Alfred Parsons, China Roses, Broadway, watercolor, early 1900s
A HEIGHTENED SENSITIVITY TO PLANTING composition and the use of color were key components of Arts and Crafts gardens. In theory, the floral furnishings for outdoor rooms needed to be as carefully considered as the architectural elements. In place of carpets of annuals, designers sought soothing, more informal solutions by selecting plants for their compatibility with one another. This artistic approach to planting was adopted by artist-gardeners who were thoroughly versed in design and color theory, rather than by architects who delegated planting to nurserymen or horticultural advisers. Taking their cue from William Morris, William Robinson, and Gertrude Jekyll, all of whom advocated the use of perennials, this new breed of artist-gardeners looked to a more sensitive palette of plants and colors than that offered in traditional Victorian gardeners.
Jekyll’s agility in combining form, texture, and color in her borders was legendary, but other artist-gardeners advocated a similar approach. Like Jekyll, Alfred Parsons (1847–1920) was an artist and an accomplished garden designer. A regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy and the New English Art Club, he was also president of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours, an indication of the high regard in which he was held. Parsons’s illustrations enhance many of Robinson’s books and journals, including The Wild Garden, for which he illustrated a special edition. He lived in Broadway, a picture-book village in Worcestershire, where he was part of the Broadway Group of American illustrators for Harper’s Magazine that centered on artists Edwin Austin Abbey (with whom he shared a home) and Frank Millet. Parsons once shared a studio with John Singer Sargent, who painted Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose while based in Broadway in 1885.1 Henry James, another Broadway habitué, commented that Parsons’s work “forms the richest illustration of the English landscape that is offered us to-day. . . . One would like to retire to another planet with a box of Mr. Parsons’s drawings, and be homesick there for the pleasant places they commemorate.”2
Parsons’s own garden at Luggershill (now Luggers Hall), near Broadway, was quintessential Arts and Crafts in both its planning and furnishing, with high green hedges shaped as battlements, topiary, beautifully composed flower and shrub borders, a picturesque summerhouse, a pergola, and a rose garden.3 Parsons’s paintings of Broadway gardens attest to his fine-tuned color sensitivity as well as a botanical accuracy that outdistances many less horticulturally inclined garden painters of the era. While based in Broadway, Parsons designed numerous gardens, such as Court Farm, for stage actress Mary Anderson de Navarro, which was as famous for its topiary peacocks and flower borders as it was for its famous visitors.4 The timber-framed house, with thatched roof and dovecote, was covered in a “whirlwind of climbing roses,” one of Parsons’s signature effects.5
In 1907, Parsons advised on the gardens at Great Chalfield Manor, an exceptionally well-preserved fifteenth-century moated manor house in Wiltshire. He enhanced the old-fashioned pleasaunce with some of his standard design elements, such as climbing roses, topiary yews, and copious flower borders as well as a gazebo that was in architectural harmony with the house. At Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, designed by architect Edward Ould (1852–1909) in a picturesque half-timbered old English style derivative of Richard Norman Shaw, Parsons and his partner, Walter Partridge, laid out the upper gardens near the house, a formal rose garden surrounded by hedges and topiary yews, and a long walk bordered with flowers. Clipped yew hedges, topiary peacocks, picture-perfect borders, and cascades of roses typify Parsons’s style.
Parsons’s fame rests primarily on his artwork for Ellen Willmott’s rare book, The Genus Rosa (1910–14), containing 132 illustrations of rose species described by the author. Although the book was a financial and artistic disaster, because Willmott ignored Parsons’s recommendations regarding papers and printers, the resulting paintings are a legacy both to client and artist.6 Ellen Ann Willmott (1858–1934) was beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy, but she was not savvy when it came to expenses. Financially independent from the age of eighteen, she overextended her resources managing three gardens: Warley Place in Essex, where she kept more than one hundred gardeners busy for years; Tresserve in Aix-les-Bains, France; and Boccanegra in Ventimiglia, Italy.7
Along with Robinson and Jekyll, Willmott was one of the three most important gardeners of the era. All three received the coveted Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society. Jekyll thought Willmott was the greatest of living gardeners, and Robinson had boundless respect for her accomplishments as a hybridizer. Today, few gardens in Britain do not include Eryngium giganteum, or Miss Willmott’s ghost, known for its intense blue color. In its heyday, Warley Place was fifty-five acres in extent, filled with rockeries, roses, perennials, and naturalized sweeps of snowdrops, crocuses, tulips, daffodils, and other bulbs that Willmott hybridized. While still a young woman, she commissioned an extensive alpine garden from the Backhouse firm in York, and from there her passion for plants and gardens grew unabated until she died, nearly destitute, at age seventy-six. Little remains of her gardens, but her book Warley Garden in Spring and Summer records that garden in its most splendid state.
