Vita’s channel of influence was a newspaper. But the two greatest gardening influences of the early twentieth century came in book form. I have them both: Gertrude Jekyll’s Home and Garden (1900) and William Robinson’s The English Flower Garden (1883). They are my grandmother’s copies, and I know that she gardened out of them; they lifted her, and countless others, out of the Victorian concept of gardening and into a new perception of how gardening could be – actually, one that we still favour.
William Robinson, an Irishman, came to England as a young man and found work at the Regent’s Park Botanical Gardens in London, and within a few years was active as a garden writer, starting up his own journal, The Garden, in 1871, which, along with his two main publications, The Wild Garden (1870) and The English Flower Garden, served as the vehicle for his trenchant opinions and ground-breaking ideas: the new face of gardening. The English Flower Garden is a hefty polemic, full of swingeing pronouncements and persuasive advocacy of the Robinsonian theory of gardening, along with a great deal of robust practical advice and encyclopaedic information. Robinson in hand, you need look no further. First and foremost, he was out to defy the Victorian craze for carpet bedding and seasonal planting. ‘Pastry-work gardening,’ he called it, and jeered at the typical garden of the day in which ‘only scarlet Geraniums, yellow Calceolarias, blue Lobelias or purple Verbenas were used … the constant repetition of this scarlet, yellow and blue nauseating even those with little taste in gardening matters, while those with fine perceptions began to enquire for the Parsley bed by way of relief.’ Pungent stuff, and note the lofty reference to those with little taste in gardening matters. His sensitive readers will by now be in a panic, fearing to be among the damned, and will rush out to root up the bedding plants, and embark on the wild garden that Robinson is advocating – or rather, to instruct the gardeners to get going, because it is quite clear that Robinson is aiming at the more prosperous gardener, and supposes not only a substantial acreage but also an infrastructure of support. This is a far cry from the more egalitarian tone of today’s garden writer, or television presenter.
The wild garden is, of course, no such thing. Robinson’s grassy walks with swathes of spring bulbs, his stretches of grassland with specimen trees and naturalized plantings, his great borders of herbaceous plants and shrubs, were high maintenance. But they didn’t look like it; they were the antithesis of the finicky particularity of Victorian gardening, in which everything was contrived and formalized. Robinson was after the natural look: ‘the best garden should arise out of its site and its conditions as happily as a primrose out of a cool bank’. His illustrations extol the charms of informal cottage gardens (the well-heeled garden reader was to take a tip from those less well equipped, but with natural style), and he describes in minute detail how the Robinson effect is to be achieved. He effectively introduced the mixed or herbaceous border which has been a staple of gardens large and small ever since, that mixture of shrubs and hardy or half-hardy herbaceous flowers, densely planted, a long ripple of colour and texture without the straight lines and patterning that he abhorred.
He was keen on the rock garden, a less happy feature as anyone who has tried to manage one finds out. The rock garden has rather disappeared today, except in botanical gardens where they have the skills and the labour to deal with these things, but they were still in favour in the 1970s, when I tried to make one. What happens, in practice, is that, having created your small hill of large rocks and earth, you plant up with alpine treasures and then find that every possible weed has snuck in and triumphantly shot its roots under the rocks, from where it is impossible to get them out. The alpines languish; the rock garden becomes a weed garden.
Robinson wanted diversity, an end to Victorian seasonal planting, but appreciation of the seasons by way of spring bulbs, woodland plants, winter-flowering shrubs. His wild garden supposed a merger of the garden with a wider landscape of meadow and woodland. My grandmother had a shot at this, with a lawn that rolled down to a ha-ha above a pasture that was rimmed with copses, and grassy walks with naturalized narcissi, Robinsonian on a small scale only, but he would have approved. A ha-ha is the device favoured in the eighteenth century whereby a lawn appears to merge with the landscape beyond by way of a sunken ditch below a retaining wall (the infinity swimming pool of today uses the same idea), the peculiar terminology said to suggest a person’s surprise on discovering the deception – Ha! Ha!
