And there a summer-house that knows no shade.
About the same time the Spectator complains: “Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.” But Addison rather surprises us by pointing abroad for better models “in an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country.”
IN THE ITALIAN GARDEN
At all events, the revolt against that formal orthodoxy was raised under the standard of what came to be called the English school, whose principles suggest those of Gothic architecture. At first it was rather a Strawberry Hill Gothic which improvers practised in imitation of natural effects, heightened by art that clung to tawdry decorations. The cradle of this school was not far from Kew, at Twickenham, where Pope and Horace Walpole, “prince of cockle-shells,” set copies in a “more grand and rural manner,” advocated by a local author, Batty Langley, in his New Principles of Gardening. The rank of leader of the revolution has been claimed also for Stephen Switzer, who, though of foreign origin perhaps, was born in England, and from a working gardener became a nurseryman, then in 1715 published the Gardener’s Recreation, a work showing better education than might be expected from such a career, unless the writer got some literary craftsman to graft flowery tropes and classical tags upon his practical knowledge. Another gardener named Bridgeman is mentioned in connection with Kent, who designed ornamentation both outside and inside the Prince’s villa at Kew.
Kent is commonly called the father of the English or natural school of landscape gardening, and seems at least to have been its first exponent on a large scale. He was followed by rival doctors of the picturesque, very apt to differ, to accuse one another of quackery and of malpractice in the exhibition of clumps, belts, vistas and sheets of water. The Picturesque and the Gardenesque became watch-words like Allopathy and Homœopathy. One practitioner was judged to starve Nature, another to use the knife too freely.
To improve, adorn, and polish they profess,
But shave the goddess whom they came to dress.
These artists in scenery, one of them insists, on a foundation of painting and gardening “must possess a competent knowledge of surveying, mechanics, hydraulics, agriculture, botany, and the general principles of architecture,” besides professing themselves cognoscenti and virtuosi. They dealt with gardens mainly as one feature in a larger field of operations, the laying-out of parks, pleasure-ground, fermes ornées, and such fanciful paradises as Shenstone made famous at the Leasowes. Into the park, of course, the garden proper passes by transition over the lawn turf that is the special beauty of English culture, often separated from less trim outskirts by the invisible barrier of a sunk fence, said to have been Kent’s invention, but this statement seems dubious, as may be Horace Walpole’s story that the name Ha-ha expressed a rustic’s astonishment at being brought to an unexpected stand. But for poets like Cowley and Marvell, who courted “a green thought in a green shade,” it was left for writers of our time to dwell lovingly on the garden they love, however small; the tasteful authorities of that century hardly condescend to notice anything below the pleasure-grounds that ran into lordly demesnes. Humphry Repton, doyen of a later generation of improvers smiled at by Jane Austen, in his proposals for Woburn Abbey, distinguishes the gardens about a country-seat under the following heads:—-
The terrace and parterre near the house.