The Manor House, Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire, is another vanished garden associated with a keen horticulturist and brilliant designer. The home of Norah Lindsay (1876–1948), it exuded an air of spontaneity in its plantings, “as if the flowers and trees had chosen their own positions.”8 She laid out the gardens as a series of rooms to complement the low, half-timbered house. The Long Garden, punctuated with fastigiate yews and soft mounds of boxwood, was filled with bold groups of lupines, anchusas, and mulleins, followed by thalictrums, hollyhocks, campanulas, and other English flowers planted in big informal drifts. The color scheme, while appearing deceptively carefree, was carefully considered. The rich blues, deep purples, pinks, and yellows were kept separate from the “hot scarlet of the sizzling great poppies, the burning alstroemerias and all the metallic golds of the rudbeckias and sunflowers,” noted Lindsay. An American visitor commented that Lindsay’s colors were soft greens, gray, buff-violet, and softest salmon.9
Lindsay, a colorful, if not eccentric, woman, designed dozens of gardens for the cream of the aristocracy, including the Duke of Windsor at Fort Belvedere, Windsor, and Nancy Astor’s garden at Cliveden, but her most famous association is that with Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote Manor, where she was a valued advisor, as was her daughter, Nancy Lindsay. Vestiges of her designs can be seen at Mottisfont Abbey, Devon, where she designed a small parterre near the house and advised on the plantings in the large walled garden. Her once-magnificent gardens at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, offer a glimpse into her rarified skills as a master garden-maker. Drifts of lavender along the garden enclosure walls, hundreds of roses, and color-themed borders in parterres accented with topiary are still visible today.
Jekyll’s Munstead Wood, which has happily survived, was a proving ground for her nearly 400 garden commissions, the most famous of which were done in collaboration with Edwin Lutyens. Undoubtedly, Jekyll began designing gardens in response to many requests to supply the special plants she grew at Munstead Wood. Her notebooks detail shipments of plants to dozens of clients’ gardens, ranging from small gardens owned by friends, to large, complex gardens she designed with Lutyens. Jekyll was omnivorous in her appreciation of plants, commenting that there were no “bad” plants, only plants badly used. In the 1920s, when she was in her eighties and nearly blind, she designed borders from her memory of hundreds of plants, their colors, textures, fragrances, and habits. Sometimes she adjusted her planting style to suit the needs of the architect or the client, as was the case at Hestercombe, which represents only one side of Jekyll’s planting genius. In other cases, she was given a greater amount of freedom to indulge her passion for artistic planting combinations.
The Manor House at Upton Grey, Hampshire, is one of the best surviving private gardens demonstrating Jekyll’s skills as a planting artist and garden designer. The gardens display Jekyll’s versatility in planning both formal and wild gardens for a small property. For inspiration, it dips deeply into her planting schemes at Munstead Wood, Hestercombe, and Millmead. The Manor House was the home of Charles Holme, founder of The Studio, who lived there for twenty years after moving from William Morris’s Red House in 1902. He commissioned Ernest Newton to design a comfortable Edwardian family home around the core of an old Tudor farmhouse, and the design of the four-and-a-half acres of ground happily fell to Jekyll.
