AND ANOTHER THING
The Rembrandt of the Parterre and a cheerful Rothschild duck pond
PAUL JOHNSON
Lord Rothschild's invitation to see his new carpet-bedding at Waddesdon Manor on its hilltop in Buckinghamshire was doubly welcome. Rothschild hospitality is always princely, and Waddesdon has a special repu- tation for gorgeous going. To begin with, it is a visual shock. Its wood-knoll commanding sumptuous miles of the Vale of Aylesbury was a virgin site when Ferdinand de Roth- schild began to build a house there in 1874, the year Disraeli became prime minister with a resounding majority. Perhaps to cele- brate the fact, a fantasy palace was trans- planted, as it were, from the Loire Valley, made up of motifs from Blois and Cham- bord, put together by the brilliant pasticheur- architect Hippolyte Alexandre Gabriel Wal- ter Destailleur, who lived up to his name in his elaboration, ingenuity and Froggy chutz- pah. Marvellous boiseries and mirrors were stripped from the walls of decaying French town houses and transplanted to leafy Bucks, and the sumptuous rooms were filled with the treasures of Gallic civilisation at its best. The gardens were laid out by another aesthetic frondeur, Lain& and were served by 50 greenhouses and as many gardeners. The visitors' book gives an exact record of the guests, 1881-98, mainly leading politicians and their families, judiciously balanced between the parties with a slight statistical bias in favour of the Liberals, one of whom, Lord Edward Hamilton, was put up 52 times during these years. Gladstone's daughter, Mary, felt 'oppressed with the extreme gorgeousness and luxury of the place'. But more hardened bon viveurs rel- ished it. 'I do love all seemly luxury,' Lord Haldane chuckled. 'When lying in bed in the mornings, it gives me great satisfaction When a lackey softly enters the room and asks me whether I will take tea, coffee, Chocolate or cocoa. This privilege is accord- ed to me in the houses of all my distin- guished friends, but it is only at Waddesdon that on saying I prefer tea the valet further Inquires whether I fancy Ceylon, Souchong or Assam.' Extraordinary efforts were made to cater for the whims of special guests. A secret staircase with unusually Shallow steps was put in to enable the Prince of Wales, already portly, to ascend Without puffing to the room where his cur- rent mistress was obligingly installed. It is not recorded whether Queen Victoria was Shown this facility when she came in 1890. One thinks not. In due course, some decline set in. In 1939 Harold Nicolson grumbled, 'Hardly a thing has been changed since the old Baron's time . . . the lavatories still have handles you pull up instead of chains you pull down. There is no running water in the bedrooms and, although it is very luxurious as regards food and drink and flowers, it is really less comfortable than our mud-pie in the Weald.' Rather bedint that, I feel. However, the Rothschild wand has again been waved in recent years, and all has been restored, updated, gilded and smartened. A copious fountain spouted and glittered in the early evening sunlight as we arrived to inspect the new garden works. Two abstract flower-beds have been designed by the American artist John Hub- bard. Actually, I think of him as English, for he has lived here since 1960. The pat- terns that fill his mind clearly reflect those amazing Dorset beaches near his house, and the colours are soft, subtle and very English. Some 30,000 plants compose the pointilliste surface of these abstracts, and computers are used in the process of setting them out — do not ask me to explain how. I am not much of an ornamental garden man myself, as it happens, regarding them as too labour-intensive and difficult to dif- ferentiate from municipal park stuff. But Hubbard is a genuine artist — I call him the Rembrandt of the Parterre — and his work soothes and sweetens the mood. It is expensive, of course. Each design lasts a season, and other artists have been lined up to try their hands in future years.
I say expensive, but what is the expense incurred in this attempt to produce a new form of art compared with the colossal sums lavished on pretentious and unpopular rub- bish? Future historians may well single out the Dome and its like (Hamburg's Expo 2000 seems equally gross) as a fitting close to a century of modernism during which more money was lavished on art than ever before and virtually nothing memorable emerged. Supposing the Dome's £750 million had been spent on creating a river garden on the site? Could we not have produced something which would have rivalled Tivoli and put Versailles to shame? A princely garden embraces all the arts: painting in its pavilions and grottoes, sculpture in its statuary and fountains, landscape in its composition, music in its soft wind-bands and orchestras, playing their serenades and Nachtmusik for water-parties and fetes gallantes, poetry in the inspirations it provides for a Keats or a Shel- ley, a Baudelaire or a Heine. We might have created, on the site where the despised Dome now stands, a garden of delights which would be blooming and cherished, used and enjoyed by countless millions, and celebrated by painters and writers, for the whole of the new millennium.
Why do gardens seem to come so low on the list of priorities for public projects? And another question: why does the state get such poor value for its money? The cardi- nals who built gardens at Tivoli, the kings who laid out and embellished Versailles, are cursed by socialists for their prodigality and selfishness. But they left, at comparatively little expense (seen sub specie aeternitatis), a legacy which all can now enjoy, and which no one could now create. Baron Ferdinand used his money, unearned no doubt — but what does that matter? — to transplant a jewel of Touraine to an English vale, to delight and ravish future generations, and Lord Rothschild is using the rewards of banking to rejuvenate the original and add new visual experiences to a visit. Impossible to conceive of anyone producing Waddes- don and what surrounds it now — state tax- ation forbids it. But then the state would not do it either: it has too many inhibitions about luxury, beauty and 'conspicuous con- sumption'. So these great temples of indi- vidual wealth are now not merely an endan- gered but an extinct species, and the best we can do is to keep those that remain in repair. The state, meanwhile, spends money on a flagitious scale to give us a monstrosity because it can be called a People's Dome, though real people hate it.
I might add that money often has little to do with garden delight. What enchanted me most at Waddesdon was the duck pond. There were two black swans there, wreath- ing their amazingly sinuous heads and flam- ing red beaks, and attended by their three cygnets in oyster-grey and pink feathers, who were having such a wonderful time splashing and ducking that their happiness spread to me in an instant. And there were two funny little black-and-white ducks who paddled about in a strict formation, at uni- form speed, as if they were clockwork toys in a child's bath. But they were not clock- work; they were real, and they too were happy. No chance of more Waddesdons these days. But why not more duck ponds?
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