No Shades Gardens : Garden Design Style

Perhaps, after all, the old disciplines were the quickest route by which gardens could emerge from their morass of formlessness. Those who thought like this had little sympathy for Loudon and his half-baked `ideas'. The essential step to them was obviously to get gardens out of the hands of gardeners. The next notable designer after the sculptor Westmacott, and one of far wider influence, was an architect, no less than Sir Charles Barry, the designer of buildings as distinguished and disparate as the Houses of Parliament and the Reform Club. Barry worked in partnership with William Nesfield on the gardens of the great houses which he built or altered. Nesfield had fought in the Peninsula and in Canada and when he retired from the army as a lieutenant he won himself a reputation as a watercolour painter of cascades. It is not possible to say to what extent these gardens are solely the work of Nesfield; it was probably a true partnership, with Barry responsible for the terracing and the main lines of the geometric portion of the garden, and Nesfield concentrating on the shrubberies and winding walks. Nesfield had a large practice and seems to have been an eclectic on the Repton pattern, as ready as Barry himself to turn from one manner to another on request. The best known of the many places for which his advice was sought were St. James's, Kew, Arundel, Trentham and Alnwick. Barry-Nesfield gardens like those at Trentham Castle are no more than the large home parterres of the Italian garden adapted for the bedding out of half-hardy plants. Because they were conceived as horizontal pictures they were surrounded whenever practicable with terraces from which one could look down on them. If this were not possible the method of the sunk parterre was adopted instead. There was nothing of rest or seclusion or peace about such gardens. No shade was allowed and we are back again at the `vast, scorching expanse' of which St. Simon complained at Versailles. But though this is the nineteenth-century version of the old parterre, reproduced almost in a copyist spirit, there are essential differences.