On the east side of the house, she designed a formal garden within the framework of yew hedges, converting the grass slopes into four descending terraces, each defined with low dry-stone walls filled with rock plants in soft pinks and grays. A small pergola that links the house to the steps leading to the lower garden is covered with roses, clematises, and other vines. The rose garden, divided into geometric beds with square stone pads, is simply planted with roses and peonies and softly edged with stachys. On the lower levels are a wide bowling green and a tennis lawn enclosed by ornamental trees and shrubs. Surrounding borders are planted with Yucca filamentosa, Y. gloriosa, Bergenia cordifolia, and other familiar Jekyll favorites. In contrast with the soft coloring of the rose and lily parterre, the main border’s flowers are more dramatically colored, following the same ideas of color gradation used in the main border at Munstead Wood. A large wild garden at the west front of the house follows Robinsonian principles with its informal design and naturalistic plantings. Mown grass paths wind through taller grass, with rambling roses, walnut trees, and clumps of bamboo. The pond at the far end of the garden nourishes water-loving plants, and in spring, the meadows are carpeted with daffodils, snowdrops, scillas, muscari, fritillarias, anemones, hellebores, and primroses.10
Jekyll’s books were a profound influence on nearly everyone who was interested in the finer points of garden design and horticulture. Her Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) influenced writers and gardeners on both sides of the Atlantic because it is eminently readable, reflecting nearly thirty years’ worth of experience in the subject, and Munstead Wood, which was used as illustrations for her ideas, was by then world famous. The book also includes planting plans for every conceivable type of border that could be used as a practical resource. There are few gardens in Britain that do not owe something to Jekyll’s ideas. At Hidcote Manor, Lawrence Johnston’s striking red borders, composed of deep maroon foliage as well as red and orange flowers, continues to enchant visitors. At Crathes Castle, a picture-book Scottish tower house in Banchory, near Aberdeen, the Burnett family embellished the ancient gardens with a series of color gardens directly influenced by Colour in the Flower Garden, including blue, white, and red borders as well as a gold foliage garden, the last added by Lady Burnett in 1973. Though they do not replicate Jekyll’s designs, the borders at Crathes drink of their spirit. Long before the color borders were added, Jekyll had admired the Edwardian gardens at Crathes in her book Some English Gardens (1904), noting the excellence of their color and diversity of texture and, no doubt, the ancient yew hedges.
The eminent plantsman and botanical artist Graham Stuart Thomas (1909–2003) remarked that Colour in the Flower Garden had piqued his interest enough to seek a visit to Munstead Wood in 1931, the year before Jekyll died. “I was spellbound,” he wrote. “The gradation of tints” in the main flower border with a hot red center “testified to the skill of her garden staff, and to her ideas, developed from the deep study of various arts. . . . any plant which would grow well in her sandy soil was a colour in a paint-box.”11 In his long career as gardens adviser to the National Trust, Thomas had the opportunity to put some of Jekyll’s lessons to work. At Cliveden in Berkshire, he designed two herbaceous borders facing each other on a wide lawn to the north of the house. One in cool colors, the other in hot, the borders successfully weave a complex tapestry of color and texture. He described these borders as providing maximum color in July and August, augmented with purple clematises and yellow roses on the “hot” wall, and lavender and pink clematises and pink roses on the east-facing “cool” wall. He also designed the rose garden at Mottisfont Abbey.
Penelope Hobhouse, a noted garden designer clearly influenced by Jekyll, praised Thomas for his understanding and execution of the subtleties of her art. Jekyll’s genius lies in “the gradual build-up of related shades and tones of colour [and] in a sure sense of what ancillary plants should be used as links to unite the whole scheme.”12 Hobhouse proved an expert at this concept during her years at Tintinhull House, Somerset, where she was the gardening tenant for the National Trust property. Tintinhull’s famous color borders, with cool tones on one side of the lawn and warmer tones on the other, were originally devised by Phyllis Reiss, who worked on the gardens for nearly thirty years before donating the property to the National Trust in 1954. Of Tintinhull, Hobhouse wrote that the “planting style is very much in the tradition of Hidcote Manor and Sissinghurst, where plants in tightly packed flower beds appear to grow in casual profusion.”13 To keep Reiss’s intended effect, Hobhouse replaced many aging plants with better, more vigorous varieties. The original series of garden rooms is of great interest, including a white pool garden and a dramatic red shrub border, and owes much to Jekyll’s planting theories.
In the 1940s, plantsman Peter Healing created a series of remarkable color borders in his four-acre garden, The Priory, near Tewkesbury. Though not replicating Jekyll’s main border at Munstead Wood, which was filled with annuals and perennials, the borders at The Priory are equally innovative in their discerning use of color. Subtle color combinations are interwoven imaginatively with the various textures of shrubs, annuals, and hardy perennials. One border is given over to gray, silver, and white, with warm yellows and reds. A red border, similar to the one at Tintinhull House, creatively combines bronze, purple, and red foliage and flowers. Tim Richardson credited Healing for having “created effervescent planting schemes of great complexity and originality.”14 Like the more famous color borders at Hidcote and the White Garden at Sissinghurst, ingenuity in planting often takes its inspiration from books, but the results are always individual.
