The Picturesque || Two Romantic Picturesque Flower Gardens

The Garden History Society

Two Romantic Picturesque Flower GardensAuthor(s): Mavis BateySource: Garden History, Vol. 22, No. 2, The Picturesque (Winter, 1994), pp. 197-205Published by: The Garden History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1587027 .

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MAVIS BATEY

TWO ROMANTIC PICTURESQUE FLOWER GARDENS

THE NUNEHAM COURTENAY FLOWER GARDEN

The flower garden at Nuneham, laid out by the poet-gardener William Mason 'with Poet's Feeling and Painter's eye', was a major influence on pleasure ground gardening. It was acclaimed as a revolution in taste and sentiment. 'Nuneham is a place of the first beauty; it may in varying opinion have an equal, but its flower garden transcends all rivalry and is itself alone. Taste alone could not have formed it ... only the genius of

poetry could compose it', enthused William Combe in I794. Everybody raved about it, the Royal family, Walpole, Joshua Reynolds, who found it 'irresistible', John Wesley, and Mrs Siddons, who found it did her more good than any church service; poets extolled it and it was made famous by Paul Sandby's paintings, engraved by William Watts in I777. The engravings, published in the Copperplate Magazine of 1778 showed the picturesque possibility of a landscape with flowers. Real gardeners, not bogus shepherds, are the figures in the landscape (Figure I).

When the flower garden was begun in I770 there was no literary attitude known as Romanticism, but Mason's garden was truly romantic in the existing sense of the word as 'resembling the tale of romance'. The cult of medievalism had already led to such ventures as Strawberry Hill, the Sanderson Miller ruined castles, and gothic follies, but in the I76os feeling for the romantic past was further stimulated by the publication of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Hurd's Letters of Chivalry and Romance, the Ossianic poetry, and Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. In terms of gardening the romantic spirit had manifested itself in grottoes, bowers, and hermitages. In I75I an edition of Spencer's Faerie Queene was published with illustrations by William Kent showing romantic buildings, and in 1767 William Wrighte published a manual of Grotesque Architecture with plans and sections for such conceits.

Lord Nuneham and William Mason, like their friend Horace Walpole, preferred 'the romantic scenes of the past' to the rational view of life, and they planned a garden of romance at Nuneham such as Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser, and Chaucer had described. These were paradisal gardens with flowers, fruit-bearing trees, joyous birds, caves, and natural bowers. At Nuneham, Flora presided in her temple over the romantic garden with its orange trees, myrtles, trailing plants, and dainty patches of flowers. At the

West House, 151 Barrack Lane, Aldwick, West Sussex P02 I 4ED

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GARDEN HISTORY 22:2

Figure I. Engraving of the Nuneham Flower Garden, Painting by Paul Sandby, engraved by William Watts, I777

Copperplate Magazine, 1778

entrance to the garden a bust of Flora was inscribed with lines from Chaucer's translation of The Romaunt of the Rose depicting the Garden of Mirth:

Here springs the violet all newe, And fresh periwinkle riche of hewe And flores yelowe, white and rede Swich plentee grew ther never in mede, Ful gay is all the ground and queint And poudrid, as men had it peint With many a fresh and sondry flowe That casten up ful good savour

In the temple under a marble medallion of Flora, lines from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) describe the natural bowers of a romance garden:

Small thickets, with the scented laurel gay, Cedar and orange, full of fruit and flower, Myrtle and palm, with interwoven spray Pleached in mixed modes form a bower, And, breaking with their shade the scorching ray Make a cool shelter from the noontide hour And nightingales among those branches wing Their flight, and safely amorous descants sing

A new note, however, was brought into the idea of a romance garden through the influence of Rousseau's novel La Nouvelle Heloise at Nuneham. Medieval romance

I98




gardens were essentially 'bowers of bliss' and the background for courtly love, indolence, and mirth. The Garden of Eden had been the setting for the fall of Man and the sensual beauties of romance gardens were presented as traps for the virtuous. Not so when a visitor passed through Julie's Elysee garden in La Nouvelle Heloise. 'J'ai cru voir l'image de la vertu ou je cherchais celle du plaisir', he exclaimed, having become aware of the virtuous state of nature. Rousseau believed in a 'sixth sense', the moral sense, in the delights of a garden; along with the scent of flowers, the sound of birds, the taste of wild fruits, the touch of cooling breezes, and the visual beauty of the scene, one could actually experience a sense of virtue, which like the other senses was also pleasurable.

