W. H. Ward, Garden at High Moss, near Keswick, perspective (Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art, 1908)
W. H. Ward, Garden at High Moss, near Keswick, perspective (Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art, 1908)
MORE THAN ANY OTHER PUBLICATION of the period, The Studio magazine reveals how artists and architects actually envisioned gardens. Founded in 1893 by Charles Holme, an art connoisseur and latter-day owner of Morris’s Red House, The Studio celebrated the new approach to art and design that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.1 It appealed to the younger generation of art lovers and artists who had tired of the late Victorian era’s stale academic approach to art and embraced the current House Beautiful aesthetic.2 Adopting the motto “Use and Beauty,” the magazine was singular for recognizing applied art and craftsmanship as the equal of fine art. Its coverage included jewelry, metalwork, embroidery, photography, and book arts as well as domestic architecture, interior decoration, and garden design.3
In addition to its unparalleled coverage of all the arts, The Studio was successful because of its exceptional illustrations. Its covers—the initial one designed by Aubrey Beardsley and others by C. F. A. Voysey—lent a distinctive graphic identity to the magazine. Early issues included facsimiles of lithographs made especially for the magazine by James McNeill Whistler and other fashionable artists. The Studio’s reviews of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’s annual venues and its sponsorship of design competitions appealed to up-and-coming architects, artists, and designers. Extensive coverage of trends in Europe and America gave birth to The International Studio, for many years a mainstay of art schools abroad. The Studio also published volumes devoted to individual artists and themes, annual yearbooks of decorative arts, gardening annuals, and a formidable range of books, including The Gardens of England, edited by Holme.4
The Studio’s appealing color renderings of houses and gardens encapsulated the versatility and creativity of garden design from the architectural viewpoint. Even though many of these renderings were romanticized visions of gardens, they were always rich in imagination and detail. A rendering of High Moss, near Keswick, Cumbria, is an excellent example of the type of designs that architects were producing at the time. Designed in 1900 by William Henry Ward (1865–1924), who worked briefly for Lutyens, the garden at High Moss, a storybook double-gabled, whitewashed cottage, is somewhat fanciful.5 The walled enclosure, anchored by twin garden houses, with paved and topiary gardens surrounded by high, clipped hedges, is more suited to a small Elizabethan manor house than a vernacular-style Lakeland cottage.6 A rendering for a proposed house in Barnsley depicts a linear hedge with arched openings separating the front lawn from the geometric garden enclosures. Parterres, planted with rose or peony standards and clipped yews in one area and a sundial garden in the other, offer pleasant, but undistinguished outdoor spaces.
The Studio was among the first to champion Voysey (whose work was featured in the first issue), Baillie Scott, Charles Edward Mallows, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and other architects associated with the new art. Most of the architects hailed by The Studio were largely ignored by Country Life magazine, founded four years later in 1897 to promote upper-class country living. Country Life championed architects such as Edwin Lutyens and Robert Lorimer, whose clients sought houses steeped in vernacular traditions, rather than the artistic homes favored by The Studio.
The Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) was one of the most original architects to emerge in the mid-1890s. He was described by Hermann Muthesius as “an architect to his fingertips [with a] strong architectural sense” that prevailed in his idiosyncratic buildings and furnishings.7 Although Mackintosh’s early sensibilities were founded in the Arts and Crafts philosophy, his work rapidly transcended the insularity of his English contemporaries. Mackintosh and his circle, including the Macdonald sisters (Margaret and Frances) and Herbert MacNair (all based at the Glasgow School of Art), gave birth to the Glasgow style in their revolutionary display at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in 1896.8 The group’s distinctive embroideries, metalwork, posters, and furniture, later shown in international exhibitions, would have a far-reaching influence on modern design.9 The Macdonald sisters’ highly stylized flowers and elongated female figures in their gesso panels and stained glass formed the decorative base in their numerous Glasgow commissions, including interiors for four tearooms designed by Mackintosh.
Mackintosh’s architectural work was widely applauded abroad. His entry for the 1901 German-sponsored Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover) competition signaled his unusually fertile approach to design. The Glasgow School of Art and several of his country houses are considered masterpieces. His passion for decoration, whether flower studies, landscapes, or textiles painted in his last years when his architectural commissions diminished, all attest to his unique vision.10
Along with the Glasgow School of Art, Hill House is his best-known and best-preserved work. He received the commission from the prominent Glasgow publisher Walter Blackie in 1902, shortly after being made partner in the architectural firm Honeyman, Keppie, and Mackintosh. Mackintosh’s charge was to design a country house in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, on the top of a hill overlooking the Firth of Clyde. When Mackintosh handed Blackie the plans, he wrote, “Here is the house. It is not an Italian villa, or English Mansion House, Swiss Chalet, or a Scotch Castle. It is a Dwelling House.”11 His design was vaguely Scottish Baronial, but the light gray stucco exterior, with unadorned gables and chimneys and asymmetrical windows with minimal dressings, signaled a revolutionary approach. The interior spaces are dramatic and unconventional, with stark, dark-stained wood on the main floor and ethereal white bedrooms with elegant rose- and lavender-colored fittings upstairs. The decorations, designed in collaboration with his wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, ranged from his signature geometric furniture to striking metal-and-glass light fixtures. More than one hundred years later, the house is still awesome, rising up like a phoenix on a hillside among more conventional homes.
