Gardens and Landscape

A garden is architecture made partly of living material. It has a plan, axes, walls, floors and rooms; it is set out with cords and stakes and levelled like a building site; and from Pliny onwards it had writers who described how it should be made. Its designers were often architects: Bramante, Vignola, Le Vau, Kent, Lutyens. But it has two things a building lacks. It grows, so that the designer plants for an effect he may never see, and it is made of plants, each with its own habit, its own tolerance of the shears, and its own meaning.

This chapter follows the European garden from the Roman villa through the Italian Renaissance, the French court and the English park to the Victorian and Arts and Crafts gardens, and then turns to the three great traditions of Asia: the Persian and Mughal fourfold garden, the Chinese scholar’s garden and the Japanese garden. Each has its rules, and many of the rules are about how a garden is seen: from a window, along an axis, across a lake, through a gate. The last part is about the plants themselves.

The garden in the treatises

The European garden begins with a letter. About AD 100, Pliny the Younger described his villa in Tuscany to a friend, part by part. In front of the portico lay a terrace with beds edged in box and figures of animals clipped in box, facing each other; below it a bank, a walk enclosed by clipped evergreens, and a garden shaped like a hippodrome, ringed by plane trees, where the box was cut into many shapes and into letters that spelled out his own name and his gardener’s. The gardener of a Roman villa was the topiarius, and his art is topiary.

℟Box clipped into figures and letters

Edge the beds before the portico with box, clip box into figures of animals set facing one another, and in the garden beyond cut it into many shapes, even into the letters of the owner’s name.

Alberti read Pliny closely, and in the ninth book of his treatise, about 1450, he gave the villa garden rules. The garden should have porticoes for sun and shade, grottoes lined with tufa and shells, trees in straight rows at equal distances, box hedges, and vines over walks on marble columns; he even repeats Pliny’s names in box. The garden is an extension of the house, measured and set out with it.

℟The villa garden: porticoes, grottoes, evergreens in rows

Give the villa garden porticoes for sun and for shade, grottoes made in imitation of nature with tufa and shells, evergreens planted in straight rows at equal distances, and hedges of box; set vines on columns over the walks.

The third founding text is a romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), whose dreaming hero reaches the island of Cythera, a circular garden laid out in rings round the fountain of Venus, with knots of herbs, pergolas and topiary. Its woodcuts were copied for a century.

The Italian Renaissance garden

The Medici villas round Florence were the first to put Alberti’s advice into practice, but the architecture of the type came from Rome. In 1505 Bramante began the Belvedere Court at the Vatican, which joined the papal palace to a villa on the hill above by three terraces on one axis, linked by stairs. From then on the Italian garden was typically a hillside cut into level terraces held up by retaining walls, joined by stairs and ramps, and ordered by a single axis running from the house (Terraces on the axis of the villa).

The terraces made level ground, gave views, and gave water somewhere to fall. At the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, laid out by Pirro Ligorio for Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este from 1560, it was brought from the river Aniene through a channel under the town and released down the slope through the Hundred Fountains along one terrace, the Oval Fountain, a Water Organ that played music, and the fishponds at the bottom. At the Villa Lante at Bagnaia, begun in 1568 for Cardinal Gambara and attributed to Vignola, the water runs from a rustic grotto at the top down a stepped stone channel, the catena d’acqua or water chain, along a stone dining table with a trough to cool the wine, and into a square water parterre between two small casinos. The cardinal’s name is in the water chain, whose scrolled sides are the claws of a crayfish, gambero.

Each great garden told a story through its statues: Hercules at Tivoli, the passage from the Golden Age to civilisation at Bagnaia. The Boboli Gardens in Florence, begun by Niccolò Tribolo for Cosimo I in 1549, grew to include an amphitheatre, Buontalenti’s Grotta Grande (1583–93) and a long cypress avenue down to an island in a pool. Such grottoes and nymphaea recalled the Roman villas, and many had water jokes to soak the unwary guest.

Beside the house, and apart from all this display, lay the giardino segreto, the secret garden: a small walled garden for the owner, with flowers, herbs, fruit trees and a fountain (The secret garden). At Caprarola, Vignola gave the pentagonal Farnese palace two of them, one for summer and one for winter. Beyond the formal garden there was often a bosco, a grove of holm oak or bay.

