Britain’s Gardens
Th ey took th eir lead from French gardens, in particular the Sun King’s garden at the Palace of Versailles
popularity of greenhouses led to more effective pest control, and more interest in exotic botany. By the 1880s people had grown tired of the gaudy flower
borders. William Robinson is credited with starting the move back to a more naturalistic look. His garden at Gravetye Manor in Sussex is now a hotel and restaurant, where guests can roam the restored garden. Gertrude Jekyll, John Ruskin and William Morris went
further in their ambition to reclaim a ‘lost’ pastoral way of life, in a backlash against Victorian mass production. Jekyll in particular sought to soften the boundaries of architecture. She worked extensively with the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, who designed gardens as a series of ‘rooms’ beyond the house. Jekyll blurred those hard edges by using a soft fringe of plants. She is well known for her graduated use of colour, grouping ‘hot’ colours together and for the first time consciously introducing a perception of mood and temperature through colour and pattern. A fine example of the Jekyll and Lutyens partnership can be seen at Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset. Moving into the early decades of the 20th century, trend-setters included Lawrence Johnston, Norah Lindsay
54 BRITAIN
and Vita Sackville-West. This last created the famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, with her diplomat husband Harold Nicholson, and wrote numerous gardening books and articles. Sissinghurst Castle is the epitome of the fashionable Edwardian garden, most known for its White Garden with a profusion of white blooms, lilac and silver foliage, all compartmentalised by box hedging. More recently, the Prince of Wales has championed
organic gardening, and that movement has seen great success across the country, in agriculture as well as in gardening. The ultimate example of environmentally aware, sustainable gardening can be seen at the Eden Project in Cornwall. So ambitious, its giant biomes each create a world within a world, and explore the global human journey from wildness to domestication. Perhaps the best thing about our varied 21st-century
gardening is the knowledge of all that has gone before. Accumulated technologies, botany and design are available for everyone’s use and interpretation, both affordable and free from pressure to conform.
For more information on all of these gardens, and links to their own websites for full visitor details, visit
www.britain-magazine.com. Additional information can be found on the websites of the Historic Houses Association,
www.hha.org.uk, and the National Trust,
www.nationaltrust.org.uk.
www.britain-magazine.com
Above: The dovecote and parterre at Rousham in Oxfordshire. Inset: The tropical biome at The Eden Project, Cornwall
PHOTOS: KATHY MANSFIELD/THE EDEDN PROJECT
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