Charles Jencks, in The
Language of postmodern architecture, assigned 'the death of
Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time': July 15 1972 at
3.32 pm. But in the British Isles, Modern Gardens had scarcely
enjoyed a life. The public gave every appearance of having looked
at Tunnard's photograph of the Behrens house in an 'olde worlde' garden and
decided the garden was charming but the house an abonimation. Nor
had professional designers shown much enthusiasm for the style.
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The garden at Ditchley Park, designed by G A
Jellicoe. |
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The restaurant in the Cheddar Gorge, by G. A.
Jellicoe and Russell Page, had one of the earliest modern gardens
in England. |
Jellicoe was, in essence, a post-modernist
from the start of his career. As suggested in the accompanying
essay on Jellicoe and the subconscious, it was an attitude
learned on his mother's knee. One can detect its presence in his
first significant designs, for Ditchley
Park and the Caveman Restaurant, in
the 1930s. Ditchley Park was a modern design with a heavy overlay
Italian Renaissance themes. The Caveman Restaurant was a modern
design with a significant symbolic content. Visitors to the
restaurant could look up through the glass fish-pond to see the
world through a representation of the miasmal stew from which our
species evolved. As a designer, Jellicoe was too literary,
theoretical and experimental to become popular. But some of his
themes have found echoes in the work of others. Michael Spens wrote
a book about him entitled Gardens of the Mind and there is a Garden
in Mind at Stansted Park in Hampshire.
It experiments with surrealism, as Jellicoe did in the Magritte
Garden at Sutton Place.
[See essay Jellicoe’s subconscious
approach to landscape design on CD]
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At the level of garden centre
design, one can see something of a merger between the
Abstract and the Arts and Crafts approaches. The geometry of
abstract art has been blended with the varied sensuous delights of
arts and crafts gardens. This tendency is most apparent in the
selection of materials. The coldness of square concrete slabs,
white-painted wood and steel, which once characterised the Abstract
style, have given way to the richness of earthy bricks, stained
timber and concrete finishes in which the cement is dominated by an
exposed stone aggregate. Decorative fittings have reappeared in
gardens and the prevailing sense of place and scale is altogether
more intimate than in the early days of the Abstract style.
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The first edition of this book (1986) saw the inaugeration of a
series of Garden Festivals as
'an auspicious pointer to the future of English garden design',
though the master plans were seen as disappointing interpretations
of the Mixed Style. They were worse than disappointing. They were
disastrous. Excepting a few promenades, the five Garden Festivals
have been destroyed: at Liverpool (1984), Stoke-on-Trent (1986),
Glasgow (1988) and South Wales (1992). Most were built in two years
and destroyed in one year. The largest sums of money ever spent by
a British government on parks and gardens was utterly squandered,
while equivalent projects in Germany, Holland and France, yielded
useful parks and dramatic examples of landscape design. Michael
Hesseltine, a Tory minister and leading advocate of closer
relations with continental Europe, was responsible for the British
blunders. When he promoted the Millennium Exhibition site at
Greenwich, I wrote a letter which The Times did not publish.
It proposed the following inscription, either for a slab outside
the Greenwich Millennium Dome or as a tattoo on a suitable
part of Mr Hessletine's anatomy:
In the planning of Festivals, two principles apply. First: the
after-use should be planned before the Festival-use. Second:
the planning, design and construction process takes 10 years, not 2
years.
My conclusion to the 1986 edition was more optimistic with
regard to the festival theme gardens:
The importance of the Liverpool International Garden Festival in
the history of English garden design rests upon its 'theme
gardens'. The use of themes marks a complete departure from the
non-representational Abstract Style, and implies a return to what
van Doesburg described as 'the repetition of stories, tales, etc',
which he believed should be left to 'poets and writers'. If new
links are forged between garden design, contemporary philosophy and
poetry, the consequences of the Festival will be salutary. If, on
the other hand, the 'theme gardens' merely lead to concrete
reconstructions of historical styles, it will be a retrograde step.
The art of garden design prospers when it looks to the fine arts
and the world of ideas. It falters when looking exclusively to its
own history.
Whether or not it resulted from the Festivals, garden design in
the British Isles did acquire a fresher complexion between 1986 and
1998. Designers have shown a significant interest in design themes,
symbols, poetry and philosophy. New materials have been used with
old materials. Bare concrete has given way to brick and stone.
Bright colours have been used, especially as wood stains. Bold
geometry has been enjoyed for its own sake. Lighting schemes and
new water features have added drama. Steel, iron, aluminium, glass,
mirrors and plastics have been used. One can see these trends on
television gardening programmes, in magazines, in books and in
demonstration gardens (eg Broadview
Gardens). One can also see them in the gardens which designers
have made for themselves.
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Little Sparta, by Ian Hamilton
Finlay |
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Little Sparta, by Ian Hamilton Finlay |
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Little Sparta, by Ian Hamilton Finlay |
Ian
Hamilton Finlay's garden, Little
Sparta at Stoneypath, has become the most important garden to
be made by a poet since Pope's garden at Twickenham (c 1719). In the 1970s, Finlay was
Scotland's leading concrete poet. As with the work of other
concrete poets, the disposition of the words on the page, or
whatever, made a significant contribution to their meaning. Some
poets arranged their words to form circles, squares, spirals and
triangles on the printed page. Finlay became interested in working
on materials other than paper, including wood, stone, glass and
aluminium. One could not place these works in libraries but they
fitted easily with buildings and gardens. Finlay remembered how the
Augustan designers had placed inscriptions on words and other
features. The grotto at Stourhead is
inscribed with Pope's words:
Nymph of the grot these sacred springs I keep
And to the murmer of these waters sleep
Ah spare my slumbers gently tread the cave
And drink in silence or in silence lave.
Ian Hamilton Finlay began to place 'concrete poems' in his
garden. Sculptors worked with him. The garden at Stoneypath has
links with art, poetry and philosophy. Finlay's work is discussed
in Mark Francis book on The meaning of gardens.
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Charles Jencks' London garden |
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Charles Jencks' London garden |
Since writing The language of postmodern architecture,
Charles Jencks has become involved
with garden design. He admires Finlay and has worked with him.
Jencks' gardens, in London and south-west Scotland, are laden with
symbolism. In his own terminology, they are double-coded. The
primary coding is legible to all. The secondary coding is
intelligible only to those who share the designer's knowledge of
art, mythology and astro-physics.
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So what of the future? As
argued in an essay on Revolutions in the
garden, I believe the last decade of a century to be specially
important in garden design. It is a time when people are prone to
looking back and looking forwards. Both are vital to the making of
good gardens. The wind is set fair for the twenty-first century to
produce a crop of gardens as great as those of the Italian
Renaissance. The twentieth century taught us what to do. The next
century will be a time for doing and, no doubt, for more
revivals.
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