Probably the most famous herbaceous borders in England today are at Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, created in the 1920s by Major Edward Compton, whose family had owned the eighteenth-century hall and surrounding twenty-five acres of land since 1948. Much influenced by the garden rooms at Hidcote Manor, Compton reorganized the grounds to include various color-themed gardens typical of the Edwardian era, including a naturalistic rock garden and laburnum-covered pergola attributed to Willmott. But the main attractions are the matching 600-foot-long double herbaceous borders leading from the Queen Anne house down a slight slope to the River Ure. The grand borders, backed by dark yew hedges and separated by a wide grass path, far outdistance Jekyll’s single 200-foot-long border. Large clumps of well-established perennials, such as peonies, irises, and other hardy plants, add to the bold, dramatic effect.
The late Christopher Lloyd’s iconic garden at Great Dixter near Rye, in East Sussex, is a testament to the creative use of a period Arts and Crafts framework as a showcase for dynamic contemporary plantings. In 1910, Lloyd’s father, Nathaniel Lloyd, commissioned Lutyens to remodel and enlarge an ancient manor house complex and devise a garden layout that melded together the ancillary buildings, some of which were dilapidated and tumbling to the ground. Nathaniel, an architectural historian and an expert in topiary, liked order, while his wife, Daisy, leaned more to William Robinson’s ideas of informality. Lutyens’s ingenious plan marrying formality and informality includes two topiary gardens, a sunken garden enclosed by ancient farm sheds, an intimate wall garden, and a network of paths that connected the formal gardens with an informal wildflower meadow and orchard. The diverse areas were tied together with Lutyens’s signature architectural features, including archways, paved walks, and steps. Within this framework, Christopher Lloyd (1921–2006), who was a genius in nontraditional color and textural combinations, created an ever-changing testament to his horticultural prowess. “I take it as a challenge to combine every sort of colour effectively [and] if I think a yellow candelabrum or mullein will look good rising in the middle of a quilt of pink phlox, I’ll put it there.”15 To his credit, Lloyd was never constricted by the layout but used it to great advantage. Today the garden enjoys a new chapter under the direction of Fergus Garrett, who has injected his own genius into revitalizing a period garden with innovative ideas and a new, bolder plant palette.
Of the many outstanding gardeners today, one stands out for her romantic sensibility to design and unusual combinations of plants. Helen Dillon’s former garden in Dublin never ceased to inspire because of its small size and suburban location. Her 2016 decision to give it up after forty years in order to create a smaller garden confirms her wish to be known as a creator, not a curator. Dillon is passionate about plants, traveling far from home to acquire unusual specimens, but the garden she created is not a collector’s garden. In creating her garden, she wrestled with how “to reconcile the collector’s instinct with the desire to make a garden that is pleasant to be in. This is a challenging task because a collector’s garden is all too frequently a cabinet of curiosities, a glorious confection of plants,” she wrote.16 Jekyll opined that “the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden: it only makes a collection.”17 Dillon has observed that “visitors assume that one night, in a flash of creativity, I designed this garden. Not so. My method is to wait until some part of it annoys me and then take action. . . . Endless adjustments have taken place—in the paths, the shapes of the beds, and, above all, in the planting.”18
In its heyday, the Dillon Garden was filled with surprises and many special effects, but the twin borders, best viewed from the window in the Georgian townhouse, literally took the viewer’s breath away. The blue border, she wrote, was a “glorious muddle of different blues . . . turquoise, sapphire, lapis lazuli.” She was willing to break a few rules, even Jekyll’s stern dictum that a garden with only blue flowers is senseless: “Surely the business of the blue garden is to be beautiful as well as to be blue . . . the blues will be more telling—more purely blue—by the juxtaposition of rightly placed complementary colour.”19 With the subtle shading from blue to mauve to violet, illuminated with mounds of artemisias, Dillon proved otherwise.
The challenge of arranging these borders is endlessly fascinating, “perhaps because there’s no chance whatsoever of getting it right—the more I think about it the more complicated it becomes,” she wrote.20 Only those who are truly knowledgeable about plants, whether Jekyll, Lindsay, Lloyd, or Dillon, can even begin to compose artistic borders. The architects who provided such a firm foundation for Arts and Crafts garden design would have been nowhere had there not been dedicated horticulturists to create the plantings.