The planting was evergreen and architectural. Box and myrtle made the low hedges of the beds; cypress stood in avenues and as single dark spires against the sky; holm oak, laurel and laurustinus were clipped into green walls; stone pines gave high shade; and lemons stood in terracotta pots along the terraces. Flowers were the least of it: shade, stone, water and the view were the materials of the Italian garden.

The French formal garden

In France, on ground that was usually flat, the Italian garden became a plane, seen from the house and organised by perspective. Claude Mollet, gardener to Henri IV, laid out some of the first embroidered parterres at Anet in the 1580s. Jacques Boyceau, superintendent of the royal gardens under Louis XIII, wrote the first French treatise on garden design, published in 1638. His first rule is optical: a parterre is a flat pattern, so it must lie where it is seen from above, below the windows or a terrace (Parterres to be seen from above). Claude’s son André Mollet set out the order of a royal garden from the house outward: embroidered parterres, then grass, then groves, then long walks closed by painted perspectives (The order of a royal garden).

André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), son of the gardener of the Tuileries, made the French garden a style. At Vaux-le-Vicomte, between 1656 and 1661, he worked with the architect Louis Le Vau and the painter Charles Le Brun for the finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. The main axis runs from the house over parterres and pools to a canal nearly a kilometre long laid across it in a hollow that cannot be seen from the house, so that the visitor discovers it only at its edge; beyond, a grotto and a grassy slope lead up to a statue of Hercules. On 17 August 1661 Fouquet entertained the young Louis XIV there. Three weeks later he was arrested, and his three designers were set to work for the king at Versailles (One axis from the house to the horizon).

Versailles, begun in 1662 and enlarged for forty years, is the formal garden at its largest. From the terrace of the palace the axis crosses the water parterre, descends the Latona stairs, runs along the lawn of the tapis vert to the Apollo fountain, and goes on along the Grand Canal, 1,670 metres long and 62 wide, to the horizon. Either side of it are the bosquets, blocks of trees enclosed by clipped hedges, each hiding a room with fountains. Avenues radiating from a point, the patte d’oie, carry the geometry into the forest and, on the other side of the palace, into the town.

In 1709 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville turned Le Nôtre’s practice into rules in La théorie et la pratique du jardinage. Its maxims are that art should give way to nature, that a garden should be neither too dark nor too bare, and that it should seem larger than it is; its parts run from the house outward, parterres, then bosquets, then allées to the horizon (Parterres by the house, woods beyond).

℟Parterres by the house, woods beyond

Lay the parterres next to the house, low and flat so that nothing blocks the view from its windows; set bosquets and groves beyond them, and lead long allées out toward the horizon, so that the garden always seems larger than it is.

Many of Dézallier’s rules are proportions. A parterre should be oblong rather than square, because it is always seen foreshortened from the windows; later practice made it as broad as the front of the house and about twice as long (The parterre longer than it is wide). An allée must widen with its length, or its far end shrinks in perspective to a slot (The allée widens with its length). His table, rounded here as it is in the book, gives the widths:

The French garden was made of plants that would take the shears. Dwarf box drew the scrolls of the broderie on a ground of coloured gravel, crushed brick or coal; hornbeam, clipped into tall green walls called palissades, lined the allées and enclosed the bosquets; lime, elm and later horse chestnut made the avenues; yew was clipped into cones and obelisks along the edges of the parterres; and orange trees in tubs were set out in summer from the orangery. Flowers were confined to narrow borders.

The Dutch and English formal garden

In the Netherlands the French garden had to fit small, flat plots cut by drainage canals, and it became intimate: compartments of box filled with flowers (this was the country of the tulip), narrow canals, lead statues and much topiary. William of Orange built such a garden at Het Loo from 1684, with Daniel Marot as designer. When he became William III of England in 1689 he brought the manner to Hampton Court, where the Privy Garden and the semicircular Great Fountain Garden were laid out in the 1690s. The nurserymen George London and Henry Wise planted formal gardens across England.

The English already had a formal tradition of their own: the knot garden of Tudor and Elizabethan houses, a square bed laid out in an interlacing pattern of low hedges of box, thyme or lavender, and the mount, an artificial hill from which to look at it. The Dutch taste added yew topiary, of which the garden at Levens Hall in Cumbria, laid out from 1694 by Guillaume Beaumont, is the most famous survivor, and the long canals of Westbury Court in Gloucestershire (1696–1705). Almost all the rest was swept away within a lifetime.