With his distaste for ‘builders’ and anything contrived, Robinson would be aghast at those television programmes that turn a suburban garden into a building site and spend more time on pavilions, pavings and grottoes than on plants, or those Chelsea show gardens that are more about building materials than anything that grows. Though, that said, the Robinsonian wild garden influence hangs in with the popularity of the wild meadow, fiendishly difficult to establish and maintain – and the attempt by garden designers to cram the dying gasp of a wild garden into the toe of a narrow suburban plot.
Gertrude Jekyll wrote for Robinson’s journal The Garden. She collaborated with him, indeed, and was sympathetic to his ideas, but she struck out on her own, was the esteemed garden designer of her day (a term she would have rejected – she called herself simply a gardener). She was the subject of that wonderful William Nicholson portrait, in which she is seen in profile, resembling Queen Victoria, and looking extremely cross – presumably wondering when this artist fellow will be done and she can get back to the garden. And there’s the splendid companion study of her gardening boots: robust, black and purposeful. Her Home and Garden not only told its readers how to garden, but also how to arrange flowers, make pot-pourri and generally improve the home. Along with her many other books, Home and Garden is the ancestor of the glossy gardening books on sale today, most of them coffee-table fodder, and in many cases the size of coffee tables, simply vehicles for lavish photography. But Jekyll – and Robinson too – is literature by comparison. These are books dense with text – confident, knowledgeable text. Jekyll’s black-and-white photos were her own work, while Robinson’s illustrations to The English Flower Garden are engravings, if you please, done from original photographs of the various seminal gardens he wished to cite.
We still garden according to Gertrude Jekyll, we still favour her emphasis on gradations of colour, her attention to structural plants, her palette of blues and silvers and whites. Her partnership with the much younger Edwin Lutyens, the architect, married her plantings with his landscaping, and an emphasis on vernacular materials, very much Arts & Crafts style. My grandmother raided their schemes for her sunken rose garden, and the canal garden where yew hedges enclosed a space around a long rill, with ponds at each end. So did many others, in the early part of the twentieth century; you still see the Jekyll/Lutyens look up and down the land. She was formidably influential, largely, I suppose, because like Robinson she was breaking new ground – bringing to the garden ideas about colour massing and colour combination which themselves owed something to Impressionism. But this widespread influence must have owed much also to her prolific output: the list of her publications is startling – many books, and hundreds of articles in The Garden and Country Life and elsewhere. All this, and a life in the garden also – there is no question but that she was out there and digging herself, those battered portrait boots the perfect testimony. How did she do it? No family, no children – though she pays nice attention to children in Home and Garden, and has a book called Children and Gardens – and, of course, the early-twentieth-century middle-class domestic support system. She wouldn’t have done the housework. And there would have been gardening staff as well. All the same, it is an amazing achievement for one woman – so much writing, so much garden designing (she designed around 400 gardens), all made possible by a lifetime spent out there in the garden experimenting with her own ideas.
There are those who decide gardening fashion, like Jekyll and Robinson, but there is also the matter of what plants are available. The nineteenth century was t
he great period of plant introduction, with intrepid plant hunters like David Douglas, Robert Fortune, Ernest Wilson and George Forrest bringing introductions from North America, the Himalayas, China, Japan. These effectively changed the face of gardening in this country, and the more arresting plants brought back at once became ferociously sought after, a garden must-have, like the handkerchief tree, Davidia involucrata, or the regal lily, Lilium regale – both from China. The Victorians may have been obsessed with carpet bedding, but they were also avid for the striking new acquisition, and by the beginning of the twentieth century the more affluent English garden must have looked very different from a hundred years before.
There had always been plant introductions, from Roman times onwards, and conspicuously in the seventeenth century when the Tradescants, father and son, brought back from Russia, Virginia, and elsewhere, the plants that are garden staples today. In fact, if you make a forensic inspection of any garden now, there is little there that is native: our gardens are cosmopolitan, they speak in tongues. Introductions that may initially have been fashionable acquisitions for the few have become, over time, ubiquitous, and the norm.
