Do not bring the park up to the walls of a house: give the house a terrace, steps and a flower garden in formal lines between it and the park, because the house is a work of art and must be joined to the landscape by art.
Rules · Site · Theory · Materials
The wild garden
Place perfectly hardy plants, foreign as well as native, in woods, meadows, banks and the edges of water where they will thrive and spread without further care, instead of renewing tender bedding every year.
Robinson is careful to say what he does not mean. The wild garden is not a garden of native plants, nor a garden left to run wild, nor a planting of exotics in a shrubbery. It is the naturalising of hardy plants from the temperate world, bulbs in rough grass, climbers through old trees, Caucasian and North American perennials by streams, in places that suit them, so that they need nothing more once established. Such planting costs little, lasts, and changes through the year, where bedding is bare for half of it.
The idea passed into the Arts and Crafts garden, where the formal garden near the house shades into orchard, meadow and woodland planted in Robinson’s way, and from there into the naturalistic planting of the twentieth century.
Related rules
Plant each tree and shrub apart, with room to grow to its full natural form, so that it can be seen and admired as a specimen; prefer foreign kinds to native ones, so that the place is recognised at once as a garden, a work of art.
Raise tender plants in glasshouses through the winter and plant them out in early summer, massed in beds cut in the lawn or on a terrace, in blocks, ribbons or patterns of a few strong colours; lift them in autumn and replant for the next season.
Glaze a roof in a series of small ridges and valleys, the panes set at an angle on light sash bars, so that the low sun of morning and evening strikes the glass more squarely, the roof is stiffened by its folds, and the rain runs into gutters in the furrows.
Build on a single grid of 24 feet, set by the 8-foot spacing of the roof ridges and the size of the largest pane of glass, so that every column, girder, sash bar and pane is one of a few standard parts that can be made by machine, delivered and bolted together in any number.
pane 49 × 10 in · ridge 8 ft · bay 24 ft · spans 24, 48, 72 ft · 1,848 × 408 ft
Lay out the public park with a drive round its edge, lakes dug in the hollows and the spoil raised into mounds, winding paths through groves and lawns inside; sell plots for villas round the boundary to pay for it, their gardens facing the park.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The wild garden”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/robinson-wild-garden. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.