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Royal Gardens: The Garden of EuphuesThe royal gardens of Wimbledon were destroyed, Nonsuch was sold, Hampton Court was threatened and narrowly escaped; but vegetable growing made great progress. In so far as any pleasure gardens were made by the dominant Parliamentary Party they were of the more austere Dutch type, bare, hard and clean like a Welsh Sunday. The other half of the story is that of the defeated cavalier like Evelyn, forcibly prevented from taking any part in the State's affairs, retiring to his country seat and occupying himself with his garden. These men were not utilitarians, but neither were they artists; they were members of that earnest group of scientific inquirers which gave rise to the Royal Society. It certainly cannot be said of them that they were no more than botanists or collectors. Evelyn, Thomas Browne and Thomas Hanmer loved their gardens, and Evelyn for one fancied himself as a garden designer; but Hanmer's garden was second to his tulips, Evelyn's was second to his collection of trees, and Browne, who was `never master of a considerable garden', cared most of all for an obscure learned reference to some garden of antiquity. In the last years of the interregnum there are signs of change. With the Protector living at Hampton Court and French gardeners employed at Whitehall the high moral tone of England's allotment period began to slide and Gallic frivolities heralded the Restoration. It would be easy to suppose that the prodigy of Versailles was responsible for the spread of French gardening ideas in Europe. It is oversimple to trace each European garden that shows French influence to the school of Le Notre. In fact French influence was general long before 1660, the year in which Louis XIII's little pasteboard chateau began to inflate at the hands of his son. In addition to the activities of Solomon and Isaac de Caux in England and Germany, Olivier de Serres travelled in the Palatinate and may have worked there; one of the Mollet family was gardener to James I of England; Andre, Gabriel, and Claude Mollet the younger were certainly working in England for a year or two before the Restoration; Andre Mollet was gardener to that remarkable sovereign Christina of Sweden, who abdicated in 1654 when the gardens at Vaux were only four years old, and Le Notre's fame was still young. |
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