Formal Gardening
Athelhampton Hall, Dorset. Old English house with trees in their natural form
The very name of the book is a mistake. "Formal gardening" is rightly applied only to the gardens in which both the design and planting were formal and stupidly formal like the upper terrace of the Crystal Palace, Kensington Gore, as laid out by Nesfield, Crewe Hall; and Shrubland, as laid out by Barry, in which, as in others of these architects' gardens, strict orders were given that no plants were to be allowed on the walls. The architect was so proud of his design, that he did not want the gardener at all, except to pound up bricks to take the place of flower colour! It may be necessary to explain to some that this pounded brick and tile in lieu of colours has frequently been laid down in flower-gardens in our own day. To old gardens like Haddon and Rockingham, in which the vegetation about the house is perfectly free and natural in form, the term "formal gardening" is quite unfitted.
But those who attack the old English formal garden do not take the trouble to understand its very considerable differences from the Continental gardens of the same period.
No one has "attacked" old English gardens. Part of my work has been to preserve much record of their beauty. The necessary terraces round houses like Haddon may be and are as beautiful as any garden ever made by man. Can anything be more unlike than the delicate veil of beautiful climbers and flowers over the grey walls of the courtyard at Ightham Mote and the walls of some gardens of our own day? The great dark rock-like feudal Berkeley is clad with Fig and Vine and Rose as far as they can reach. No trace in these old gardens of the modern "landscape architect," who said, My walls are not made for plants, and for my beds I prefer coloured brick!
The formal garden, with its insistence on strong bounding lines, is, strictly speaking, the only "garden" possible.—R. F. Blomfield
The Vicarage Garden, Odiham. One of numerous British gardens in which the conditions here declared to be essential are absent