To make sure that the soul was raised to virtue in Nuneham's Elysee, suitable sentimental inscriptions and statues to men of virtue and memorials to dead friends were placed in the shrubbery. A quotation from La Nouvelle Heloise which Lord Nuneham felt was 'beautifully allusive to the world of flowers' was placed on a circular seat around a tree at the entrance to the garden: 'Si l'Auteur de la nature est grand dans les grandes choses il est tres grand dans les petites'. The multum in parvo quality was not just the scaling down of landscape to accommodate the intimacy of a flower garden, but rather an illusion to make nature accessible a la Julie: 'Nature is not met with in frequented places but on tops of mountains, desert islands, in the depths of forests she reveals her charms and those who love her and cannot pursue her so far are reduced to violence to make her come and live with them'.2

Mason's garden, like Julie's, stood apart from the general scene with 'no desire to catch prospects beyond its own limits'. There were flowery thickets, garlands of vine and honeysuckle trailing 'negligently as they do in the forest', natural bowers, and garden flowers growing with wild flowers. The enclosed nature of Nuneham's flower garden was dictated by circumstances. The Ist Earl Harcourt did not see eye to eye with his romantic son, who unbeknown to his father had brought Rousseau to stay at Nuneham for a short while in 1767, which had resulted in his denouncing hereditary aristocracy and refusing to go to Court or to be called 'My Lord'.

When the earl went to Paris as ambassador, Lord Nuneham, in Walpole's words 'begged an acre' out of the landscaped garden to be natural in during his father's absence. The earl returned in the autumn and was disgusted at the sight of drooping honeysuckle bowers and dead flowers, comparing the garden unfavourably with the year-round elegance of French flower gardens. He unfeelingly gave orders for a new laundry to be built overlooking the flower garden and told his son to get ready to accompany him on his next mission as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to take his mind off Rousseau. The poet laureate, William Whitehead, who was Lord Nuneham's former tutor, wrote a poem to commiserate with him on the 'two melancholy events of Ireland and the laundry', in which he pointed out that a Rousseauist should be pleased that the laundry maids could share his cult of Flora.

We laundry-maids at Nuneham Are the happiest in the nation With a rub, rub, rub and a frothing tub, And a charming situation.

No more shall our caps and aprons Be torn by gooseberry-bushes Or our ruffles be rent by the thistle and bent, Or our sheets be soil'd with rushes.

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GARDEN HISTORY 22:2

Our lines shall grace laburnams, Since such our master's will is; And our smaller things shall dangle on strings From tuberose tops and lilies.

No more in our chests of linen Shall lavender reign despotic We'll cull our flowers from yonder bowers And our smocks shall smell exotic.3

The ist Earl died in 1777 and his son screened off the offending laundry and could now place a statue to the Man of Nature in the shrubbery with an inscription by his cousin Brooke Boothby, a fellow 'ame sensible'.

Say is the heart to virtue warm? Can genius animate the feeling breast? 'Tis ROUSSEAU, let thy Bosom speak the rest.

Back in France Rousseau expressed his delight when he heard he had been given a place in Nuneham's Elysee. The new Lord Harcourt wrote his own description of the refurbished flower garden to accompany Sandby's prints in the Copperplate Magazine and insisted that all the inscriptions on seats and urns must be included as they were essential to the concept of the flower garden, which must be 'perceived and felt'.4 The Countess Harcourt, a poetess admired by Walpole, used to write verses for favoured guests, which she left hanging from the statuary, and pen and ink was left in Mason's bower so that others who were so inspired could leave verses in an album provided.

The flower garden changed in character after the association of Mason and Lord Harcourt with William Gilpin, who had less sentimental and more practical ideas on nature than Rousseau. Lord Harcourt and William Mason greatly admired Gilpin and were instrumental in persuading him to publish his picturesque Tours. The Wye Tour is dedicated to Mason, the Scottish Highlands to Lord Harcourt. In 1778 Mason planned a circuit walk at Nuneham, along the lines of a Gilpin picturesque Tour, with 'stations' for viewing framed scenes of the Thames and the distant view of Oxford.

