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Garden music
See also: the history of the art of garden design with moods and emotions explained by music
Greensleeves is serene, delightful, lyrical and pastoral, as a song, a dance and an orchestral piece. The garden music plays against the backdrop of an inaccessible, small but beautiful private refuge on the fringes of Central London. Seen here in July, the garden has an air of sadness with its profusion of flowers soon to be over for another season. Clematis dance for admiration. The music was published in 1580 and this arrangement was orchestrated by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1934. He called it a Fantasia on Greensleeves and it achieves his dream of embodying the 'soul of the nation'. The painting of My Lady Greensleeves, who must live in the garden, is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Some people believe Henry VIII wrote the tune and Elizabeth I danced to it.
Listen to the music, representing the first 5000 years of gardening in the British Isles. We suggest listening without watching first to see if you can identify the periods. Then you can listen again while looking at the images only - there are about 5000 of them so one photograph/year. Then you can listen for a third time, reading the captions to find out more about the gardens. It is a compendium of 10 other videos, without the short spoken introductions which explain how the music was chosen to represent the ten periods in the history of garden and landscape design which cover the period from 3000 BCE to 2000 AD.
Monks and nuns worked in gardens; the Limbourg Brothers show bits of medieval garden in their paintings. Though they lived 3 centuries apart the mood in the music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and the paintings done for the Tres Riches Heures (by the Limbourg Brothers who lived c1385 – 1416) is spiritually congruent. The glimpses of gardens, and other details of medieval gardens and medieval life, are fascinating.
St John’s Lodge was part of the 1809-32 design for Regent’s Park. The garden was commissioned by John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute (1847- 1900), said to be the richest man in the world. He wanted it to be a place for meditation and, in 1889, commissioned the Arts and Crafts designer Robert Weir Schulz to lay out the gardens at St. John's Lodge as a place ‘fit for meditation’. He used the garden for parties and may well have had musicians playing. When last on the market, in 1994, the Lodge was the most expensive private house in the UK. In 1994 the garden was restored by landscape architects Colvin and Moggridge. The music, Salut d'Amour, was composed by Edward Elgar in 1888. The phrase can be translated as “love letter” and comes from the medieval period so admired by the Pre-Raphaelites. Bute, like Elgar, was a Catholic.
Johann Strauss II's Roses From the South (inspired by Cervantes' Where the Wild Rose Blooms) was first performed in Vienna in 1880. Humphry Repton first proposed a circular rose gardens in his 1813 design for Ashridge. Regent's Park Rose Garden is now the best example. It was first planted in 1932, redesigned by the landscape architects Colvin and Moggridge in the 1990s and is very well managed by the Royal Parks. It is not quite in listening distance of the Regent's Park bandstand (which is used for garden and outdoor music).
The Garden Music in this video was composed by Kevin MacLeod - one of the best-known YouTube music composers. The music could put one more in mind of a cityscape than a gardenscape, so we have put it with a video stream of London's Canary Wharf development (taken during the 2020 lockdown when London was, for sure, more garden-like than usual). Kevin MacLeod writes about his composition as follows - and Gardenvisit.com can recommend it to listeners in all these groups : "This epic 41-minute relaxing juggernaut is a continually changing yet always pleasant piece. How pleasant? Very, very pleasant. You can just put this one on and drift away to the imagined utopian land of your choosing! Suitable for day-spa background music, dental office calming music, very long form landscape or train videos, governmental intake and processing videos."