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| Gardenesque planting in Birmingham Botanical
Garden. Loudon designed the garden in 1831. |
The aesthetic considerations which led Loudon to priase Italian gardens also led him
to devise a style of planting design which he named the
'gardenesque'. Loudon believed that there were two ways of evading
the anomaly of making 'gardens' which could not be distinguished
from 'nature'. The first was to base their layout on abstract
shapes. The second was to make exclusive use of plants which are
not native to the area in which the garden was made, and to keep
the plants well separated from each other so that they can be
recognised as exotics. This is the intellectual origin of the
'specimen' trees and shrubs which are still dotted around in
British gardens.
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| Gardenesque planting at Wakehurst
Place, West Sussex. The estate is run by the Royal Botanic
Gardens, Kew. The plants are well-grown and well-labelled, as
Loudon would have wished. |
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start of section
Loudon described the main idea behind the Gardenesque style of
planting as the Principle of
Recognition and asserted that 'Any creation, to be recognised
as a work of art, must be such as can never be mistaken for a work
of nature'. His rules for applying the principle to landscape
gardening were of the utmost rigour:
The gardenesque is found exclusively in single trees, which have
been planted in favourable situations; not pressed on during their
growth, by any other objects; and allowed to throw out their
branches equally on every side, uninjured by cattle or other
animals; and, if touched by the hand of the gardener, only to be
improved in their regularity and symmetry.
The brook, lake, or river, is readily appropriated as a work of
art, by planting exotic, woody, and herbaceous plants along the
margins, in a natural-looking manner; carefully removing all that
are indigenous.
Even the turf should be composed of grasses different from those
of the surrounding grass fields.
Loudon also discussed the problem
of making a natural outcrop of rocks look artificial.
By what means are the perpendicular rocks on the banks of the
river Wye, at Piercefield in Monmouthshire, to be rendered a
work of art? By substituting another kind of rock for the
indigenous one? No; for not only is the scale too large to render
this practicable, but, if it were accomplished, the very largeness
of the scale would make it be still considered as the work of
nature; unless, indeed, rocks, which every one knew did not exist
in the country at all, were substituted for the natural
ones'.
His solution was to remove all indigenous vegetation and
replace it with 'foreign vegetation of a similar character'. Given
the impracticality of such expedients it is no cause for wonder
that Loudon prefered regular gardens. However he also liked to see
exotic plants arranged in naturalistic groups - providing they were
well grown and well labeled.
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| Gardenesque planting at Leonardslee Gardens,
West Sussex. Exotic plants are arranged in natural groups |
Loudons's passionate interest in the plants which made his
Gardenesque style possible brought his family close to financial
ruin. His wife gave the following account of his labours:
From the year 1833 to Midsummer 1838 Mr Loudon underwent the
most extraordinary exertions both of mind and body. Having resolved
that all the drawings of trees for the Arboretum should be
made from nature, he had seven artists constantly employed, and he
was frequently in the open air with them from his breakfast at
seven in the morning till he came home to dinner at eight in the
evening, having remained the whole of that time without taking the
slightest refreshment, and generally without even sitting
down....... In addition to the large sums in ready money he paid to
the artists and other persons employed during the progress of the
Arboretum, he found at its conclusion that he owed ten
thousand pounds to the printer, the stationer, and the
wood-engraver who had been employed on that work.
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The Arboretum et Fruiticetum
Britannicum was eventually published in eight volumes with
'upwards of 2,500 engravings'. Professor Sir Joseph Hooker wrote that
There is not a naturalist in Europe who could have executed the
task with anything like the talent, and judgement, and accuracy,
that is here displayed by Mr Loudon..... In short, nothing is
omitted, either in the descriptive or pictorial matter, which can
tend to illustrate the history and uses of trees and
shrubs.... it will be seen at once of what vast importance
must such a work be to this country, to every part of Europe, and
the temperate parts of North America; and we may even say, to all
the temperate parts of the civilised world.
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Loudon designed an excellent
arboretum in Derby which survives in reasonable condition -
though the local parks department does not label the specimen
plants.
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| The Derby Arboretum, designed
by John Claudius Loudon. The mound was planned to create an orderly
walk through which plants could be viewed in a botanical
sequence. |
Hooker judged the importance of the Arboretum correctly.
He became the first Director of Kew
Gardens two years after reviewing the book and set about arranging
the trees and shrubs in accordance with the principle which Loudon
had derived from Sir Uvedale Price,.
