The Search for Style in Garden DesignThe gardenesque manner was fully established by 1840. `According to the Gardenesque School, wrote J. C. Loudon, `all the trees and shrubs planted are arranged in regard to their kinds and dimensions; and they are planted at first at, or as they grow, thinned out to, such distances apart as may best display the natural form and habit of each: while, at the same time, in a general point of view, unity of expression and character are aimed at, and attained, as effectually as they were under any other school. In short, the aim of the Gardenesque is to add, to the acknowledged charms of the Repton School, all those which the sciences of gardening and botany in their present advanced state, are capable of producing. . . . It has been more or less adopted in various country residences, from the anxious wish of gardeners and botanical amateurs to display their trees and plants to the greatest advantage. Perhaps it may be said to have always existed in botanic gardens... Was it for this that Uvedale Price and Payne Knight had destroyed the reputation of Brown? Again there had been a revolution and again it had turned out not at all in the manner the revolutionaries had intended. For whatever else the gardenesque school may have been it was certainly not picturesque. One cannot easily imagine a garden designed by Loudon as the subject of a Claude or a Salvator Rosa. Loudon, the high priest of the gardenesque style or lack of it, was surprisingly the very man to put his finger on the essential change of outlook between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He pointed out that the stream of books on the aesthetics of gardening had narrowed to a trickle, dried up, and been replaced by a flood of gardening literature which was almost solely concerned to introduce new varieties of plants to its readers and to instruct them how they should be grown. |
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