The garden is rarely mentioned, but Mackintosh’s perspectives of the house show how he linked indoor and outdoor spaces through geometry. There are low terrace walls, with espaliered shrubs of impossible form and glittering fruit trees that seem to be on the verge of bursting, and a baronial-style dovecote anchored in one corner. The semicircular entry drive is lined with square-shaped rose standards. U-shaped spy holes on the boundary walls frame the appropriate viewpoints to the house. The garden plan echoes the square motifs used in the furniture and light fixtures in the house. The terrace, divided into nine squares, resembles an outdoor gameboard for tic-tac-toe, or one of Mackintosh’s ebonized tables or metal lighting fixtures.12
The contemporary Glasgow architect John James Joass (1868–1952) was the first to address the history and lore of garden design in the pages of The Studio. Joass made a case for seventeenth-century formal gardens in Scotland as worthy prototypes for new gardens. Referring to the lengthy debates about the “relative function of the architect and the horticultural artist in regard to garden design,” Joass argued that since the Renaissance period, architects had shown themselves quite capable of designing gardens. The moderate scale of seventeenth-century Scots gardens were excellent models “for everyday application when the pleasaunce is becoming again a part of the English dwelling.”13 Old Scots garden enclosures (or pleasaunces), with their characteristic walls, ornamental detailing, and garden buildings, provided inspiration and vocabulary for Arts and Crafts gardens.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, The Hill House, Helensburgh, line drawing, 1903 (Studio Yearbook of Decorative Art, 1907)
Barncluith, a steeply terraced garden overhanging the River Evan in Lanarkshire, is sheltered by long enclosure walls and has fanciful bird topiaries in yew and box, as well as traditional summerhouses. “It is quite unlike anything else,” wrote another Scotsman, Robert Lorimer. “It is the most romantic little garden in Scotland.”14 Stobhall, in Perthshire, overlooking the River Tay, is another romantic garden, with a seventeenth-century topiary garden and dwellings dating to the same century. As envisioned by L. Rome Guthrie, an Arts and Crafts architect who supplied illustrations for H. Inigo Triggs’s Formal Gardens in England and Scotland, the elegant central sundial and exaggerated yews provide a perfect match for the old house.
Although he was not the first to write about garden design in The Studio, Edward Schroeder Prior (1852–1932) summed up the magazine’s approach to the decorative aspects of a garden. An important Arts and Crafts architect, Prior “was the most eccentric, intellectual and original pupil in the Shaw office,” according to historian Margaret Richardson.15 A founder member of the Art Workers’ Guild and secretary of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Prior was known for his highly original blending of building materials in two extant projects, The Barn, in Exmouth, Devon, and Home Place, High Kelling, Norfolk.16 Prior began work at Home Place (now known by its original name, Voewood) in 1903 for the Reverend Percy Lloyd. After the construction of several outbuildings, including thatched cottages for the gardeners, Prior set to work on the main house, designed in a butterfly plan with distinctive colors and patterning of the textured wall surfaces. In contrast to the house’s eccentrically patterned exterior, the interiors consist of plain whitewashed walls and untreated timbers, taking their cue from Philip Webb’s Red House for William Morris and Lutyens’s house for Gertrude Jekyll at Munstead Wood. The sunken garden (formerly a flat turnip field) was reached by stone steps leading down from the terraces flanking the two wings of the house. A water garden and pergolas completed the scheme. In their book, Gardens for Small Country Houses, Jekyll and Weaver pronounced the stepped scheme “a counsel of perfection.”
Prior addressed his articles to “garden-makers as artists,” outlining the principles, practice, and materials that one needed to grasp. “The garden’s immediate connection with the house is manifest,” he wrote, reiterating much that had been said earlier by John Sedding.17 Prior was critical of the improper use of materials and referred to the “nastiness of the materials of garden-design” and “the present-day vulgarities of commercial material [which need] to be taken into account by the garden-maker.”18 He recommended the creation of an enclosure with hedges or walls, the use of stone for edging paths, and straight lines for flower bed layout. “Of course in practice irregular slopes and irregular boundaries are the common lot, but let not the garden-maker be discouraged. Out of such material his art grows,” he concluded.19
Among The Studio’s writers, Charles Edward Mallows (1864–1915) had the most significant impact in defining the essential guidelines of good garden design for Arts and Crafts architects. Mallows possessed an artist’s eye for composition and appropriateness, and regardless of the size of the houses he designed, they always appeared unpretentious. Although little remains of Mallows’s built work, his renderings for schemes, both real and imaginary, distill the essence of architectural gardening at its best.20 Above all, he is best remembered as a skilled pencil draftsman and perspective artist.