Hooker opened the gardens to the public. The exotic trees and
shrubs at Kew are arranged in naturalistic groups and great
attention is paid to botanical accuracy - though Hooker and his
successors have not prevented plants from being 'pressed on during
their growth'. The same idea was employed by Paxton in the arboretum at Chatsworth and was been repeated in Victorian
arboreta throughout the land. Two the best examples of gardenesque
planting are Kew Gardens and Birmingham Botanical Garden
(designed by Loudon). Woodland gardens can be found, as Hooker
predicted, in 'all the temperate parts of the civilised world'. The
can be classified as 'gardenesque' if they are laid out with the
emphasis on botanical display and as 'Picturesque' if the emphasis
is on pictorial composition.
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| A design for geometrical carpet bedding by
Charles M'Intosh (from The Book of the Garden, 1853) who worked for
the Duke of Buccleugh at Dalkeith Palace and for the King of the
Belgians at Claremont in Sussex. Many patterns of this type were
published in books and journals and gardeners competed to produce
schemes which would delight their employers and excite the
admiration of friends. |
The art of floral bedding, or mosaiculture, has
almost disappeared from private gardens but survives in public
parks and institutional gardens. The example above is at Cannizaro in south west
London. |
| Repton's design for the Flower Garden at
Valleyfield, in Scotland. |
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Floral bedding, or
mosaiculture, is another famous Victorian style of planting design,
intended to make the gardener's work 'recognisable'. Its distant
origins lie in the knots and parterres of renaissance Europe. Its
immediate origins can be found in the flower gardens designed by
Humphry Repton at Valleyfield,
Ashridge, Woburn and many of his other later
projects. They were part of the plan for making Beautiful
foregrounds as the first stage in the Landscape Style. The patterns
which were used for these gardens bear a distinct resemblence to
Victorian bedding patterns but since Repton does not say that they
were stocked with tender plants and changed at regular intervals
they cannot be reckoned as true examples of carpet bedding. The
principle on which the 'changeable flower garden' was managed are
explained in Loudon's 1822 Encyclopaedia:
All the plants are kept in pots, and reared in a flower nursery
or reserve ground. As soon as they begin to flower, they are
plunged in the borders of the flower-garden, and, whenever they
show symptoms of decay, removed, to be replaced by others from the
same source .
In 1822 this practice was not so common as the 'mingled
flower-garden', in which flowers were mixed with shrubs, but in the
1840s carpet-bedding became a craze. Flower gardens took on the
appearance of brightly coloured carpets and gardeners vied with
each other to produce new and ever more dazzling displays.
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| Loudon admired the circular beds at Hoole House |
Loudonesque circular bedding in Greenwich Park,
London |
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| A drawing of circular beds from Loudon's Gardeners
Magazine |
Circular beds with stone edging, designed by Edward Kemp at
Stanley Park in Liverpool. |
Loudon prefered to see bedding plants in circular beds. He
considered the circle to be the purest geometrical shape and also
the most practical for flowerbeds of all kinds:
We wish we could strongly impress on the mind of every amateur,
and of every gardener, that, for all general purposes of planting
beds of shrubs, or beds of flowers on a lawn..... the best form is
the circle, provided that it be always kept of small size, say from
18 in. to 6ft., in diameter, one circle never placed neareer to
another than 2ft., and these beds be thrown together in groups or
constellations, as stars are in the firmament.
Loudon's wish was granted. Almost a century and a half has
passed since he wrote the above passage and the circular flowerbed
retains its popularity in suburban gardens and public parks. The
flower garden in Greenwich Park is a
fine example. The star has also been brought down from the
firmament and used as a shape for flowerbeds.
Joseph Paxton excelled at the art
of carpet bedding and filled the grounds of Chatsworth, Mentmore and the Crystal Palace with the most elaborte displays.
They were one of the chief attractions of the Crystal Palace and
Paxton was most annoyed when publicly financed parks departments
started making displays of bedding plants which could be viewed
without paying an admission charge. Edward
Kemp and Charles M'Intosh, who
succeeded Loudon as popular writers on garden design, included
patterns for carpet-bedding in their books and whetted the public's
appetite for new designs. M'intosh even wrote a learned section on
the application of the principles of colour harmony to the design
of bedding schemes. It contained references to Repton, Loudon,
Newton and Chevreul.
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