Garden Plant Material : Garden Design Style

Physically the difference was in the plant material used. The most elaborate of the old parterres de broderie used box, or turf, or often no plant material at all. Certainly no Italian parterre of the sixteenth or French of the seventeenth century disposed of such masses of vivid colour, nor, had they done so, would they have used it in combinations solely intended to increase their intensity. The result of squadrons of geraniums, calceolarias, marguerites, alyssum and lobelia, was that in the spring and summer the nineteenth-century parterre was infinitely more gaudy than its predecessors, while in the autumn and winter it was infinitely more dull. The brilliance of colouring, and the scrupulous care with which the beds were maintained, combined to shock the spectator and elicit a gratifying gasp of admiration; these gasps were dearly bought; no one can gasp for long at what he sees under his bedroom windows each morning. Perhaps even the old parterre de broderie could never have given a very acute protracted pleasure, but at least the eye could amuse itself by tracing the sinuosities of its correspondent shapes even when they had already been traced many times before, whereas no eye could linger on the hot colours of `bedding out'. Some of the gracelessness of the time, the muscular contrast of masses of pure colour drilled amongst heavy permanent defences of holly and laurel, was Germanic. The Germans had never evolved a garden style of their own, although the strong national temperament had coloured the surface of every style they touched. The curiously distinct national shapes which marked their versions of Italian and French gardens, as at Schonbrunn and Cassel, were less evident when they attempted the English park garden. This they rarely did wholeheartedly, but the most notable of German `natural' parks, that of Prince Piickler at Muskau, contained an early example of the flower garden restored to the vicinity of the house and reappearing in a distinctive way. Shaped flower beds, stars, crescents and roses, scattered inconsequently over the lawn, show a strange side to the man who had spent a vast fortune to achieve a Burke-Brown park.