Bedding Style : Garden Design Style

It is difficult to say to what extent these more bizarre types of bedding-out originated in Germany; the cultural current between the two countries was strong in the days of the Prince Consort, and the Royal Park style of bedding, on which naturally his influence was greatest, was copied in every municipal park in the land. By now the notion was almost forgotten that such beds to be effective needed to be seen from above. It is true that the terrace as a viewing-stand had to some extent been replaced in private gardens by the veranda or balcony but the beds were no longer thought of as related to each other in a recurrent pattern: the parterre was no longer a carpet. It was not really in the essential nature of its appeal that nineteenth-century bedding out differed from the old parterres, it was rather in its relationship to the society for which it was intended to cater. After all, for whom were these gardens now intended? The parterre de broderie, although horizontal, was a background exactly as a carpet is a background, giving an air of richness to the whole and supplying an underlying and controlling harmony to what stands or moves on its surface. But a patterned parterre in an empty garden is like a carpet in an unfurnished room it has an air of desolate expectancy, of nakedness. The seventeenth century, when these parterres were elaborated, was an age of courts; the nineteenth century was not. The highly dressed crowds that each day thronged Versailles, Marly, St. James's, and Hampton Court, when the monarch was in residence, had no real equivalent in the nineteenth century. There were no throngs at Trentham Castle or at Shrublands Park or at Chatsworth or at Welbeck or at Wrest Park as a normal everyday affair. In the eighteenth century the lack of a highly etiquetted country-residence crowd had been one reason why the English abandoned the ornate ceremonial garden in favour of one that could be enjoyed in the privacy of small groups or even in solitude; in the nineteenth century the attempt to relay the carpet met with only temporary success, because the life that was to flood it and give it reason was reduced to occasional house parties... and those most commonly in the winter. Certainly they had their occasions, but, however frequent, they were now only occasions, not the common run of everyday life.