The hortus conclusus of our mediaeval palaces and monasteries can
scarcely have differed in design from the gardens of Egypt and Persia ; and the old " hcrbers " or arbours, the trim garden-plots in which was grown the meadowsweet which Queen Elizabeth heaped upon her bedroom floor, the turf benches and the raised flower- borders, the mounts and the trellis, were all based upon that rectilinear symmetry which we see in the Kip drawings and which finally aroused the protests of Addison and Pope. It was the latter who induced Bridgeman to break up the straight lines of the old Egyptian design and to introduce " natural groves " ; and as the successor of Bridgeman came William Kent who " leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden." It was thus, I explained, that we acquired what they call "le jardin anglais " and what we call " land- scape-gardening." But whereas Bridgeman had had the taste to retain what he called " the great lines," Kent evolved the unfortunate theory that " nature abhors a straight line " and the great yew hedges which were the proud background to all our flowers were replaced by the " ha-ha " and the flowers were left with no background at all. It was only when the shrubberies so gaily planted by the early Victorians had grown into vast and dusty thickets that succeeding generations realised that landscape-gardening, however suitable it might be for public parks, was not in fact adapted to private gardens. A reaction arose. Sir Reginald Blomfield raised his powerful voice in favour of the discarded formal garden and two people of genius— William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll—came to show us that the English flower-garden was in fact independent of irrigation and might therefore be also independent of the design which irrigation imposed.
Previous page
