Many garden but few
gardeners have the power to reach into the future to shape landscape
style and fashion. Gertrude Jekyll, Mien Ruys, Geoffrey Jellicoe,
Frank Lloyd Wright, Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Max, and Edwin
Lutyens are just some of the extraordinary gardeners from the
last century who influence today’s garden design.
Andrew Wilson introduces
56 of them in Influential Gardeners; The Designers Who Shaped
20th-Century Garden Style (Clarkson Potter, 2003), transporting
readers through photographs and scholarly text into the designers’
ideas and gardens.
Wilson has the perfect
background for the task: He teaches the professional diploma course
in Garden Design
Studies at the world-famous Ichbald
School of Design in London and was the chairman of the Society
of Garden Designers. Wilson tackled this daunting task by
organizing the designers by their primary focus — color and decoration,
plants, concept, form, structure, texture, and materials. An introduction
to each section provides an overview of the times. More detailed
essays about the individual designers follow, providing just enough
information to whet one’s appetite. The result is an encyclopedic
reference to garden design.
Color and decoration
was the focus of Gertrude
Jekyll, Vita
Sackville-West, and Penelope
Hobhouse. These designers saw themselves as decorators, filling
beds with planting color and texture. Gertrude Jekyll, of course,
is the undisputed master of color and decoration. Inspired by
Michel Eugene Chevreul’s The Principles of Harmony and Contrast
of Colors and their applications to the Arts, Jekyll applied
color theory to large-scale borders.
Her collaboration with
architect Edwin Lutyens resulted in their most successful projects.
Jekyll supplied the planting design and Lutyens, the structure
and hardscape. “Their schemes were not for the faint-hearted,
“ according to Wilson. Jekyll “took her ideas from the cottage
gardens she saw near her home and applied them on a grand scale
and in carefully ordered color sequences.”
Those who focused on
plants — either in the sense of trophies, a carryover from the
Victorian period, or to create a design — opened the door to the
naturalistic school. The author includes Piet Oudolph, famous
for brightly colored herbaceous perennials and grasses, and Jens
Jensen, whose “prairie style” captured the qualities of the
wider landscape.
Mien Ruys’ color plantings
also focused on plant form. Breaking with another tradition, she
pursued professional training in landscape architecture. The author
describes her as “a major link between the plant-orientated gardening
of Britain, the horticultural traditions of the Netherlands, and
the modernism of the wider continent of Europe.”
Beth
Chatto’s focus on plants emphasized working with nature and
only growing plants adapted to suit local conditions. Wilson describes
her work as a mixture of art and science, researching which plants
worked best in a given area and which associations thrived and
under what circumstances.
Pioneer designers focused
on concept or an overriding theme “blurred the line between garden
and sculpture,” according to the author, opening the proverbial
garden gate to abstract sculpture. Geoffrey Jellicoe, Isamu Noguchi,
Martha Schwarz, and Peter Walker are a few of the designers who
fall into this group.
The use of three-dimensional
form in design is expressed in architectural and planted elements,
the author explains. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Christopher
Tunnard, and Fletcher Steele have design styles associated with
form. Wright struggled to accommodate natural and man-made forms.
The house in Fallingwater, Pennsylvania is a “rare example of
harmony achieved through the direct contrast of forms,” according
to Wilson.
The author explains
“structural emphasis” as the contrasting of geometry and form
of a garden’s structure with the irregular, organic shapes of
found in nature. Proponents of this approach included Thomas
Church, Russell Page, and Dan Kiley. Church’s El Novillero
garden illustrates his style: “Perched on the side of the Sonoma
Valley, California, looking out to the Pacific beyond, this garden
has a structure that comes from the regular grid in decking and
paving that underpins the entire design and from the sinuous curves
of lawn and swimming pool that counter this regularity.”
Roberto Burle Marx,
Anthony Paul, and Vladimir Sitta are three designers who focused
on texture, which included the tactile experience as well as the
arrangement of foliage. Marx applied his background in art to
landscape, applying richly textured plant materials in “huge swathes
and drifting color and patterns of light and shade....”
Designers famous for
their use of materials include Edwin
Lutyens, partner to Gertrude Jekyll. Lutyens, the author says,
took pride in using local stone. French designer Gilles Clément
stands out as one whose sensitive handling of plants is balanced
by a bold use of hard materials. Wilson describes him as “a champion
of biodiversity, sustainability and ecological prudence.” His
Jardin Planetaire project, the author explains, attempts to demonstrate
how we can continue to consume, exploit, and develop without exhausting
the planet’s resources.
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