting, harvesting, and tending. Even the social use of the gardens is visible, as the backgrounds are peopled with characters strolling, eating, flirting, playing at sports and listening to music.

The speaking pictures also provide inspiration for the modern gardener seeking to introduce meaning into their landscape: the ivy growing round the obelisk symbolizing weakness supported by strength, and what is more beautiful than the tree that symbolizes a patient heart?

View the whole poesy text associated with the speaking pictures at The English Emblem Book Project of the Penn State University Libraries' Electronic Text Center. Kudos to them for making Withers, and many other emblem books, available online.