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 · Ornament · Plans · Materials
Bedding out
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.
Bedding depended on cheap glass, coal for heating and a large staff, and it showed off all three. Pelargoniums, calceolarias, verbenas, lobelias and other half-hardy plants from South Africa and South America were raised by the thousand and set out in May or June. In the 1840s and 50s they went into geometric beds on Italianate terraces and in ribbons along borders; from the late 1860s carpet bedding used low foliage plants, such as alternantheras, echeverias and sedums, clipped to an even height to make flat patterns like a carpet, crests and lettering. Public parks took it up, and it became a matter of civic pride.
William Robinson attacked bedding in the 1870s as costly, short-lived and ugly, and the Arts and Crafts garden replaced it with hardy plants. It never died out in parks and on seafronts.
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.
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
Carry the city’s cross traffic through the park on roads sunk below its surface, out of sight; inside it, give carriages, riders and walkers each their own system of drives, rides and paths, crossing one another by bridges and arches so that none need meet.
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.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Bedding out”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/victorian-bedding. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.