A Garden of Peace: A Medley in Quietude

by Frank Frankfort Moore

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

The Temple is one of the “features” which began to grow with great rapidity in connection with the House Garden. And here let me say that, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating elements of the House Garden is the way in which its character develops. To watch its development is as interesting as to watch the growth of a dear child, only it is never wilful, and the child is—sometimes. There is no wilfulness in the floral part: as I have already explained, the “dwarf habit” of the stock prevents all ramping and every form of rebellion: but it is different with the “features.” I have found that every year brings its suggestions of development in many directions, and surely this constitutes the main attractiveness of working out any scheme of horticulture.

I have found that one never comes to an end in this respect; and I am sure that this accounts for the great popularity of the House Garden, in spite of its enemies having tried to abolish it by calling it Formal. The time was when one felt it necessary to make excuses for it—Mr. Robinson, one of the most eminent of its detractors, was, and still is, I am happy to be able to say, the writer to whom we all apply for advice in an emergency. He is Æsculapius living on the happiest terms with Flora.

But when we who are her devotees wish to build a Temple for her worship, we don't consult Æsculapius: he is a physician, not an architect, and Mr. Robinson has been trying to convince us for over twenty years that an architect is not the person to consult, for he knows nothing about the matter. Æsculapius is on the side of Nature, we are told, and he has been assuring us that the architect is not; but in spite of all its opponents, the garden of form and finish is the garden of to-day. Every one who wishes to have a garden worth talking about—a garden to look out upon from a house asks for a garden of form and finish.

I am constantly feeing that I am protesting too much in its favour, considering that it needs no apologist at this time of day, when, as I have just said, opinion on its desirability is not divided, so I will hasten to relieve myself of the charge of accusation by apology. Only let me say that the beautiful illustrations to Mr. Robinson's volume entitled Garden Design and Architects' Gardens—they are by Alfred Parsons—go far, in my opinion, to prove exactly the opposite to what they are designed to prove. We have pictures of stately houses and of comparatively humble houses, in which we are shown the buildings starting up straight out of the landscape, with a shaggy tree or group of trees cutting off at a distance of only a few yards from the walls, some of the most interesting architectural features; we have pictures of mansions with a woodland behind them and a river flowing in front, and of mansions in the very midst of trees, and looking at every one of them we are conscious of that element of incongruity which takes away from every sense of beauty. In fact, looking at the woodcuts, finely executed as they are, we are forced to limit our observation to the architecture of the houses only; for there is nothing else to observe. We feel as if we were asked to admire an unfinished work—as if the owner of the mansion had spent all his money on the building and so was compelled to break off suddenly before the picture that he hoped to make of the “place” was complete or approaching completeness.

Mr. Robinson's strongest objection is to “clipping.” He regards with abhorrence what he calls after Horace Walpole, “vegetable sculpture.” Well, last year, being in the neighbourhood of one of the houses which he illustrates as an example of his “natural” style of gardening, I thought I should take the opportunity of verifying his quotations. I visited the place, but when I arrived at what I was told was the entrance, I felt certain that I had been misdirected, for I found myself looking through a wrought-iron gate at an avenue bounded on both sides with some of the most magnificent clipped box hedges I had ever seen. Within I was overwhelmed with the enormous masses treated in the same way. It was not hedges they were, but walls—massive fortifications, ten feet high and five thick, and all clipped I I never saw such examples of topiary work. To stand among these bêtes noires of Mr. Robinson made one feel as if one were living among the mastodons and other monstrosities of the early world: the smallest suggested both in form and bulk the Jumbo of our youth—no doubt it had a trunk somewhere, but it was completely hidden. The lawn—at the bottom of which, by the way, there stood the most imposing garden-house I had ever seen outside the grounds of Stowe—was divided geometrically by the awful bodies of mastodons, mammoths, elephants, and hippopotamuses, the effect being hauntingly Wilsonian, Wagnerian, and nightmarish, so that I was glad to hurry away to where I caught a glimpse of some geometrical flower beds, with patterns delightfully worked in shades of blue—Lord Roberts heliotrope, ageratum, and verbena.

I asked the head-gardener, whom the war had limited to two assistants, if he spent much time over the clipping, and he told me that it took two trained men doing nothing else but clipping those walls for six weeks out of every year!

From what Mr. Robinson has written one gathers that he regards the clipping of trees as equal in enormity to the clipping of coins—perhaps even more so. If that is the case, it is lucky for those topiarists that he is not in the same position as Sir Charles Mathews.

And the foregoing is a faithful description of the “landscape” around one of the houses illustrated in his book as an example of the “naturalistic” style.

But perhaps Mr. Robinson's ideas have become modified, as those of the owner of the house must have done during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the publication of his book, subjecting Mr. Blomfield (as he was then) and Mr. Inigo Triggs to a criticism whose severity resembles that of the Quarterly Review of a hundred years ago, or the Saturday of our boyhood.