The English landscape garden

The landscape garden began as a protest in print. In The Spectator of 25 June 1712 Joseph Addison complained that English gardeners, instead of humouring nature, departed from it as far as they could:

Our Trees rise in Cones, Globes, and Pyramids. We see the Marks of the Scissars upon every Plant and Bush.

A year later Pope mocked topiary in The Guardian, and Whig writers linked the clipped garden with absolute monarchy and the free-growing tree with English liberty. In the Epistle to Burlington (1731), addressed to the patron of English Palladianism, Pope gave the new garden its rule:

Consult the Genius of the Place in all; / That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall.

℟Consult the genius of the place

Let the character of the site direct the design: whether the ground should be raised or lowered, a view opened or closed, water led or stilled. Prefer variety, surprise and concealed bounds to symmetry.

The practical step had already been taken. Charles Bridgeman, royal gardener from 1728, still laid out straight walks, but he bounded the gardens at Stowe and elsewhere with the sunk fence, a ditch walled on the garden side, which kept the cattle out without interrupting the view. Horace Walpole, who wrote its first history in 1780, says that the common people called these ditches ha-has from their surprise at finding a sudden check to their walk, and calls their invention the leading step to all that followed (The ha-ha: a boundary that cannot be seen).

William Kent, a painter who had studied in Rome and became Lord Burlington’s architect, broke the straight lines. In Walpole’s phrase, he “leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden.” At Chiswick, Claremont, Stowe and Rousham he composed the ground as a painter composes a landscape, after Claude and Poussin, with groups of trees for light and shade, a winding stream in place of a canal, and temples placed to be seen across water (The garden as a picture). These gardens were walked as a circuit of scenes with buildings that carried meanings: Lord Cobham’s Elysian Fields at Stowe (about 1734), with Kent’s Temple of British Worthies, are a political argument in stone, and the walk round the lake at Stourhead (from 1741), past Henry Flitcroft’s Pantheon (1753–54), recalls the journey of Aeneas.

Capability Brown

Lancelot Brown (1716–1783), a Northumbrian who was head gardener at Stowe in the 1740s, set up on his own in 1751 and in thirty years made or remade some two hundred parks. He emptied the garden of most of what Kent had put in it. Grass runs right up to the walls of the house, and a ha-ha keeps the sheep and deer off it. The trees stand in clumps on the brows of rising ground, where they make the slopes seem higher, and singly on the open lawn. A belt of woodland round the boundary hides the edge of the property, with a drive inside it (Lawn to the door, clumps on the rises, a belt round the edge). In the valley below the house a stream is dammed to make a lake of irregular outline whose ends are hidden round a bend or under a bridge, so that it reads as a river (A lake that seems a river). There are few buildings, and the flower and kitchen gardens are walled away out of sight.

Brown wrote no treatise, and his measures were those of the site. He placed the lake where it would be seen from the principal rooms, below the level of the eye and near enough to catch the light; he set the clumps at the points where the ground turns, and the belt at the boundary, however far off it lay. His rules are best read in Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). His own account of his method survives only at second hand: Hannah More reported in 1782 that he compared it to writing, with a comma here, a colon there, a parenthesis to break a view, and a full stop before beginning another subject. At Blenheim (1764–74) he dammed the little river Glyme so that the water rose round the piers of Vanbrugh’s great bridge, which had until then spanned a marsh.

The Picturesque and Repton

By the 1790s Brown’s manner had been copied so often that it had become a formula, and in 1794 two Herefordshire landowners attacked it. Uvedale Price, in his Essay on the Picturesque, argued that the qualities painters loved in landscape (the gnarled tree, the rutted lane, the overgrown ruin) were neither beautiful nor sublime in Burke’s terms but picturesque, a quality made of roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, and that Brown had smoothed them all away (Roughness and sudden variation). Richard Payne Knight’s poem The Landscape made the same case, with two engravings of a single scene, one dressed in Brown’s manner and one left rough. Its mark is in rough walks along gorges, ruins kept or made, rustic cottages and irregular houses built to be seen from many points.

