Shrublands : Garden Design Style

Barry's fault seems to have lain in an undistinguished sense of proportion and scale; it is revealing that his model for Shrublands was the Villa d'Este, which of all the great Italian gardens is least happy in its proportions. The Villa d'Este succeeds in spite of the too great severity of its slope because it is a great water garden, but Shrublands has little water and it must stand or fall by its layout alone... even great statuary and garden furnishings are lacking.' In most of these large gardens the parterre was merely carved out of an old landscaped park, or if the land had never been `improved' all that was not parterre was planted with meandering walks of exotic shrubs. In either case the flower garden was now more out of harmony with the park than it had ever been. There would seem to have been no nineteenth-century equivalent amongst the aristocracy of the `ideal' world which the preceding centuries. had sought. In another sense and at another level there was certainly an `ideal' which could almost be said to represent the true style of the period. Small gardens, those covering between a quarter of an acre and an acre, were now much more common as the in-crease in urban population led to greatly increased suburban living. Suburbia is Everyman's ideal of a country mansion (or castle, or grange, or manor, or farm, or cottage) scaled down to economic possibility; it is the creation of those who must live in towns but will not admit that they do. The gardens of suburban dwellers certainly represented an ideal; but it was now no longer a universal ideal, it was a personal one.