Trendy horticulture .
In the Eighteenth one C William Kent and Capability Browns ’ designs for gardens broom away the formality of the Dutch style with its canals , parterre and box hedgerow . In fact , sometimes they swept away villages which were inconveniently in the way . Then quixotic gardens became stylish and mountains which had always been terrifying were admired . People wanted precipices and grot and places to be melancholy in . Rockeries were built on a monumental scale to interpret factual lot ranges . Victorians plunder the countryside of fern to fill up their ferneries . glasshouse were het and rich people spent hazard on new exotics plant out each year to look like oriental carpet .
Since then fashions have get and gone with new designer revile the perceptiveness of those who went before despite the fact that they shamelessly sack horticulture motifs of previous generations .
Alexander Pope said ‘ confer with the genius of the stead ’ when garden and this was probably the best horticultural advice ever . But of course it has usually been ignored because meter and again the furore for exotic foreign ideas sweeps the nation . The craze for Chinoiserie left us with an incongruous Taiwanese Pagoda in Kew Gardens . Everybody wanted their garden to face like a willow pattern plate . The Edwardians admired Japanese gardens and dead there were tea houses , skim gravel and excruciate trees everywhere . Italian influence have never really leave behind us and many designers still think that our garden should be mostly green and resemble the Boboli Gardens with box , topiary , and recollective scene .
William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll show in the Golden Age for English gardening with its naturalism and elusive colour schemes . bungalow gardens became all the trend and paintings show rural pastorale of cottage gardens complete with picturesque peasants . Of course the whole idea of a cottage garden is an contrived concept because they never were or could have been beautiful . peasant needed their land to grow vegetables .
For many years pastel colours were the only kind to turn and garden up and down the country were made jejune with black and white gardens in white or blue . Anything in crimson , orangish or yellow was terribly vulgar . leafage became important but it had to be grayish . ( Except it was prognosticate silver . ) There was even a nursery devoted to it . Mrs. Desmond Allwood sell silver plants and pinko . Yellow which was eschew in flowers was embraced in leafage because it was n’t call in yellow it was prognosticate amber .
In the seventies people decided that gardens should be labour - saving and design for mass who could n’t be gravel to garden . Herbaceous plants were no longer grown because it was felt that staking your delphiniums is too much of a chore . The atrocious conception of ground back industrial plant became popular and the great unwashed were encouraged to plant such horrors asVinca , Lamium , SymphoricarposandHypericum .
Then there was the craze for island beds of heather and nanus conifer made democratic by Adrian Bloom . This has leave the suburbs full of huge conifers which release out not to be dwarf after all . Fashion promptly change again and you still see the great unwashed come out with that old cliché : ‘ the only place for heather is on the moors ’ . ( This is almost as galling as people say ‘ the garden just growed like Topsy ’ . ) AnywayErica carneadoesn’t grow on the moorland and there is nothing like it for winter colour .
Now perennial are making a replication and also at last we can have colour without being weigh common . Dahlias have been reinstated ; for a foresightful time it was only consider acceptable to grow the Bishop of Llandaff but now people are not ashamed to plant brightly coloured one with gullible farewell . you’re able to even growKniphofia , and not only the tasteful ‘ Jenny Bloom ’ . Sarah Raven has done a lot to advance adventuresome colour schemes .
This is all very liberating but of trend there are representative saying that our custom of English body politic garden is reactionary and old - fashioned . I truly hope that the craze for prairie gardening is on its way out now . We could n’t have come further from Pope ’s advice to confabulate the genius of the place than this uncanny musical theme that to create an American prairie is a realistic way of garden in the UK . It is a good melodic theme to plant flowers in a ground substance of smoke , in other Logos create a hayfield . After all , meadows have been always reinvented since the Elizabethan flowery George Herbert Mead . But the style promoted by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury looks right only for a yoke of months in late summer . After that you have to content yourself with utter seed heads and pretend you like looking at them . There are sign of the zodiac though that people finger that the English flower meadow is the sorting we should be supporting ; suddenly moo-cow Petroselinum crispum is the in matter . graphic designer say that we cram too many flowers into our garden and we should restrain our pallette to broad sheets of colour . I feel very strongly that hoi polloi should be free to make of their gardens what they will without supreme authority of gustatory sensation evidence them that they are vulgar or honest-to-god fashioned .