If I consider especially cherished items in my own several gardens, they finger much of the rest of the world. In our first Oxfordshire garden, there was a fine Robinia pseudoacacia, called the black locust in North America from whence it comes, brought here by John Tradescant. Elegantly shaped, lightest of green leaves, racemes of white flowers – I loved it. Nearby, and nicely contrasting with its dark foliage, was a holm oak, Quercus ilex, which comes from the Mediterranean, so an interesting conjunction of two species which, in nature, would never have met. My beloved signature plant, Erigeron karvinskianus, comes from Mexico and is sometimes called Mexican fleabane, though I wouldn’t dream of doing so. I don’t know which plant hunter brought it here, but we are indebted – and indeed it has apparently spread pretty well all around the world, wherever conditions are appropriate, an opportunist migrant. I respect its independence; it doesn’t care to be deliberately planted, it likes sites of its own choice, the cracks in a wall into which it slips.
Mexico has also supplied choisya, another favourite. I have recently had to take out a vastly overgrown Choisya ternata ‘Sundance’, replacing it with Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’. So Mexico is elbowed aside by Asia. But I am not without a choisya. Choisya ‘Aztec Pearl’ is flourishing, in a large pot. Elegant choice of name; I wonder if the Aztecs really did have it.
The longest-lived plant in my London garden is a corokia. It has been in the same large pot for over twenty years, terminally pot-bound, presumably, but apparently quite happy, lighting up the garden on sunny days with its little silvery leaves, studded with tiny yellow flowers in spring – tall, but see-through, so that it gives height without bulk. The corokias come from New Zealand, and mine (Corokia cotoneaster) is not seen around all that much, so that only a visiting New Zealand friend has been able at once to recognize and name it. Surprising that it can adapt so happily to life in a northern city.
I am addicted to fuchsias. Pot after pot of them; I have to avert my eyes from temptation, in the garden centre – no, not another. So I am indebted to South America here, and that most evocative one of all, Fuchsia magellanica, apparently occurs right down to the tip of the continent, as the name suggests – evocative for me because there were great banks of it in my grandmother’s garden, the red one and the pale pink. And Josephine has it, of course, in her Somerset garden. A family speciality, along with aquilegias, for which thanks to North America this time – allowed in all our gardens to self-seed and establish.
But my London garden is indebted to Japan, twice over. The Hydrangea petiolaris, the climbing hydrangea, is now swarming nicely over the back wall, though it took many years to get going. That comes from Japan and the Korean peninsula. And the Fatsia japonica that occupies the difficult bed on the shady side of the garden – established when I came here, so well over thirty years old now – is native to Japan and Taiwan. And to north London also, nowadays, you feel – you see it all over the place: robust, tolerant of city pollution.
Plant introductions influenced garden fashion, and new specimens would initially have been highly priced. But the most expensive plant ever was not so much a fashionable acquisition as an item of commerce. The Dutch tulip mania of the early seventeenth century is more an economic than a horticultural phenomenon. Tulipomania ran for just a few years, 1634–7, and at its height one of the most prized bulbs changed hands for a price equivalent to one of the then-finest houses on an Amsterdam canal. This was a specimen of the rare ‘Semper Augustus’, which no longer exists but looks from contemporary paintings to have been an elegant white flower patterned with red striations. This patterning was the whole point: what was so sought after was the ‘broken’ tulip, where the normal plain colouring had become feathered with another colour, as though delicately painted. It was unknown at the time why this mutation came about, and apparently it could not be induced, so that these unique ‘sports’, when they occurred, caused great excitement among tulip growers which spread, at the time of the mania, to financial speculators. Each ‘broken’ specimen was completely original, and remained that way, as did its offsets, though it did not produce offsets as freely as an ordinary bulb, so that they were slow to increase, enhancing their value even more.