Charles E. Mallows, Design for Brackenston, Pembury, Kent, pencil drawing by Frederick L. Griggs, 1904
Jekyll and Weaver praised Mallows in Gardens for Small Country Houses, singling out one of his houses for the “close connection of house and garden,” the underlying premise of their book.21 His schemes typically employ a simple sunken garden, sometimes with a central pool, and architectural devices such as covered archways to connect house and garden. Brackenston, in Pembury, Kent, designed for the Reverend R. F. W. Molesworth, has a straightforward layout of terraces, with low walls and a simple pergola enclosing the garden, as shown in a rendering published in 1907. He possessed an unusually observant eye for paving, steps, pergolas, and other architectural detailing, all designed to good scale. Together with his pupil, F. L. Griggs, Mallows wrote numerous articles on architectural gardening for The Studio between 1908 and 1910 that introduced the nuances of garden design to the younger generation. They served as a forum for Mallows’s own work and theories.
Frederick Landseer Griggs (1879–1938), who was known for his brooding etchings of rural cottages and the English countryside, was another leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement.22 Associated with the Cotswold School, he counted Charles Ashbee, Philip Webb, Ernest Gimson, and the Barnsley brothers among his friends. Although he trained as an architect, it was his talent as an architectural draftsman and etcher that brought him considerable renown. His etchings of imaginary medieval buildings form the core of his artistic talent, but he also illustrated numerous books, including garden memoirs.23
In their articles for The Studio, Mallows and Griggs captured the essence of the symbiotic nature of gardens and architecture in both words and pictures. “The happy union of house and garden in architectural design,” they wrote, emerged in sixteenth-century England as the result of designers considering “reasonableness and order” as necessary components to all good architecture. Mallows paid tribute to Sedding, whose principles of twenty years earlier had finally seen the demise of the “landscape man” in favor of architectural gardening.24 Flagged walks flanked by high hedges and other equally simple devices inspired by old manor house gardens could be used to great effect in new gardens for smaller houses, he advised, echoing the words of Sedding. But even the best of garden planning, they argued, could be spoiled by the faulty arrangement or lack of scale in the detailing. Decorative features, such as lead figures, sundials, and balustrades “should always be judged on the site and never left to be settled by designs on paper, however carefully they may be worked out.”25 In general, their recommendations for garden design were sensible, if not self-effacing.
Mallows’s 1909 scheme for remodeling a small homestead known as Crocombe in Happisburgh, on the Norfolk coast, is simplicity itself. As Jekyll and Weaver wrote, “The essence of the planning is the protection of the garden from the fierce and frequent winds that blow from north and east.”26 This is achieved with a hedged recess near the house and a sunken flower garden in the old farmyard with flagged paths and steps surrounding it. For additional shelter from the winds, Mallows proposed several schemes in The Studio, ranging from a long, open pergola to a more rustic covered arcade. In all, it was typical of his simple, yet elegant, approach to garden design that was devoid of the eccentricity shown by some of his better-known colleagues.
The two most complete examples of Mallows’s work are Craig-y-Parc in Pentyrch, near Cardiff, and Tirley Garth, both of which bring to life his ideas about garden planning. Designed in 1913 for Thomas Evans, a colliery owner in Wales, Craig-y-Parc is a double-gabled house, with a cloister court connecting the two wings, overlooking a formal terraced garden. A small rose garden adjacent to one wing and a lily garden on the other serve as outdoor rooms. From the long flight of steps leading down to the lawn enclosed by low stone walls is a grand view of the countryside of rural South Wales. Woodland gardens on the entrance side of the house provide the requisite balance between informality and formality. It is now a private school.
Charles E. Mallows, A Seaside House and Garden at Happisburgh, Norfolk, line drawing (The Studio, March 1909)
Tirley Garth, near Taporley, Cheshire, is a gracious country house, originally commissioned by Bryan Leesmith in 1906, when it was called Tirley Court. It was not completed until 1912 when Richard Prestwich, a Manchester textile industrialist, asked Mallows to finish the building. The house, built around a central courtyard, with an enclosed cloister walk serving as part of the terrace, is a grander version of Craig-y-Parc. The site was selected to take advantage of the superb view across the Cheshire plain.27 Tirley Garth also has an outstanding garden, conceptualized for the first client, but not built until 1912. Mallows’s sketches, first published in The Studio, show a strong architectonic conception. When the project finally went forward, Mallows consulted with the landscape architect Thomas Mawson for recommendations for the plantings.
Charles E. Mallows, The Garden Entrance, Tirley Court [Tirley Garth], line drawing (The Studio, October 1908)
Mallows made skillful use of the different levels of the hillside site, with a circular vegetable garden encompassing an acre in size at the uppermost elevation, and a long, linear axis connecting the circular garden with a semicircular rose garden on axis with the house. The rough slate paving, steps, and other architectural detailing defining each level and garden area are tributes to Arts and Crafts sensibilities of utility and beauty as well as an example of “the happy union of house and garden.” Mawson provided planting plans for the borders and the surrounding landscape.28 Tirley Garth still retains Mallows’s remarkable hardscaping, along with Mawson’s horticultural elements, including impressive sweeps of mature rhododendron plantations. But it is Mallows’s visionary perspectives that bring the garden alive as it was in the Arts and Crafts era.
