A Gardening Dream Team

The Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the 19^th century was spurred by a rejection of the industrial revolution. As Europe was swept up in an age of mechanization and mass-production, some people feared that the appreciation of craftsmanship was lost. As a result, artists and craftspeople developed the Arts and Crafts movement that celebrated designs echoing medieval, folk and country traditions. The garden was not excluded from this movement and two people, Gertrude Jekyll and Edward Lutyens, developed the beautiful Arts and Crafts garden.

Gertrude Jekyll was a prime example of a participant in the Arts and Crafts movement. She dabbled in everything from writing to ironwork, but one of her most influential hobbies was gardening. She was trained as a painter, and was the first to apply painterly color theory to her gardens.

Jekyll worked with Edward Lutyens, who was an architect. They had a unique connection that allowed them to fuse the best aspects of each of their professions to create unique gardens that once again revolutionized garden styles. They worked together in designing the grounds of country cottages, and oftentimes the architectural structure of the house blended almost seamlessly into an artfully designed garden. Their work was featured frequently in Country Life, an English magazine dedicated to the latest styles of country homes, and it was in this way that the team gained popularity. 

Jekyll was inspired by country gardens in Surrey. Her interest was creating beautiful flower gardens, and not whether the plants were native to England. She designed her gardens using color theory, and while transferring the plans from paper to garden seems simple, it was anything but. 

A plan like the one pictured above is two dimensional, but of course, gardens are three dimensional. In order to make her gardens look beautiful, Jekyll had to consider everything from flowering times to heights of plants, to sizes and colors of leaves, and everything in between. Jekyll and Lutyens worked closely with their clients, and designed specifically with their needs and preferences in mind. This incorporates the essence of the Arts and Crafts movement - taking one's own talents to create unique, one-of-a-kind displays of creativity. 

This photo shows Jekyll's and Lutyens garden actualized. It has a herbaceous border, which Jekyll reinvented and revived, and is a perfect example of the naturalistic garden that was very much a part of the Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the 19th century. 

19th Century Battle of Styles

Towards the end of Queen Victoria's reign in England, the high Victorian garden saw a decline in popularity. Like many garden styles of the past, it was becoming overdone and tawdry. People interested in gardening were interested in developing something fresh and new, and as a result, a battle of styles ensued. The two key players in this battle were William Robinson and Sir Reginald Blomfield. They clashed over how they believed the high Victorian garden style should be abandoned.

Robinson, trained as a gardener and horticulturist, advocated that gardens return to their roots, and that gardeners should be the ones to design gardens, as they understood the plants. He was inspired by observing a summer with poor weather during which the wimpy plantings of the Victorian bedded gardens failed, and people complained that their gardens looked bad. Robinson believed that gardens could and should be hardy, and, if planted correctly, could be beautiful in all seasons. His gardens utilized strong native plants in a naturalistic and artful way to create a peaceful escape.

A Robinson Garden Design

Blomfield, on the other hand, saw gardens as an extension of the architecture of the house. In his eyes, the gardens should be formal, and it should be obvious that they were designed along with the buildings. He was influenced by the formality of the English renaissance garden, and his designs included geometric shapes and often, axial symmetry. Blomfield wanted gardens to look orderly and seamless, and as a result, his designs were formal and focused on close-clipped grass and hedges, along with organized flower beds.

Blomfield Garden at Sulgrave Manor

The Battle of Styles ended in a compromise: the collaboration of Gertrude Jekyll and Sir Edward Lutyens. Jekyll was a gardener and Lutyens was an architect. They meshed both personally and professionally, and this cooperation brought about the garden of the Arts and Crafts movement. This garden style saw the end of the high Victorian gardens, and was the advent of naturalistic, painterly flower gardens that Robinson dreamed of combined with architecture of which Blomfield would be proud.

