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A love affair with Italian gardens, outdoor activies and the return of the great plant hunters with wonderful new plant varieties symbolised what we now call the Edwardian garden era


Edwardians and their love


HISTORIC GARDENS


affair with Italian gardens by Vivienne Lewis


all garden designers went down the Robinson/ Jekyll route.


Iford Manor in Wiltshire shows how the love affair with Italian gardens continued


The gardening innovations during the Victorian era were not to everyone’s taste. There was a backlash against the garishly coloured hot house bedding schemes of the top Victorian gardens. Leading the critics was a fiery Irishman, William Robinson, who spoke out against what he saw as contrivances and artificiality.


He is said to have rushed to England to escape an employer’s wrath when he let all the heat go out of the hothouses at the property where he worked in Dublin, so killing all the exotic plants.


His writings, and particularly his first book, The Wild Garden published in 1870, followed later by The English Flower Garden, helped to change the way people saw gardens in the last decades of the 19th century. He influenced Gertrude Jekyll and not only a generation of garden designers, but those that followed.


What we call the Edwardian garden really began in Victorian times, in the 1870s and 1880s when Robinson and others started to plan and write about gardens in a totally new way. They realised that the hot houses, the heated conservatories, and the bedding out of flower borders twice yearly, should give way to a more naturalistic way of gardening, based on growing hardy perennials that did not require any heat.


Robinson didn’t advocate growing only native plants – he grew exotics in his own garden at Gravetye Manor in Sussex. But they had to survive outside. He had seen Golden Rod and asters growing next to woodlands in America. We have to thank him for naturalising spring bulbs in grass – snowdrops, crocus, narcissi and bluebells.


It was the start of the low maintenance garden. Jekyll experimented with these ideas at her garden at Munstead Wood near Godalming in Surrey, but as we know, there were many lavish gardens that had formal features as well, and not


32 Country Gardener


Jekyll was an artist and craftswoman who had switched her interests to gardens when her eyesight deteriorated. She is the link in horticulture to William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement. She studied art in London, knew Morris and his circle as a young woman, absorbing the principles of using traditional materials and working methods.


Her collaboration with Edwin Lutyens produced the most exquisite gardens, of which the Edwardian garden at Hestercombe at Cheddon Fitzpaine near Taunton is a supreme example. He provided the structure which she complemented with outstanding plantings that softened walls, steps and paths in a wonderful colour palette. She worked with other garden designers but this collaboration was the most famous.


The pergola at Hestercombe


Lutyens was introduced to Jekyll in 1889 and soon after she asked him to design a house for her – Munstead Wood. The collaboration that continued for more than 20 years produced some 70 gardens. Many have disappeared but among those that have survived is the Manor House at Upton Grey near Basingstoke in Hampshire, where owner Ros Wallinger has lovingly restored and replanted according to the records, so that it is a completely authentic Jekyll garden once more.


Other designers loved formality. Gardens were laid out that might have come straight out of the 17th century as at Athelhampton in Dorset, where Inigo Thomas made a garden dominated by topiary. While the Great Plat and the


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