French Gardens: The Garden of Euphues

Portland had visited the principal French gardens and Le Notre, already in his eighties, regrets that `owing to his youth' he was unable to accompany him and show him round. There is a reference to plans and to a gift from the King. Le Notre's nephew, Claude Desgots, is traveling in England and Portland will give him assistance. At Het Loo in the Low Countries it was a French designer, Daniel Marot, whom William engaged. But despite all this, William's arrival in England did some-thing to check French artistic as well as French political influence. Indeed, by 1688 even in its homeland the force of the French inspiration was already largely spent. The state of the kitchen garden at Versailles at the end of the century was typical of the malaise that had descended upon France as the great King grew old. Many of the fruit trees were dead and had not been replaced, others had pulled away from their nails in the wall and hung neglected, and this was the chief work of the great master Le Quintanie 2 within forty years of its first planting. Nevertheless though the spark had gone out in its homeland there was as yet no thought of altering the main French constituents of a garden abroad. Even in England, where the problem was felt by discerning men to be a different one and to call for a different answer, there seemed to be no clearly marked alternative available save to return to an earlier fashion. In 1666 Pepys, walking in Whitehall with Hugh May, the architect, discoursed `of the present fashion of gardens to make them plain, that we have the best walks of gravel in the world, France having none, nor Italy: and our green of our bowling alleys is better than any they have. So our business here being ayre, this is the best way, only with a little mixture of statues, or pots, which may be handsome, and so filled with another pot of such or such a flower of green as the season of the year will bear. And then for flowers, they are best seen in a little plot by themselves; besides, their borders spoil the walks of another garden.' This is a reversion to the type of Flemish town garden of medium size, but it proposes no solution to the layout of a great garden such as St. James's or Hampton Court. Twenty-two years after Pepys's remark, with the accession of William and Mary, the process of erasing French detail is accelerated, but the skeleton does not change at all. The simplification of the parterres, the failure to think and plan on the grand scale, the increase in box, yew, and topiary, are all evidence of the Dutch gloss upon the French text. That these latter features were felt to be associated with Holland is clear, for immediately her hated brother-in-law died Queen Anne swept away the box-edged parterres from Hampton Court.