Woodland Gardening by Kenneth Cox sample chapters pps 7-42

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Woodland Gardening - prelims and chapters 1, 2 and 3 (290mm tall x 230mm wide).qxp 06/01/2018 08:39 Page 32 pART I: HISTORY William Robinson’s home, Gravetye Manor: naturalised Camassia in orchard meadow. subjects. Robinson, and his arch enemy, architect and formal garden advocate Reginald Blomfield, battled away in print, and both tried to enlist Jekyll’s support. Having entered the hitherto largely maledominated world of garden design, and seeing through the bluster to what lay behind the feud, Jekyll could see both sides of the argument. As she saw it, both were right and both were wrong. Jekyll’s solution, which followed on from the precepts of Humphry Repton and John Dando Sedding, was to have formality nearer the house with rectangular beds, terraces and straight lines, with wilder, more natural gardening further away, which would eventually merge sympathetically into the surrounding countryside. Jekyll’s approach is how many of the Edwardian house and woodland garden combinations were designed. There is perhaps no better example of this than at Bodnant in North Wales where the house has a walled garden on one side and a series of formal terraces (just the sort of thing that Blomfield would build) on the slopes towards the River Conwy, while the steeper River Hiraethlyn gorge is the centrepiece of a wonderful woodland garden Robinson would have been proud of. William Robinson’s role in designing or advising on specific woodland gardens is hard to quantify. As a typical example of Robinson’s attributed influence, A. J. Huxley in an article on Leonardslee in Country Life 1959 writes: One imagines William Robinson’s writings must have influenced its design for the earliest plantings were made in 1888 only 16 years after Robinson started publishing his periodical The Garden and five years after the first editions of his book The English Flower Garden. Leonardslee was the first of the great English rhododendron-dominated woodland gardens to be planted and undoubtedly influenced other gardeners nearby, with Sheffield Park, Borde Hill, South Lodge, another Loder garden at Wakehurst Place and the Valley and Savill Gardens at Windsor all within easy driving distance. Further afield, Mount Usher in Ireland and Hergest Croft near the Welsh border are often described as ‘Robinsonian’. It turns out that Robinson did not formally design any gardens, partly because he did not appear to have the skills as a draughtsman to draw up garden plans on paper, but probably more because his famed irascibility made the garden designer–client relationship unlikely to bear fruit. Even his friends and professional colleagues sometimes found him unbearable. Architect Edwin Lutyens wrote after a day spent with Robinson: ‘he bores me . . . he goes off on tangents – his conversation wayward and contradicts himself every two minutes – until one feels inclined to explode . . .’ If Robinson had a rival in the world of Edwardian garden writing, it was the equally outspoken Reginald Farrer, who was to rock gardening what Robinson was to wild gardening. They met at least once, a spectacular clash of egos. Farrer was not impressed, describing William Robinson as: ‘unguided and unguidable . . . a thing purely anarchic, 32
Woodland Gardening - prelims and chapters 1, 2 and 3 (290mm tall x 230mm wide).qxp 06/01/2018 08:39 Page 33 TREES, SHADE AND SHELTER The River Vartry, at Mount Usher, Ireland, a garden often described as ‘Robinsonian’. unruddered, unfounded on any rule or depth of knowledge’. William Robinson did not create the woodland gardening style on his own, but nobody else had more influence, particularly on the next generation of gardeners who took advantage of the largest influx ever seen of new plants from the wild. Whatever his shortcomings, Robinson informally advised many gardeners and garden owners. He visited Caerhays in 1899 and advised Leonard Messel at Nymans, Frederick Lubbock at Emmetts, the Aclands at Killerton and the owners of gardens in south-west Ireland including Derreen and Garnish. His influence, above all, was from his periodicals and best-selling books, many of which ran to multiple editions. Robinson’s views were central to the zeitgeist for more naturalistic, less artificial gardening, and Gravetye Manor, where he put his ideas into practice, was much visited and written about by himself and others. Robinson’s ideas have never gone out of fashion, even if his name is fading with the passing of time. His greatest long-term legacy must be his concept of ‘naturalising’. His belief that good gardening practice would creating sustainable plant communities has become widely accepted, and his legacy percolates down to the New Perennial movement, the work of landscape architects, garden designers and academics including Oehme, van Sweden, Roy Diblik, Heiner Luz, Piet Oudolf and the Sheffield school of James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett. Robinson’s naturalising ideal may give the idea that wild and woodland gardening is simply about planting amenable shrubs and perennials and watching them grow. If only! Woodland gardening is above all the artful illusion of non-intervention, creating a ‘look’ as if everything is just taking care of itself. Even marginal gardener Geoff Dutton spent many hours in his Scottish garden creating the myth that he had hardly touched it. The ‘naturalness’ of wild gardening is also questionable, given that most woodland gardens are an assemblage of exotics: plants from China, Himalaya, the Andes and South Africa transplanted to Europe, North America or Australasia. The Golden Age of Plant-hunters in China . . . it so happened that the great revival in rhododendron growing, which set in with the opening of Tibet and China to the plant-hunter, synchronised with a period of our garden history which could not have been more auspicious . . . the age of the informal and the naturally grown shrub was in the ascendency. The soil was ripe for the argosies of Asia. A. T. Johnson, A Woodland Garden Following the 1885 Sino-French treaty of Tientsin, a series of missionaries, mainly from France, headed for the mountains of western China. Père Delavay, Père David, Père Bodinier, Père Farges and their fellow churchmen spent at least as much time exploring and pressing plant specimens, as they did converting the tribes of south-west China 33
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Woodland Gardening by Kenneth Cox sample chapters pps 7-42

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