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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