An architect’s argument that the garden belongs to the house and should be designed with it, in walls, terraces, hedges and walks, illustrated with drawings of the old formal gardens of England that had survived the landscape movement.
Reginald Blomfield (1856–1942) was an architect of the classical revival, later knighted, and Francis Inigo Thomas (1865–1950) a garden designer who drew the book’s views of seventeenth-century gardens such as Montacute, Brympton and Levens. The book is a history of the English formal garden and a polemic: the landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century had swept away the gardens round old houses, and the horticulturists of his own day treated the garden as a collection of plants.
Blomfield holds that the house and garden are one design, and that the architect, not the gardener, should make both: the lines of the house continue into the garden in terraces, walks, walls and clipped hedges, and the garden is divided into enclosures. William Robinson replied with Garden Design and Architects’ Gardens (1892). The Arts and Crafts garden settled the quarrel in practice, with an architect’s plan filled with a gardener’s planting.
The book, part by part
I The formal garden and its critics
The argument for the architect’s garden against the landscape gardener and the horticulturist.
II The parts of the old garden
Courts, terraces, walks, knots, bowling greens, mounts, garden houses, gates and sundials, with Thomas’s drawings.