Gilpin was offered the living of Nuneham so that he could co-operate in Lord Harcourt's new landscaping, but he declined the offer and went instead, in 1778, to Boldre in the New Forest, where he transferred his picturesque interest from mountains, rivers, and lakes to forest scenery. Mason was soon invited down and promised that a short distance from Gilpin's house at Vicar's Hill he would in Norley Wood 'see a country finer than any garden, you ever saw',5 where the wood pasture 'lawndes' of the forest, browsed by deer into a fine turf, were 'adorned with islands, or peninsulas' of thorns, holly, and gorse.

In 1781 Gilpin and Mason exchanged manuscripts of the books they were writing, Gilpin the notes for his Remarks on Forest Scenery and Mason the 4th Book of his The English Garden in which he describes Lord Harcourt's flower garden. Mason had clearly been converted to his friend's idea that landscape gardeners should study the natural scenery of the forest when he undertook the 'new arrangement' of the Nuneham flower garden. No ground plan exists showing the previous layout of the flower garden as painted by Sandby, where the flowerbeds are seen to be edged formally with box. The 'patches quaint' of the flowerbeds, which Mason regretted had looked like 'blistering plasters' when he committed them to the original plan, were gradually changed to

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resemble the picturesque shrubberies of forest lawns. The urns and busts still had pride of place even in forest scenery, which Gilpin would have found incongruous.

His taste will best conceive The new arrangement, whose free footsteps, us'd To forest haunts, have pierc'd their opening dells, Where frequent tufts of sweetbriar, box, or thorn, Steal on the green sward, but admit fair space For many a mossy maze to wind between So here did Art arrange her flow'ry groups Irregular, yet not in patches quaint, But interpos'd between the wand'ring lines Of shaven turf which twisted to the path, Gravel or sand, that in as wild a wave Stole round the verdant limits of the scene; Leading the eye to many a sculptur'd bust On shapely pedestal, of Sage, or Bard. Bright heirs of fame, who living lov'd the haunts So fragrant, so sequestered. Many an Urn There too had place, with votive lay inscrib'd To Freedom, Friendship, Solitude, or Love.6

Gilpin in his Forest Scenery, which was not published until 1791, included Mason's quotation about how 'frequent tufts of sweetbriar, box or thorn steal on the green sward',

I. . , .

^^"W Tflr w -TO A 7 M .li.Ut f7'

It Figure 2. Plan of the Nuneham Flower Garden, 1785.

Public Record Office, Work 38/349

20I



GARDEN HISTORY 22:2

further sealing the thoughts they had in Norley Wood and the way their ideas were interwoven.7

The plan of 1785 (Figure 2) shows the 'new arrangement' of the flowerbeds and shrubberies at Nuneham. The neat box edging shown in the Sandby paintings has disappeared and the layout follows the instructions given in William Burgh's prose commentary of the above lines, as approved by Mason, of how to plant a garden forest lawn. 'It is the form and easy flow of the grassy interstices that the designer ought first to have regard to; and if these be well formed, the spaces for flowers or shrubbery will be at the same time ascertained'.8

The earl again made 'material alterations' in 1794 himself. The plan in Mark Laird's article in Garden History, 18.2 (I990), shows this stage of development when the 1785 shapes have grown out of recognition and Flora and Hebe, formerly on the grass, appear in the flowery beds.9 This was the layout that Humphry Repton saw when he and his son stayed with Lord Harcourt in I798. Repton seems to have been puzzled as to how to categorize the flower garden when he wrote in his Theory in I803 that: 'The Flower garden at Nuneham, without being formal, is highly enriched, but not too much crowded with seats, temples, statues, vases, or other ornaments, which, being works of art, beautifully harmonize with that profusion of flowers and curious plants which distinguish the flower garden from the natural landscape, although the walks are not in straight lines'.10

Mason's garden clearly impressed him, however, since he used his sketch of it as an illustration for Peacock's Repository for June 8oo, one of the few illustrations not of his own work. Although he used forest lawn type planting in his own designs he was never happy with the sentimental side of Nuneham. He did, however, enter into the spirit of 'pleasing melancholy' when he made a charming watercolour of the flowery setting of the Urn to Viscountess Palmerston, a Harcourt friend who 'living loved the haunts', which bore the inscription:

Here shall our lingring footsteps oft be found This is her shrine and consecrate the ground Here living sweets around her altar rise And breathe perpetual incense to the skies O if kind Pity steal on Virtue's eye, Check not the tear, nor stop the useful sigh.