Green Space in Copenhagen

In the 19th century, Copenhagen saw a boom in parks and green space. The city's fortifications that had been constructed between the 12th and 15th centuries retired as defense systems and transformed into beautiful parks which the people of Copenhagen could enjoy. The bastions originally walled in the city on the west, but as the population expanded and the need for physical defenses disappeared, they became useless. 

The fortifications were made into 4 parks: Ørstedsparken, the Botanical Garden, Østre Anlæg, and Kastellet. Each park recycled the moat from the fortifications to create one or more lakes, and can be seen in the map below. Kastellet is the most recognizable, for its star-shaped design. It is built up around the moat, and is filled with paths along which many Copenhageners jog and walk. Østre Anlæg by contrast, has many more trees and this creates a more wooded atmosphere. It is home to the Statens Museum for Kunst at one end. The Botanical Garden's purpose is twofold. It serves both as a place where city dwellers can go to enjoy the outdoors, but it is also a research facility. In this park, each plant is tagged with a name, and there are conservatories filled with tropical plants that can be a welcome respite from the harsh cold and dreary winter. Ørstedsparken, just south of Nørreport station, is dominated by a central lake, with grassy banks. The paths are lined with benchs, and when it's warm, the grass and the benches are filled with people taking breaks from work or class to eat and relax. 

Today, these parks are an integral piece of life in Copenhagen. Green space in urban areas has been proven to have numerous positive effects on the environment, including increasing rainwater retention, cooling cities and improving air quality. What may be most noticeable, however, is the positive effect urban green space has on the social aspect of life. Exposure to nature enhances a person's psychological and emotional well-being. Parks provide a place to relax, get fresh air, exercise and connect with friends and family. In Copenhagen, parks and green spaces are utilized to their fullest extend in this way. When the weather is nice, the parks and full of people - myself included - and the atmosphere, along with the fresh air, is rejuvenating and invigorating. 

The English Landscape Garden

18th century England saw a shift in the style of gardens. The beginning of the century was dominated by countless cookie-cutter baroque gardens, and they became something commonplace. That, coupled with increasing feelings of hatred between the French and the British, led the Brits to radically redesign the garden.

This revolution first began with Charles Bridgeman. He was the pioneer of free form landscape gardening, and was a key transitional piece. Bridgeman's landscapes followed an overarching structured form, similar to geometric baroque gardens, but he played with curves within the constructs of a structured garden.

His more naturalistic, wandering designs can be seen in this 1720 aerial drawing of Stowe. While the garden is still dominated by straight lines, the meandering paths it did have were a completely new idea in England at the time. Sadly, many of his original landscape gardens were redesigned by the likes of William Kent and Capability Brown as this style of garden became more popular, and no pure Bridgeman design still exists. 

William Kent was the next of influential persons to work with English landscape gardens. He was many things, including an architect, painter and a gardener. He picked up where Charles Bridgeman left off, and went 10 steps farther. While he was not a horticultural genius, he was a genius when it came to landscape design, and often designed the landscapes and let others carry them to fruition.

This picture of the Vale of Venus at Rousham shows how Kent designed gardens in a way that brought landscape painting to life. He utilized natural forms and colors to create spaces that illicit emotional responses, and this is still true even today in the gardens like Rousham where his work can still be seen. 

Capability Brown was the last great English landscape garden designer. He worked after both Bridgeman and Kent, and began by first working under Kent at Stowe. He created more than 170 landscape gardens for estates and country homes during his career. His style was dominated by sloping meadows of grass, which seemed to effortlessly incorporate the homes into the scenic panorama.

Brown's landscapes can be experienced at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, and in many other places across England. His landscapes were developed to be beautiful to the eye, without the viewer necessarily realizing they were looking at a carefully designed space. Use of hidden dams to create naturalistic lakes and gently sculpted hills elicit emotion from the landscape, and this really is the ultimate purpose of the English landscape garden.

Sources:
http://faculty.bsc.edu/jtatter/sleepwood.html (Bridgewater)
http://www.rousham.org (Kent)
http://www.blenheimpalace.com (Brown)