An unsung hero?

Posted on 19/10/2019 by The Garden History Blog

Welcome to our 300th post!

Hands up if you recognize the man in the photo. As  a clue he  wrote: “Designing gardens is an art… As in all the arts there are periods of growth and changing fashion, but the principles remain constant. To make  a beautiful garden the garden-maker must not only know what he is going to do, but also why he is doing it.”

So congratulate yourself if you do know but, if like most people outside the very small world of garden design and garden history you don’t, read on and maybe you can see why Anna Pavord called him   “the Thirties’ answer to Edwin Lutyens,”  although “he  has yet to find a champion to set him up in the garden designer’s pantheon where he belongs.”

 

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Sneferu… and his garden

Posted on 12/10/2019 by The Garden History Blog

Limestone figure of Sneferu,   from Egyptian Museum, Cairo

No… it’s not an old English dialect swear word, or a disease of sheep or anything remotely similar, instead Sneferu was an early Egyptian pharaoh who ruled around 4500 years ago. Like Ozymandias he would have been long forgotten but for the fact that he left behind an extraordinary funeral monument or two.

When we think of the pyramids I’m sure everyone thinks of the famous ones at Giza  which were  built by Sneferu’s sons and grandsons. In fact they were based on a new architectural form which Sneferu had pioneered and almost perfected.

But this a blog about the history of gardens and designed landscapes so why am I waffling is on about the evolution of  pyramids in Egypt?  It’s because archeology has now shown that Sneferu’s pyramids were not designed in isolation and in fact  sat in the middle of a complex of buildings and gardens  which is [I think] the earliest known example of large-scale landscape design.

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Winifred Walker: “The most famous of all flower painters”

Posted on 05/10/2019 by The Garden History Blog

Trusses of hybrids: R. ‘Hugh Wormold’ at top, ‘Mrs Lindsay Smith’ at right and ‘Rosamund Millais’ at left. from JG Millais ‘s Rhododendrons(1924).

If I ask you to name the most famous of all flowers painters I very much doubt you’d reply Winifred Walker,  yet that’s how she was described by a national newspaper a century ago in 1919. The description might be a bit of an exaggeration but there’s no doubt she was certainly  a more than accomplished painter who illustrated seed and nursery catalogues and gardening books as well as being an “official” artist for the Royal Horticultural Society.

Bodgers’ Zinnias by Winifred Walker, from  American Bulb Company catalogue, 1930

Yet her story confirms one of the things I learned quite early on writing this blog, and indeed doing garden history research more generally, that it’s often more difficult to track down information about the comparatively recent past than it is about the 18th or 19th centuries. It also shows how difficult it can be to trace the lives of many of the botanical artists who figure in the story, even if they are significant, and it’s usually doubly difficult if they are women.

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The Eighth Wonder of the World?

Posted on 28/09/2019 by The Garden History Blog

Last week’s post was about Salomon de Caus’s career in England. It ended when James I’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, who de Caus was tutoring, married Frederick, the Elector Palatine in 1613 and moved to Heidelberg.  This might have been a disaster for de Caus but it turned out to be a great opportunity and led to his grandest commission.

Instead of being left looking for a new patron in England de Caus was invited to Heidelberg, and  by July 1614 he had been appointed “Ingenieur et architecte de son Altesse Palatine Electorale” and asked to redesign the palace gardens for the happy couple.

These have become one of the most celebrated gardens of the early modern period.  They were on an extremely  difficult site, but extensive in scale, almost ludicrously elaborate in conception, and possibly with all sorts of mystical overtones.  They were immortalised in a much-reproduced painting and  engraving, and in considerable detail in de Caus own book about them, the Hortus Palatinus.  Yet it’s almost as much about their theoretical appearance and meaning as their actual existence, because they were unfinished, and even those parts  which were completed did not last long because of the ravages of war.

In short the Hortus Palatinus is as much  a legendary garden as a real one

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Solomon de Caus in England

Posted on 21/09/2019 by The Garden History Blog

Design for a grand figure representing Mount Imolus, from De Caus Raisons des Forces mouvantes 1615

Roy Strong in The Renaissance Garden asserts, quite rightly, that early writers on garden history seem to have overlooked the huge part played in garden design in the late 15th to early 17thc by engineers.  The Renaissance humanist mind saw no boundaries  between academic and practical disciplines of any kind, and proof of that can be seen perfectly in the life and career of Salomon de Caus.

De Caus was an engineer, architect, mathematician and musical theorist who also studied hydraulics and optics amongst many other things. He combined broad practical skill with theoretical understanding  in all these fields, and also had a significant role in early modern garden design. 

De Caus worked on several important sites in Jacobean Britain, as well as others in mainland Europe, most famously at Heidelberg.  He also wrote a series of books which show his breadth of intellect and interests, and which, particularly because of their wonderful illustrations, continue to be a major source of information notably on early modern engineering and gardens.  
Today’s post is a look at his impact on gardens in England
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