The flower garden was little altered until I830 when Archbishop Harcourt inherited. Most of the busts and urns were removed, the statue of Rousseau was unceremoniously disposed of, and William Sawrey Gilpin was called in in 1832 to redesign the garden. The number of beds was reduced and changed in shape, with further promontory planting of shrubs, including rhododendrons, overlaying some of the flowerbeds. The trees round the flower garden had closed in making it no longer suitable for flowers. William Sawrey Gilpin made a rosary on new land beyond it,1l and introduced the type of basket urns in the glades illustrated in his Practical Hints on Landscape Gardening, in which he advocates that flower garden glades 'should be broken by a single plant or basket, taking care never to place such interruption midway between the sides of the glade.12

Later Harcourts attempted to bring back the Sandby look of Mason's garden. One of them was possibly Lady Waldegrave of Strawberry Hill, who became mistress of Nuneham in I847, and knew how greatly Horace Walpole had admired the flower

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garden. More recently, in 1982, the Garden History Society was asked to advise on the restoration of the flower garden, which had become completely overgrown. Progress was slow and there have been new owners since that time, but it is hoped that restoration of this important garden will be continued in the future.

AUDLEY END PARTERRE GARDEN

Audley End has an interesting similarity with Nuneham in that William Sawrey Gilpin in the early I83os advised on a new flower garden to replace an overgrown Elysian garden, laid out in the I780s. There is nothing to suggest, however, that the rococo Elysian garden at Audley End, with its cascade, grotto, teahouse, and flowerbeds, had any connection with Julie's Elysee from La Nouvelle Heloise; nor was the new flower garden by the house to be a place for 'pleasing melancholy' or Rousseau meditations in the Nuneham style.

It was romantic in a nineteenth-century way in that it was to evoke association with the past history of the house. William Sawrey Gilpin, like his uncle William Gilpin, Price, Knight, and Repton, deplored the kind of situation at Audley End, seen in the famous Tomkins painting, where by 'modern improvement' an ancient house stands alone in an apparent field surrounded by cattle. He felt this was totally out of 'keeping' or character, and thus lacked one of the most important principles of the Picturesque. William Sawrey Gilpin must have been delighted to find an owner of a 'manorial building' who wanted to bring back something of what his mentor Uvedale Price called 'the rich formality of the old school' to the garden.

William Sawrey Gilpin entered into the spirit of the romantic Jacobean revival of the house, which Lord Braybrooke embarked on in I825, when he designed the Jacobean parterre to be seen from the newly-decorated rooms on the garden front. He had already visited Audley End in the early I82os,13 just after he had given up his position as drawing master at the Military College and was beginning his career as a landscape gardener in the professed picturesque tradition.

The alterations in the house began in I825 when the 3rd Baron Braybrooke inherited. In his History of Audley End and Saffron Walden, published in I836, Lord Braybrooke described the new interior of the house and the completed flower garden, which took over from the Elysian flower garden: 'A new Flower Garden has been laid out, immediately adjoining to the House, with terraces, the design of which was principally made by Mr. William Gilpin, and it is connected with Gravel walks with the Elysian Garden and the Kitchen Garden' (Figure 3).

A plan of the parterre showing some flower planting details drawn up by William Press in I832 suggests that William Sawrey Gilpin had to seek help with horticultural matters. His Practical Hints on Landscape Gardening, published that year, had stated firmly that he was 'little conversant with flowers'. This had brought down Loudon's wrath, when he reviewed the book in his Gardener's Magazine. 14The Braybrookes may have been influenced by their relative's flower garden at Dropmore, which Loudon described, approvingly, giving a full list of plants in the parterre.15 If Dropmore had been discussed with William Sawrey Gilpin he would have disapproved strongly of one of Lady Grenville's ideas. Loudon describes how she used all manner of bizarre containers, such as an old Italian jar for Genoese pickles, in her flower garden.