Humphry Repton (1752–1818), who set up as Brown’s successor in 1788 and called himself a landscape gardener, answered both critics in print, but he moved towards them. For each client he made a Red Book of watercolour views with hinged flaps: the client saw the present scene, lifted the flap and saw it improved. His rules in Sketches and Hints (1795) restate Brown’s aims as four requisites: show the natural beauties of a place and hide its defects, disguise the boundary, conceal the art, and hide what serves only convenience (The four requisites of landscape gardening). He gave careful rules for the approach to a house, which should take a natural line and show the house first at an angle, not head-on down an avenue (The approach to the house). In his Observations (1803) he wrote on the optics of landscape, how distance and size are judged and how trees give scale. And he brought back what Brown had banished. A house, he argued, is a work of art and needs a foreground of art, a terrace, a balustrade, steps and a flower garden, between it and the park (A terrace and flower garden at the foot of the house).

The Victorian garden

Three things changed the garden after 1830: new plants, cheap glass and the industrial town. Plant hunters such as David Douglas, Joseph Hooker and Robert Fortune sent back trees and shrubs from America, the Himalaya and China, carried alive in Nathaniel Ward’s sealed glass cases; the duty on glass was repealed in 1845; and the garden became a collection.

J. C. Loudon, the most prolific gardening writer of the age, gave it a theory. In the gardenesque, set out in The Suburban Gardener (1838), each tree and shrub is planted apart, with room to grow to the full form of its kind, so that it can be seen and admired as a specimen; foreign kinds are preferred, because a lawn set with deodars and monkey puzzles can never be mistaken for natural country, and a garden, like any work of art, should be recognised as art (The gardenesque: every plant seen whole). Near the house the formal garden returned, as Repton had asked: Charles Barry built Italianate terraces with balustrades and urns at Trentham, Harewood and Cliveden, and W. A. Nesfield revived the parterre in box and coloured gravel. The beds were filled by bedding out: pelargoniums, calceolarias, lobelias and verbenas raised by the thousand under glass and planted out in May in blocks of strong colour, and from the late 1860s carpet bedding in low foliage plants clipped flat (Bedding out).

Paxton and the Crystal Palace

Joseph Paxton (1803–1865) became head gardener at Chatsworth in Derbyshire in 1826, at the age of twenty-three, for the sixth Duke of Devonshire. He built the Great Conservatory (1836–41), with Decimus Burton, a glass house 277 feet long and 67 feet high on arched ribs of laminated timber, and in 1844 the Emperor Fountain, whose jet was claimed to rise about 90 metres. In November 1849 the giant Amazon water lily, then called Victoria regia, flowered for the first time in England under his care, and he built it a Lily House with a flat roof of ridge-and-furrow glazing on iron beams, a system he had used since the 1830s. The panes, set in small ridges and valleys, met the low sun of morning and evening more squarely, and the folds stiffened the roof (The ridge-and-furrow roof).

In June 1850 the committee of the Great Exhibition, having rejected all 245 designs sent to its competition, had an unpopular brick design of its own. Paxton sketched an alternative on blotting paper at a railway board meeting in Derby: the Lily House enlarged to the scale of a cathedral. The Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park between the late summer of 1850 and January 1851 by Fox, Henderson and Co., with glass from Chance Brothers. Everything was set by the size of a pane: panes 49 inches long gave ridges 8 feet apart, three ridges made a bay of 24 feet, and the columns and girders came in multiples of it (The Crystal Palace grid of 24 feet). The building was 1,848 feet long and 408 wide; its transept, 108 feet high under a timber-ribbed vault, was added to keep a row of old elms inside. It opened on 1 May 1851.

After the Exhibition closed the building was taken down and re-erected, larger, on Sydenham Hill in south London, with a barrel-vaulted nave and three transepts; the Queen opened it on 10 June 1854. Paxton, with Edward Milner, laid out the park below it as an Italian garden on an English scale: broad terraces with balustrades and statues, stairs down to parterres, a central walk to two great fountain basins, cascades and lakes, all fed from two water towers designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s life-size dinosaurs still stand on the islands of the lower lake; the Palace burned down in 1936.

The public park

Paxton also made the first park in Britain paid for out of public money. At Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, the town bought about 225 acres of wet farmland in 1843; Paxton laid out the park, plots for villas round its edge were sold to pay for it, and it opened in 1847, free to all. A carriage drive runs round the inside of the boundary, footpaths wind separately through the interior, and two lakes, dug out of the marsh, have islands and boathouses, with the spoil heaped into mounds to give the flat site some shape (A park paid for by the houses round it). It was Brown’s landscape adapted to a crowd.

