MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN their desirable residence in St. James's Square the Arts Council are now holding an exhibition of English landscape gardening. They are justified in so doing, since we have recently been told by the Duke of Wellington that this branch of human invention represents the most original contribution made by this island to the visual arts. I agree that our native genius excels in combining the tame with the wild, the works of Nature with the works of man. Yet, much as I admire the inventive gifts of Kent, Repton and Brown, I still feel that garden design is imposed by climate even more than it is contrived by the mind of man. Italian gardens, in spite of many persistent and costly efforts, do not really accord with our English skies: the sun is seldom hot enough to bring out the full scent of the box 'or to render the sound of water falling an indispensable element in the pleasure that a garden must provide. In Italy even the most derelict garden retains its beauty, as the lizards slide over the tumbled parapets and the frogs croak from the pool below ; yet it is a sad sight indeed to visit an Italian garden in England and to see the thistles of this impoverished age sprout- ing among the columns, and the orange jars craciced by the frost. Conversely, I have never felt that the French, even in their most anglomaniac moments, have succeeded in adapting the jardin anglais to their own tradition. However serpentine may be the gravelled paths, however frequent the weeping willows and the cascades, one is always conscious that unless the turf be very wide and very deep the ideas of Repton are not suitable for export. Much again as I revere the work of Le Notre and admire those long perspectives of clipped avenues fading away into the distant blue, I do not believe that enormous vistas are intended for our misty moms. The French seem to enjoy wide open spaces in their gardens, where men and women walk like dots moving along the gravel under a wide sky. We prefer our own gardens to be more cosy immediately round the house and thereafter to melt away into the park and woods.
* * * * Fortunate we are indeed in this our habit of the natural garden. In'Italy, as I have said, gardens remain significant even when decayed or untended. But once you allow Vaux-le-Vicomte to run to seed you are not left with a Sleeping Beauty effect, you are left with the impression of a jungle ash-pit. ._ Those miles of gravel that have to be raked and weeded, those high beech hedges that have to be trimmed, the elagage of radiating avenues, all this requires a staff of gardeners such as no private income, at least in this country, can now command. The elaborate knot gardens that fill the wide French terraces need constant furbishing and clipping ; if you fill their scrolls with coloured sands then groundsel creeps in to raise its fluffy head ; if you prick them out with the horrible little plants beloved of French municipal gardeners, then you are involved in vast expense. I am glad indeed that I am not the owner of Vaux-le-Vicomte. I should gaze from my window down upon those acres of gravel and box and feel saddened by inevitable decay. A lovely thing, in all certainty, but one condemned to lose its meaning. Whereas in our happy little cottage gardens over here, in our wide parks, there is no need to fear complete ruin and destruction. We can still hope, with the aid of machinery, to keep some of our hedges trimmed ; and once we reach the ha-ha, then Nature can be allowed to take charge. We do not have to pleach half a mile of avenue or spread weed-killer over seven acres of gravel.
* * * * Let us pay homage therefore to Repton, Brown and Kent who rendered possible that something at least of the beauty of our parks and gardens shall survive into the age of penury. Too much has, to my mind, been made of the contrast between classic and romantic, of the " gothic " element in our landscape garden- ing, as of the cult of the picturesque. It is, of course, true that the beginnings of English landscape design are to be ascribed, not merely to the fashion for Claude, Poussin and Salvator Rosa, but also to the desire to escape from the formal. There is an interesting letter in this exhibition written to Lord Burlington by Thomas Coke of Holkham. In this letter he denounces " those damned dull walks at Jo. Windham's—those unpictoresk, those cold & insipid straight walks—wh. would make the Signor sick. . . ." The Signor referred to was William Kent himself who, owing to his pompous manners, had thus been nicknamed by the great. It cannot be doubted that the humad heart is addicted to variation, and that after a surfeit of per- spectives it became inevitable that men of taste should wish to exchange the pleasure of expectation for the pleasure of surprise. Yet in the minds of our great landscape architects there was certainly something more than a desire to exploit a new fashion or than a romantic longing for the terrible and the wild. There was the perfectly sensible realisation that what this country had to offer as its greatest beauties were grass and trees. Other countries could produce superb vistas or regiments of statues facing each other among groves of myrtle and bay. But only here in these islands could turf and oaks attain to absolute per- fection. " Let us therefore," they said, " concentrate on what we do best." And how right they were!
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What puzzles me as I gaze at these designs and drawings is the extraordinary unselfishness of our ancestors. They cut down their existing hedges and rooted up their parterres in obedience to Brown's estimate of the capabilities of their estates. They planted clumps of trees, they pulled down the garden walls and replaced them' by ha-has, they even destroyed whole avenues. How bleak and terrible must have been the aspect of Henening- ham or Ashburnham when the old gardens had been eradicated and before the new landscape had settled down to its shape. Young conifers would dot with their ungainly shapes the lapis vert in front of the saloon windows ; infant shrubberies would twist and turn over what had once been the knot garden ; the -park beyond would assume all the ugliness of an arboretum in the making. And before Brown's estimate of the effect could be seen and admired by the owner, twenty years or more would have to pass. Today we can enjoy without stint the astonishing genius of design manifested by these great men ; but the hanging woods of their imagination, the lovely groves and valleys, can only rarely have been seen by those who paid great sums to have them made. How impossibly ugly, for at least twenty-five years, must have been the Shepherd's Monument, the Triumphal Arch and the Temple 'of the Winds at Shugborough before the trees had grown sufficiently to veil their contours or to separate them one from the other: Sadly sometimes must the owners, after paying the bills, have turned the hinged flaps that Repton provided with his designs and looked at the loveliness which their grandchildren would one day enjoy.
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Miss Dorothy Stroud, in her introduction to the catalogue of this exhibition, does well to recall Horace Walpole's tribute to William Kent, in which he embodied the very essence of the landscape-gardener's idea. " He felt," writes Walpole, " the delicious contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, and tasted the beauty of the gentle swell or concave scoop." Yet we should realise that all this invention would have been meaningless were it not that our climate furnishes us with admirable grass and trees. In our London parks, for instance, we can observe the " gentle swell " and " concave scoop " con- trived with the utmost taste and ingenuity ; nothing could better exemplify the perfection of the landscape-gardener's art ; yet we have only to visualise the grass of these eminences and declivities being as scrannel and mangy as is grass abroad to realise thit such treatment of turf is suited only to these islands. Dark skies we may have and wet winds: but what grass, what grass!
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