BOOKS

Some of Gertrude's funnies

Ferdinand Mount

COLLINS BOOK OF BRITISH GARDENS by George Plumptre

Collins £8.95

A HISTORY OF BRITISH GARDENING by Miles Hadfield

Penguin £5.95

WOOD AND GARDEN HOME AND GARDEN A GARDENER'S TESTAMENT by Gertrude Jekyll

Macmillan £6.95, £7.95, £7.95

GARDENS FOR SMALL COUNTRY HOUSES by Gertrude Jekyll and Laurence Weaver

Macmillan £7.95

GERTRUDE JEKYLL ON GARDENING Edited by Penelope Hobhouse

Macmillan f7.95

MISS JEKYLL by Betty Massingham

David and Charles £6.50

Isometimes dream of a series of paper- backs to replace those modish and menac- ing Modern Masters and Past Masters. It might be called Our Masters, if that does not sound too biblical. There would be no monsters or bullies or sillies in it, no Lenin or Levi-Strauss, no Corbusier or Sartre and certainly no Ezra Pound; there might not even be room in it for those unwholesome modern authors from whom Professor Cobb has kept himself so pure. Our Mas- ters would have a preference for the human scale, an understanding of local materials and techniques, an exuberance and invention enhanced not dampened by a grasp of tradition, an affection for the neglected, the awkward and the private, a sense of the tragic and the difficult, a whiff of melancholy, and, not least, a sense of humour — a characteristic not much to be found in Modern Masters. The first batch of Our Masters, for example, might, might include Edward Lear, Thomas Hardy, Edwin Lutyens, John Betjeman, Elizabeth David, G. K. Chesterton, and, of course, Gertrude Jekyll.

And it is about Gertrude Jekyll that I think the selectors would have least cause to hesitate. The more one thinks about it, the more it seems that the art of gardening has escaped the Blitzkrieg of the Modern Movement with less lasting damage than almost any other. I suppose the garden was thought to be too remote from the main battlefield to be worth capturing. Garden- ing was a genteel diversion for the elderly and the defeated; and the more appallingly popular it became, the less it interested the avant-garde, since you could not use the garden as a theatre for your anti-bourgeois project. So while Ezra Pound was shocking smart dinner tables by munching tulips from the vase, Gertrude Jekyll could get on with growing them. Even today, the anarchic instinct, never far below the surface in English gardeners, now and then bursts out: 'sod Miss Jekyll, plant as you please.' Yet in our hearts we know that there is usually a right and wrong in gardening and that Miss Jekyll is usually right.

As if by some instinct for protecting its tranquillity, gardening — unlike other minor arts, such as opera, ballet and

architecture — has in the twentieth century usually managed to stay beyond the ha-ha

Which encloses the world of The Arts (it tends to end up somewhere between the Property ads and the motoring column). Historically, this is a ludicrous exclusion.

1 he cultivation of gardens for beauty is one of the first marks of any civilisation — from Babylon and Rome to Seville and Sissing- hurst. In Britain, gardening has attracted the greatest of intelligences and talents: Sir Thomas More, Evelyn, Aubrey, Van- burgh, Pope and Hogarth, Sandby, Scott, Cobbett and Beckford and so on. Almost every British architect of consequence has had at least a share in designing the gardens that were to surround his buildings — Wren, Kent, Chambers, Nash, Barry. Yet the history of gardening remained, until recently, little more than a footnote to the history of 'taste' — a somewhat evasive term. At the back of most people's minds there remains a simple pop-up ver- sion: first you have walled gardens, herbs, box hedges, knots and topiary — then Capability Brown and Repton open out the vista — and finally you have shrubs and bedding plants and suburban back gar- dens.

Things are a little different now. There is a Garden History Society. The National Trust now understands that gardens mat- ter. The Royal Horticultural Society Jour-

nal, The Garden, has been gingered up by the ubiquitous Mr Hugh Johnson, who masquerades as Tradescant and has, among other things, prodded the Lee Valley River Authority to restore Edward Augustus Bowles's garden at its HQ in Myddelton Hall, Enfield — although the pond still lacks enough water to enable one to imagine Bowles in his eighties wading through it in his swimming costume to clear the weeds. Thousands of gardeners now share the once esoteric interest in garden history first stirred by Country Life in the Christopher Hussey days. And the late Miles Hadfield's marvellous history is now out in paperback (with a rather pedestrian Appendix on the last forty years by Geof- frey and Susan Jellicoe).