Frederick Law Olmsted, a young American farmer and writer, saw Birkenhead in 1850 and wrote that nothing in democratic America compared with this people’s garden. In 1858 he and the English architect Calvert Vaux won the competition for Central Park in New York with their “Greensward” plan. The site was a rocky strip half a mile wide and two and a half miles long, which the city’s cross streets had to pass. They sank four transverse roads below the surface of the park, in walled cuttings screened by planting, and separated the drives, the bridle path and the footpaths inside it, carrying one over another on some thirty bridges and arches, so that the meadows, woods and water seemed continuous (Separate ways for carriages, riders and walkers).

William Robinson and the wild garden

The reaction against bedding came from a gardener. William Robinson (1838–1935), an Irish gardener turned journalist, published The Wild Garden in 1870 and founded the weekly The Garden the next year. He attacked bedding as costly and ugly, bare for half the year, and topiary as a mutilation, and proposed instead that hardy plants from the temperate regions of the world be naturalised where they would thrive without further care: bulbs in rough grass, climbers through old trees, perennials by streams and on banks (The wild garden). He did not mean a garden of native plants or a garden left to run wild. From 1884 he made his own garden at Gravetye Manor in Sussex.

The architects answered. Reginald Blomfield, in The Formal Garden in England (1892), argued that the garden belongs to the house and should be designed with it by the architect, its terraces, walls, walks and hedges continuing the lines of the building (House and garden designed as one). Robinson replied the same year. The best gardens of the next generation took the plan from Blomfield and the planting from Robinson.

Jekyll, Lutyens and the Arts and Crafts garden

Gertrude Jekyll (1843–1932) trained as a painter and embroiderer, turned to gardening when her sight began to fail, and made her own garden at Munstead Wood in Surrey from the 1880s. In 1889 she met Edwin Lutyens, then twenty, who built her house there in 1896–97. Together they made the Arts and Crafts garden: his architecture of terraces, walls of local stone, circular steps, narrow rills of water, lily tanks and pergolas on stone piers; her planting of hardy flowers. At the Deanery Garden at Sonning (1899–1901) and at Hestercombe in Somerset (1904–08), where a sunk square parterre, the Great Plat, is flanked by rills and closed by a pergola 230 feet long, the two worked as a single designer. She designed some four hundred gardens in all.

Her rules for the herbaceous border are set out in Colour in the Flower Garden (1908). The main border at Munstead Wood was two hundred feet long and fourteen deep, backed by a stone wall. It began and ended in grey-leaved plants with blue, white and pale yellow flowers, passed through stronger yellows and oranges, and reached a centre of deep red, so that the eye, prepared by each colour for the next, saw each more strongly. The plants were set in long, narrow drifts that overlapped, so that a plant that had finished flowering left only a small gap, hidden by its neighbours (The border planted by colour). She made smaller gardens of a single colour as well, grey, gold, blue and green.

The Arts and Crafts garden was usually divided into rooms (The garden in rooms). At Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, from 1907, the American Lawrence Johnston made more than twenty compartments enclosed by hedges of yew, beech, hornbeam, box and holly, some mixed in a single hedge, each with its own character: the Red Borders, the White Garden, a Stilt Garden of hornbeams pleached on bare stems. At Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, from 1930, Harold Nicolson laid out the axes and Vita Sackville-West the planting, including the White Garden of 1950.

Gardens beyond Europe

Persia and Mughal India. The oldest continuous garden tradition is the Persian. At Pasargadae, Cyrus the Great’s capital of about 546 BC, stone water channels outline a rectangular palace garden, and Xenophon tells how Cyrus the Younger showed off the straight rows of trees he had planted himself (The paradise: a walled garden in straight rows). Under Islam the garden took its classic form, the chahar bagh or fourfold garden, divided by crossing axes of water and raised walks into four quarters, each divided again, with a pavilion at the crossing or the end (The fourfold garden). The Qur’an’s paradise is a garden with four rivers, and the plan was read in that light. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, carried it from Kabul to India. His memoirs describe how, finding the plain at Agra flat and without running water, he raised water from wells by wheels into tanks and laid out gardens in an order the country had not seen (Order and running water in a flat land). His descendants set their tombs in such gardens, Humayun’s at the centre of one and the Taj Mahal at the river end of another, and in Kashmir built them in terraces up the hills above Lake Dal, where the water falls from level to level over carved stone chutes, the chadar, and past walls of lamp niches, the chini khana.