Anna Pavord’s definitive book The Tulip gives a fine account of this extraordinary incidence of economic madness, when sums far beyond the annual wage of the day were paid for a single dry brown ‘root’, as the bulbs were called. They were sold when dormant, and since the cause and progress of this ‘breaking’ was not understood, and it could not be induced, there was an element of chance which fuelled the frenzied competition to acquire one of the treasured few. The right tulip was not just a status symbol – the ultimate fashion item – but had become, more importantly, a potential investment. If the ‘root’ flowered as anticipated, it was even more valuable. All this seems quite extraordinary, viewed dispassionately today. A tulip stays in flower for just a couple of weeks or so, as would these have done, a brief and extravagantly expensive flourish.
The reason for the ‘breaking’ was not in fact discovered until the 1920s. It is the result of a virus, caused by an aphid – the peach potato aphid – and today, when tulips are mass-marketed more as single-coloured flowers, unwanted breaking can be prevented, though there are plenty of desirable bi-coloured kinds around – parrot and viridiflora tulips. But in early-seventeenth-century Holland, when the phenomenon was mysterious, there were all kinds of desperate experiments to induce breaking; pigeon dung was thought to help, or plaster from old walls, chopping a red-flowered and a white-flowered bulb in half and binding them together, painting the tulip beds with the required colour in powder paint. And of course sometimes these efforts would appear to have been successful, but no one knew the real reason.
We know what these horticultural aristocrats looked like from contemporary paintings. There were tulip books that were records of the collections held by tulip lovers, but there were also others that were effectively a magnificent sales catalogue, the equivalent of the glossy brochure from today’s nurserymen. These showed the expensive new ‘breaks’, with their prices; the speculator had an image of what he could expect from his dry brown ‘root’. But by 1637 the bubble had burst, prices plummeted, and the tulip reverted to being a much-cherished, much-valued garden asset, but no longer an object of commerce.
The tulip is native to Central Asia and Turkey, and it would seem that the basic reason for tulipomania occurring in Holland rather than anywhere else is that by the early seventeenth century there were tulips available in the Netherlands. The botanist Carolus Clusius had created a botanical garden at Leiden, importing a large stock of tulip bulbs, among the first to be known in western Europe, and observed the phenomenon of ‘breaking’. So there were tulip bulbs to be bought – though at a price – making the tulip at once a status flower, an indicator of your
wealth and taste, and then when it was realized that ‘breaks’ were even more elegant and remarkable than the standard tulip, and something of a mystery, demand exceeded supply, and a flurry of economic madness ensued. The only time, I suppose, that an aphid has driven the stock market.
Tulips are indeed delectable. I prefer the smaller, more elegant species tulips to those armies of tall showy Darwin tulips – ‘Little Princess’ is just going over as I write, underplanting an acer in a big tub. And while not exactly two a penny today, they are not going to break the bank. Indeed the most expensive tulip I can find on the internet is ‘Absalon’ (dating from 1780, apparently), at £15.50 for three bulbs, which is indeed a ‘break’ – brownish-purple feathered with yellow, and very handsome it looks.
Today, it would seem that the tulip has been ousted as the collectors’ choice by the snowdrop. My favourite bulb supplier’s snowdrop list includes plenty of single bulbs at £20, with ‘Tryzm’ or ‘Phantom’ going for £80. To the untutored eye they all look delightful – that exquisite graceful snowdrop combination of pure white and apple green – but very similar, though I can see that the subtle differences must be what entices the connoisseur. But these are cheap compared with the £725 paid elsewhere for Galanthus woronowii ‘Elizabeth Harrison’, in 2012, which was in turn topped by the £1,390 raised for Galanthus plicatus ‘Golden Fleece’ in 2015. That’s more like it – still nowhere near tulip mania territory, but impressive cash for one small flower. And an instance presumably of botanical fervour rather than narrow-eyed financial speculation.
It is garden fashion that is under discussion here, and collecting is something of a side issue. That said, it is an intriguing pursuit, and there is something admirable about those people whose devotion to a single plant has had them end up with the National Collection of something – a garden with every conceivable kind of clematis, a garden that is bamboo from end to end. I can empathize, I can imagine doing it. I have never collected anything, except for a brief foray into samplers until antique shop samplers became too expensive, and anyway I was getting a bit bored with them, but I can absolutely see that you would never get bored with clematis, and that if there was one you hadn’t tried, you would have to have it.