Congruity was a major picturesque tenet. When William Sawrey Gilpin advised on stone flower baskets in a flower garden he was careful to stipulate in his Practical Hints

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GARDEN HISTORY 22:2

Figure 3. Audley End flower garden

that they should only be given handles if the eye felt they were small enough to lift.16 The large flower basket in the Nuneham flower garden has no handle. The ultimate in incongruity was when he found cannons on the Windsor terrace aimed at the flower garden. He found it as unpicturesque an idea as it was unsuitable, and was forced to point out humbly that: 'To my opinion the Cannon that are placed along the East terrace are quite out of Character with the Flower Garden suppposing them fit for defence'.17

'Connexion' was as important a picturesque principle as congruity, and this applied to the way a flower garden in the 'dressed' part of a pleasure garden should relate to the landscape, especially if it was supplying, as at Audley End, a 'rich foreground' to the scene. 'Above all, the connection of the several parts into one harmonious whole should ever be kept in view'.18 This connection could be achieved by the kind of picturesque arrangement of shrub promontories William Gilpin had drawn attention to in Forest Scenery and William Mason had emulated at Nuneham. In his Practical Hints William Sawrey Gilpin repeated that 'good hints' for planting a garden shrubbery could be 'found on any common, where furze, broom, etc furnish varieties of form and groupings'.19 It was the connecting and the natural grouping of the brakes on forest lawns, the intermixing and intertwinings of plants and not the actual weeds which were to be copied of course. When the gardener imitated such New Forest scenery the actual content of the shrubbery, apart from any existing hollies or thorns, would be ordered from the nurseryman.

William Sawrey Gilpin recommended that 'paeonies, roses, hollyhocks and other flowers of sufficient height to mingle with the shrubs, may fairly be united with them, if it can be effected without showing the mould'20 and that the planting of periwinkle, St John's wort, and other groud on creepers would break any edgy lines. The best way to gauge the effect of the design of shrubberies, he hinted further in his eminently practical way, was 'forming them on the ground, with branches of various lengths, with the leaves on, which gives a far bettere a idea of intended effect than can be given by stakes: the branches being laid on the ground, can be turned in any direction, till the best forms are obtained, which may then be marked on the turf with an edging iron'.2

Following archaeology and detailed archival research English Heritage has carried out a most commendable restoration of the Audley End parterre garden, which is a rare out a most commendable restoration of the Audley End parterre garden, which is a rare

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example of Regency romantic revival gardening.22 William Sawrey Gilpin had been instructed to make not a true restoration of a Jacobean parterre with intricate patterns of box tracery on coloured gravels but one with a design of flowers available in the I83os, which has ensured that there is some informal planting in the formal pattern. English Heritage is currently planning to restore the adjoining shrubberies which formed an integral part of William Sawrey Gilpin's picturesque design.

REFERENCES

I. William Combe, An History of the River Thames, I (J. & J. Boydell, I794), p. 200.

2. J. J. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise (1761), Part Iv, Letter xI.

3. Unpublished poem in The Harcourt Papers, ed. by E. H. Harcourt (1880-1905), VII.

4. Letter from Lord Harcourt to Paul Sandby. Bodleian MS Eng. Letters d3Io fI5.

5. Gilpin to Mason, 3 Sept. 1778 Bodleian MS. Eng misc. d. 570.

6. W. Mason, The English Garden (1783 edition, with Notes and Commentary by William Burgh) Book Iv, lines 194-2II.

7. W. Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery, II

(1791), p. 152. 8. The English Garden, pp. 183-84. 9. Bodleian MS D.D. Harcourt. a.i (R). Io. Repton first commented on the nature of the

Nuneham flower garden in his Red Book for Valleyfield in 80oi. See George Carter, Patrick

Goode, Kedrun Laurie, Humphry Repton Landscape Gardener (I982), p. 56.

11. E. Adveno Brooke, The Gardens of England (1857) gives colour plate illustration of the Nuneham rosary.

I2. W. S. Gilpin, Practical Hints on Landscape Gardening (1832), p. 62.

I3. Letter dated I822, Gloucestershire R.O. D678 320. Ref. from Sophieke Piebenga.

14. The Gardener's Magazine, 8 (I832), p. 700. I5. Ibid., 3, Jan I828, pp. 257-69. I6. Practical Hints, p. 60. 17. Works 34/244. I8. Practical Hints, p. 92. 19. Ibid., p. 59. 20. Ibid., p. 56. 21. Ibid., p. 59. 22. Land Use Consultants Report, 'The

Restoration of the Flower Garden at Audley End' (I988).

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The Picturesque || Two Romantic Picturesque Flower Gardens