China. The Chinese scholar’s garden is a landscape in miniature behind high white walls in the middle of a city: the “mountains and waters” of landscape painting made of piled rock and a pool with irregular banks, seen from halls, pavilions and covered galleries that zigzag round it. The finest survive in Suzhou. Its one treatise by a professional designer is the Yuanye (The Craft of Gardens) of 1631 by Ji Cheng, a painter who designed gardens for officials of the lower Yangzi. It rests on two principles, to follow the site and to borrow from what lies round it, and calls the borrowing of views, jiejing, the most important thing in garden making: a distant hill, a neighbour’s trees, the sky above and the water below, the changes of the seasons (Borrowed scenery). Rocks stand for mountains, the most prized being the eroded limestone of Lake Tai (Rocks as mountains). Openings in the walls, the round moon gate and the lattice window, frame each view as a picture, and the winding path ensures that the garden is never seen at once and seems larger than it is: Dézallier’s fourth maxim, reached by the opposite means.

Japan. The Sakuteiki, written in the late eleventh century for the builders of court estates at Heian-kyō, is the oldest Japanese treatise on gardens. It explains how to make the sand court, the pond and its islands, streams and waterfalls (A south court for ceremony, water from the east), and above all how to set stones: a principal stone first, then others answering its “request”, after the scenery of famous places, and never against the taboos, such as setting upright a stone that lay flat in nature (Follow the request of the stones). It already knows the dry landscape, the karesansui, in which stones stand for mountains and gravel for water (The dry landscape). In the Zen monasteries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this became a garden in its own right, as at Ryōan-ji, where fifteen stones stand in a rectangle of raked white gravel about 25 metres long. The tea garden, the roji, and the stroll gardens of the Edo period, such as Katsura, followed. Japanese designers used borrowed scenery too, as shakkei: at Tenryū-ji the hills of Arashiyama, at Entsū-ji Mount Hiei, are part of the garden.

These gardens reached Europe through travellers’ accounts. William Chambers, who had been to Canton, published a Dissertation on Oriental Gardening in 1772, partly as an attack on Brown, and built the pagoda at Kew (1762). The Islamic and Asian buildings themselves are described in The Islamic World and East Asia.

Planting: what each tradition grew, and why

Every tradition chose its plants for what they would do. The formal gardens of Italy, France and the Netherlands needed plants that would take the shears and hold a shape for years. Box (Buxus sempervirens), evergreen, small-leaved and slow, makes the low hedges of parterres and knots, and its dwarf form the scrolls of broderie. Yew (Taxus baccata) is the best of all topiary plants in northern Europe: dense, dark, long-lived, and unusual among conifers in sprouting again from old wood, so that an overgrown hedge can be cut hard back and recover. Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) and beech (Fagus sylvatica), clipped, keep their dead brown leaves through the winter, so a hedge of either is never bare; hornbeam was the French plant for palissades. Lime (Tilia) grows fast, has supple shoots and makes the best pleached alleys and avenues.

The landscape park wanted the opposite: trees grown to their full forms, long-lived, cheap to raise and useful as timber. Brown planted oak and beech above all, with elm, sweet chestnut and Scots pine, larch as a nurse to be thinned later, and cedars of Lebanon near the house for their spreading layers. The Victorians wanted novelty and science: the monkey puzzle, the Wellingtonia (introduced in 1853), the Douglas fir, the deodar, rhododendrons and tender bedding plants. Jekyll wanted permanence and colour: hardy perennials that would stay in the ground year after year, delphiniums, lupins, phlox, peonies, asters, irises and old roses, with grey-leaved lavender, santolina and lamb’s ears at the front of the border and yew behind, the darkest background for flowers.

The measures of the garden

The garden has fewer fixed proportions than the orders, and its measures are mostly about seeing: the formal garden measured its parts from the house and corrected them for perspective, the landscape garden placed them where the eye would find them, and the Victorian glasshouse was measured from a pane of glass.