Hadfield shows beautifully how the his- tory of gardening is much more than a matter of 'He leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden' — Horace Walpole on Kent. Certainly, Capability Brown's formula did depend heavily on the skulking, sly ha-ha, By whose miraculous assistance

You gain a prospect two fields distance.

And it is true too that the new picturesque gardening was felt at the time to be a symbol of England's liberation from the formal constraints of French politics as well as of French gardening (although the use of 'formal' as applied to gardening is, surpri- singly, late nineteenth-century, being first used by the architect Blomfield). This identification went so far as to inspire the Rev William Mason to describe the serpen- tine English garden path as 'Thou emblem pure of legal liberty!'

This intrusion of politics should at least remind us that arguments about gardening until well into the nineteenth century were not only heated but thought to be part of other sorts of argument: classical versus romantic, form versus spontaneity, man versus nature. The main elements of these arguments were never entirely new or

abitrary, and to suppose that they were or are is always a way of misunderstanding them. The landscape movement was, after all, an attempt to recreate for real the landscapes of Claude — themselves fanta- sies on classical themes. Pliny the Youn- ger, whose letters remained a key influence on eighteenth-century antiquarian gar- deners, loved a wide and sweeping view: his own villa looked out over rich cattle meadows, the bay of Ostia and the distant mountains. Such sights might have been, as Hadfield says, regarded as 'visually horrid' until the eighteenth century. Yet even Bacon's Jacobean garden envisaged a natu- ral wilderness or 'heath' beyond the walled enclosures and hedged walks. And Sir Henry Wotton, in the heyday of intricate `architectural' gardens, claimed that 'gar- dens should be irregular or at least cast into a very wild regularity'. Aubrey described Sir John Danvers's garden at Lavington as having `a very pleasant elevation on the south side of the garden, which steals, arising almost insensibly, that is, before one is aware, and gives you a view over the spacious cornfields there'. In his Chelsea garden, Sir John — rather like Baldwin's hardhearted tycoon flicking his cigar ash over his roses — 'was wont on fine mornings in the summer to brush his beaver hat on the hyssop and thyme, which did perfume it with its natural essence and would last a morning or longer'.

The quarrel between the vista and the nook, between the wild and the tame was a continuing one. What has made Miss Jekyll the one abiding influence on English gardening is that strength of mind which enabled her to absorb and reconcile the opposing schools of thought. In her youth, she had known Ruskin and the Pre- Raphaelites and had sailed the coasts of Turkey with Newton who brought the great statues from the Mausoleum of Hali- carnassus back to the British Museum. Betty Massingham in her enchanting Life raises the nice speculation that, when they passed through Corfu in October 1863, they might have met Edward Lear winter- ing there as a refuge from bronchitis and asthma — perhaps even sketched the same view of hills and olive groves. In Venice, she did bump into Ruskin walking across the Piazza to study the Carpaccios. Long before her sight got worse and she had to give up painting and concentrate on gardening, she had apparently mastered carving, modelling, house-painting, car- pentry, smith's work, repousse work, gild- ing, wood-inlaying and embroidery as well. She wrote simply and vigorously, on brick- laying, for instance: `The chop and rush of the trowel taking up its load of mortar from the board, the dull slither as the moist mass was laid as a bed for the next brick in the course; the ringing music of the soft-tempered blade cutting a well-burnt brick, the muter tap of its shoulder settling it into place, aided by the down-bearing pressure of the finger- tips of the left hand.' She will write too in softer or more sentimental mood about the country lanes and country people of her childhood, about cats and children. Yet it is her robustness which always strikes one — and her lack of affectation.

`I do not envy the owners of large gardens.' Like many great gardeners from Bacon onwards, Gertrude Jekyll again and, again reminds us that bigger is not more beautiful. She was not a snob, either about plants or people. Eye-catching cottage flowers, muncipal annuals, dahlia and au- cuba — few flowers were beyond the reach of her sympathy, when properly used (she even had a deplorable fondness for the yucca); she transferred without repining from cultivated London society to what her family called 'some of Gertrude's funnies' — the old botanical clergymen, the nurserymen, assorted neighbours and friends' children who came to tea.

