A French Classical Garden

Flower gardens were by their nature small, and it is to them that we must look for inspiration for today's small gardens. By 1800 their format was determined. They could either be formal, as typified by Kew, or irregular, as exemplified by Nuneham Courtenay. The formal element owed much to the French, and there was already a revival of ancien regime formality in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. In the newly formed United States the formal tradition was never broken, and continued on through the revolutionary period into the new century.

Gardening still remained largely the prerogative of the rich. and it was they who, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in search of a new informality of life and closer commune with the world of nature, 'discovered' the delights of small-scale living. While the rural poor lived in direst poverty. the aristocracy and gentry built cottages ornes, in both the classical and the Gothick style, retreats suitable for 'men of study, science or leisure'. Adorned with verandahs, and climbing plants, they were surrounded by small flower gardens of direct eighteenth-century descent. These had lawns with winding walks and shrubberies, and flowerbeds cut into the turf close to the main living room so that the flowers could be enjoyed to the full while their scent wafted inside.

Developing in parallel with cottages ornes were town gardens, small rectangular tongues of land at the back of the terraces and squares of houses which sprang up in London and Bath during the century. J.C. Loudon described their value for the owner The] should surround his plot with an oval path, that he may walk on without end and without any sensible change in the position of his body'. The most important feature of all these gardens was clearly their gravelled walks. As these houses were usually used only seasonally, the design of the gardens rarely rose above a central area of green turf and a surrounding border of trees and shrubs. These had to contend with heavy air pollution caused by the smoke from coal fires, which explains the huge popularity of container plants for both the house and the garden. It was only as the century progressed that proper town gardens developed, with built structures to act as eye-catchers, flowerbeds and other delights.

More important than this in the long term, perhaps, was the plant dialogue with America which was to transform the flower' garden. The key figure in this story was the Quaker John Bartram (1699-1777) who sent on subscription to British gardeners an annual box of seeds of about a hundred different species. Among those were the first American rhododendrons and magnolias and a large number of aster and phlox species. This influx was complemented by a burgeoning commercial nursery industry, dedicated to propagating plants and making them available to an ever widening public. By the close of the eighteenth century all the ingredients were in place for a vast expansion in garden-making.

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The Late Medieval garden And An Italian Renaissance garden

A NORTHERN RENAISSANCE GARDEN

This is a garden of a kind that Shakespeare would have known. It retains the medieval love of detail and enclosure but adds to it a Renaissance sense of order. The repetition of a series of identical enclosed geometric spaces is critical to evoking a type of layout which spread through France, Germany, the Low Countries and England from the 1580s onwards in response to the new ideas of the Italian Renaissance. Encompassed by a hedge of quickthom, the standard hedging plant of the age, it includes a hornbeam tunnel arbor (a medieval feature which lived on); a flower garden planted with flowers for seasonal color and evergreen topiary and hedging for year-round interest; and a potager divided into compartments containing vegetable beds, a small orchard and a herb garden.

The potager is a simplified version of the many garden patterns in the Dutch artist Vredemann de Vries's Hortorum Viridariorumque elegantes et multiplices formae... (Antwerp, 1583), which was influential throughout northern Europe. Its most distinctive feature is the woodwork which would give instant, unmistakeable period effect even though the capital outlay would be high. The Renaissance emphasis on symmetry and formality rules out any softening of hard contours by allowing plants to tumble over them, but there is ample room here for fruit trees, soft fruit, vegetables and herbs.

The flower garden is based on one of several designs in Salomon de Caus's Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes (1615), combined with elements from one of Crispin de Passe's most famous engravings illustrated overleaf. While not complicated to maintain, this garden calls for patience, as the hedges and topiary require between five and eight years to mature — unless you use fully grown specimens.

The atmosphere of introspection is emphasized by the tunnel arbor — a medieval feature which retained its vitality into the 1680s — and another, inner wall or hedge, here of beech. Standard hollies stand at the comers and entrances, presenting a striking contrast in winter to the russet leaves of the beech. Squares and rectangles of smooth turf continue the medieval tradition of appreciating grass for its own special beauties, and form a containing band of restful areas of green, with cypresses acting as stately sentinels in the comers. The flowerbeds in the centre are edged with clipped box, and are filled with topiary and flowers which, to be correct, would be sparsely planted. I would cheat and make it denser, but avoid any suggestion of anachronistic bedding out.