Gardens in the 18th century were known for formality and controlled design but they were also alive with colours, animals and sounds
For more than 200 years the 18th-century English garden has been associated with meandering paths and rolling lawns dotted with clumps of trees and green groves – landscapes with little scent or colour and devoid of birdsong, butterflies or caterpillars. I blamed Capability Brown and his bland, repetitive designs for these seemingly sterile landscapes, until I read Mark Laird’s magisterial The Flowering of the Landscape Garden. Published in 1999, this book put perfumed blossoms and brightly coloured blooms back into the Georgian garden. Rather than being green and monotonous, Laird argued, the 18th-century garden featured shrubberies populated with flowering shrubs and trees from North America – elegant Magnolia grandiflora, the spidery yellow winter blooms of witch hazel and the bloodied autumn foliage of maple trees. They became, one contemporary gardener said, the “living pencils” that coloured these landscapes.
In his new book, Laird presents gardens alive with sounds and animals, once again challenging our misguided ideas of the 18th-century garden, which he blames on Horace Walpole. A man of letters and the owner of Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole became England’s first garden historian when he wrote The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening in 1780. This popular book celebrated the “natural” English style of garden designers William Kent and Capability Brown, a contrast to the formal geometric baroque garden. Interestingly, though, Walpole firmly excluded nature and natural history from his account. Ever since then, Laird explains, the history of English gardens “has been prone to a Walpolean bias”. This book sets out to correct that imbalance.
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