Neither her affection for cottage gar- dens, nor her care and thought about colour in planting could be described as new discoveries. Wotton reported at the beginning of the seventeenth century that Sir Henry Fanshawe 'at his seat in Ware Park, where I well remember, he did so precisely examine the tinctures and seasons of his flowers, that, in their setting, the inwardest of those which were to come up at the same time should always be a little darker than the outmost.' Nothing in gardening is likely to be wholly new — any more than one of Mrs David's dishes. But it is the completeness of Gertrude Jekyll's approach which makes her contribution to gardening so much more than 'put a few grey-leaved plants there, dear, and cut a little path through the orchard.'

The Lutyens-Jekyll partnership in the building of her own house at Munstead Woods and elsewhere was, like many great partnerships, a necessary meeting of oppo-, sites: merry Ned and stern old 'Aunt Bumps' who could be wheedled. Yet in retrospect she seems the stronger and finer sensibility — he had that element of the resilient conman which every successful architect seems to need. But one must not make her sound too daunting. I like to think of her playing 'Armigerous', her version of U-and non-U — with Logan Pearsall Smith: `Armigerous people don't, for instance, say overcoat — that's an Americanism — but greatcoat; they have tea or coffee or sugar, they never take them; they never take anything into their bodies but pills and medicines, and these they don't talk about . .

It is because of this completeness that Home and Garden seems to be the best of her books, because it describes not only the building of her own house and the making of her garden, but also the country- side and the people round about teaching her readers, with her usual charm, to think of their surroundings as a unity and not of the house as an escape from nature, or the garden as an escape from one's neighbours — although she was a mistress of the devices of horticultural privacy. But Macmillan are to be congra- tuled for reprinting in paperback so many of the books first reissued, three or four years ago, by the Antique Collector's Club. Gertrude Jekyll on Gardening is, however, something of a rip-off, since the bulk of it is simply reproduced from Wood and Garden.

Many of the great gardens that Miss Jekyll admired are to be found flourishing in Mr Plumptre's excellent guide to gar- dens in Great Britain which are open to the public — Edzell Castle and Pitmedden House, to name two of her favourites in Scotland. Others have been marvellously revived since her day: Westbury Court, for instance, the only surviving Dutch water garden in Britain, which I remember seeing as a sedgy swamp threated with obliteration 20-odd years ago, now res- tored to then scarcely imaginable glory by the National Trust; others made new from the wild since her death, like Pennyholme on the North Yorkshire moors; others again new embellishments on an already grand plan, like the pastiche of a tradition- al Moghul 'Paradise Garden' at Sezincote. To judge by Mr Plumptre's copious illus- trations, one or two look a little too colourful for my liking, even in black-and- white, resembling that unnerving blaze in the bulb catalogues which is usually cap- tioned as 'one of our client's gardens'. But Miss Jekyll might be less sniffy, although she was stern about some things: 'Azaleas should never be planted among or even within sight of rhodendendrons. Though both enjoy a moist peat soil, and have a near botanical relationship, they are incon- gruous in appearance, and impossible to group together.'

She speaks with horror of the time when `endless invention and ingenuity, time and labour, were wasted in what was known as carpet bedding; elaborate and intricate patterns worked out in succulents and a variety of dwarf plants. When the ingen- ious monstrosity was completed, the chief impression it gave was that it must have taken a long time to do; whether it was worth doing did not come in question, for this again was the fashion. This must have been the time when general taste in horti- culture was in its deepest degradation, when the sweet old garden flowers were thought not worth notice.' But she typical- ly adds: 'There are some persons with whom the revulsion from the methods of the old 'Bedding' days is so strong that it includes a condemnation of the plants themselves, so that they will not admit scarlet geranium, or blue lobelia, or yellow calceolaria into their pleasure-grounds. But, properly employed, these are all good garden plants, and it was not their fault that they were used in uninteresting ways. There is, I would guess, scarcely one of Mr Plumptre's 200 gardens which does not, in one way or another, reflect the influence of Gertrude Jekyll, scarcely a device — a pergola, a small lily pond sunk in paving, a hedge of hornbeam round the swimming pool, steps down to the yew-girt bowling green, the drystone wall around the cro- quet lawn — which is not be found in Gardens for Small Country Houses. And in the nicer gardens of Even Smaller Houses Not In The Country there is bound to be some border where a shady patch of hostas and periwinkles, a clump of wallflowers in the sun, or a silver-grey-green cloud of santolina and senecio reflects her sense of restraint, simplicity and harmony. While showy Modernists, pricked out too soon, run to seed and fail to naturalise, Miss Jekyll seems to be the hardiest of peren- nials.