The garden of the Arts and Crafts house: an architect’s plan of terraces, walls, steps, rills and pergolas in local materials, divided by clipped hedges into rooms, and filled with a gardener’s planting of hardy flowers in borders arranged by colour.
The Arts and Crafts garden came out of a quarrel. William Robinson, in The Wild Garden (1870) and The English Flower Garden (1883), attacked bedding out and topiary and asked for hardy plants grown naturally (The wild garden). Reginald Blomfield, in The Formal Garden in England (1892), answered that the garden belongs to the house, should be designed by the architect with it, and should be formal, as the old gardens of England had been (House and garden designed as one). The best gardens of the next forty years took the plan from Blomfield and the planting from Robinson.
The partnership that made them was that of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens, who met in 1889. Lutyens designed the house and the architecture of the garden: terraces, walls of local stone, circular steps, rills of water, tanks for water lilies, and pergolas on stone piers. Jekyll planted it. Her borders, set out like a painter’s palette in long overlapping drifts, ran from cool colours at the ends to hot reds and oranges at the centre, with grey foliage to cool the eye (The border planted by colour). At Munstead Wood, her own garden, at the Deanery Garden at Sonning and at Hestercombe in Somerset, the two worked as one designer.
The planting was of hardy plants that could stay in the ground year after year: delphiniums, lupins, phlox, peonies, asters, lilies, irises and old roses, with grey-leaved plants such as lavender, santolina and lamb’s ears along the front of the border, and plants self-sown in the cracks of paving and walls. Hedges were of yew, the darkest background for flowers, or of beech and hornbeam, which hold their brown leaves through the winter; and topiary, scorned by Robinson, came back in yew peacocks and birds.
The garden was divided into rooms (The garden in rooms). At Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, from 1907, the American Lawrence Johnston made a sequence of compartments enclosed by hedges, some of mixed holly, yew, beech and hornbeam, each with its own colour or character: the Red Borders, the White Garden, the Stilt Garden of pleached hornbeams on bare stems. At Sissinghurst in Kent, from 1930, Harold Nicolson laid out the axes and Vita Sackville-West the planting, including the White Garden of 1950. Both are among the most visited gardens in England, and the garden of rooms is still the commonest plan for a large English garden.