Flowers Personified

Also available for viewing courtesy of Botanicus and the Missouri Botanic Garden is a copy of Le Fleurs Animees, c. 1840, a story about the adventures of garden flowers. Unfortunately my French isn't good enough to read the text, but the main attraction is its charming illustrations, which range from 'thistle' to 'tea and coffee'. If you'd like to have a copy of one for yourself, individual illustration pages are available from print dealers; I found several just by googling the book title.

Botanicus: books online from the Missouri Botanical Garden

The illustration from Bouteaux in the previous post is from Botanicus, the rare book collection of the Missouri Botanical Garden, which is now fully scanned (page by beautiful page) and available online for either viewing or download! Many thanks to the MBG, as sites like this are an absolute dream for garden historians...rare volumes are often only available in a few libraries, and traveling to them just to see a page or two is difficult. The Bouteaux volume is one of their only garden design holdings, but there is a wealth of botanical volumes, many with beautiful illustrations, including tomes on Himalayan plants, orchids, and medicinal plants. Search the entire catalog at http://www.botanicus.org/, and also take a look at their older site, which has helpful thumbnail images. I wish they had preserved this feature in the new site, but it's a small complaint.

P.S. I've just noticed that you can also purchase prints!

Characteristics of the formal French Garden

The garden depicted in the wallpaper of the previous post is classically French...compare it to the above illustration from Plans et dessins nouveaux du jardinage by Michel le Bouteaux, c. 1700.

Elements of the formal French (as opposed to what many people think of as 'country French') style are:

-a strong axis of symmetry for the garden that is centered on the house

-symmetrical arrangement of features on either side of that axis

-the pate d'oie, or goose-foot pattern, of paths radiating from a circular feature

-fanciful parterres (flower beds, basically) that look like scroll work or embroidery

-elaborate trelliswork, often defining one or several walls of a room in the garden

Note that there is plenty of 'path', but no 'lawn'...these gardens were for strolling. In enormous hooped skirts and towering wigs. In groups with people similarly attired. Wide paths were a must, and one didn't stray into the grass in high heeled silk shoes.

Garden History Wallpaper

from a 1933 House and Garden cover, courtesy of nostalgiaville.

What sort of a garden would you say this is? Italian? French? American? English?

Ruth Moilliet's Garden Sculpture

executed in stainless steel and glass

from the artist's statement:

“In my work I reflect a childhood dream to be able to shrink in size, like ‘Alice’, to enable me to enter a plant’s elaborate structure and explore the floral architecture. The enlarged scale that I use indicates this desire, to be at one with the object of my study, to be engulfed in a flower.”

I'd like to be engulfed in a flower...See more of Ruth's work on her website.

Gardens in Art History - Online at the Met

One of the difficulties of early garden history (pre-nineteenth century) is the lack of documentation. It is not simply the passage of time, though that is part of it...gardens were considered a well-known fact of life and in many cases simply not given the importance of the house, which was often well-catalogued and described. One of the places to look is in paintings and even textiles, where the landscapes, though not perhaps an accurate depiction of an individual garden, reflect the prevailing style of the time.

The Met has a lovely online exhibit of gardens represented throughout art history; from a 1437 Ming Dynasty painted scroll to a 1944 Gorky painting.

One of the items is this late seventeenth century tapestry depicting a musical garden party and showing several features characteristic of gardens at this time:

the use of trellising and vining plants to create an outdoor 'room',

elaborate fountains,

a formal arrangement of small beds divided by paths for strolling,

plants which were widely spaced to display each individual plant to best advantage.

At this time flowering plants were rare, limited varieties were available, and unusual ones were brought at great expense from long distance. Our modern, dense planting preference is a product of the happy abundance of plant material.

One of the most interesting things about this piece to me is that the people in it are actually depicted outside the garden, in the natural environment. In this time period, people considered the garden--formal, controlled--to be not artificial but 'truly' natural, a re-creation of what they imagined was the orderly state of the garden of Eden. More real than real, as it were. What we would call true nature was considered a dangerous and disorderly wilderness. So it is fascinating that in this work they and their instruments and their pets are outside the controll, safe confines of the garden.

Old and Beautiful garden stuff

Garden plaque from Kim Fiscus antiques in San Francisco , giant egg cup lead planter from Proler garden antiques, also in California. Better if the boxwood in it was trimmed in an egg-shape...

New and beautiful garden stuff

Lighted flower pots by Rob Slewe at Bloom! (from Europe but I've also seen these on ebay...) and garden bench by Thomas Alken (via pan-dan). Love the chartreuse, a color which should be used more in garden accents for its ability to blend with, but still stand out against, its darker green surroundings.

What a garden historian does

People tend to ask me lots of practical questions, about plants or landscape installation. Though I know some about those things, my skills are as a trained historian, not a horticulturist or landscape architect.

An architectural historian could recommend construction materials appropriate to the time period, but wouldn't necessarily install the bricks himself; and an art historian could place a work within the wider culture but not necessarily name each pigment. But she'd know where to look up which pigments were used when through time.

It's a bit similar with a garden historian.

So what does a garden historian do?

1. Scholarly work for publication. Just like any historian, we research and publish within our area of expertise--the place of gardens in cultural history. My current areas of scholarly research are the Art Deco garden, the influence of science in English renaissance gardens (I'm also a scientist, weird combination but it works well), and the Greenings, a family of gardeners at the English Georgian court. I was published last year in the Journal of Garden History (yes, there is such a thing!) and hope to be so this year as well.

2. Write the history of a specific historic garden. This involves research at the site regarding what remains of the garden's elements (sometimes using archaeological techniques!), archival research (documents, photographs, letters...), and contextual research (how did the garden fit into the culture of its time? What gardens was it influenced by or did it influence? What fashions/trends did it incorporate? What materials, including plants, were available that may have been used in the garden?)

3. Make recommendations regarding the conservation, or re-creation, of a historic landscape. Depending on the site, this may require a full history to be written, as above, or perhaps just some limited research. It could involve replacing design elements, or recommending plants appropriate to the time period.

4. Provide advice for making a historically-inspired landscape, whether for a historic building or just a history-lover. Over time, I plan for this blog to include simple tips for doing just that.

5. Inspire and participate in the building of new landscapes. I'm not slavishly devoted to 'antique gardens', and am always looking for what is new and beautiful. But I see many modern landscapes that could have been more beautiful, and certainly more meaningful, if someone had taken the time to think about the history of the site, to respect its place in the past and learn from gardens that went before.

The photo, above, is of a seventeenth century fresco documenting the gardens of the Villa Lante in Italy, owned by a cultured (if somewhat debauched) cardinal who was friends with the pope.

Note the diamond-shaped parterre between the two houses...it was copied two hundred years later for a rough and ready oilman at the Villa Philbrook.

Philbrook garden history

The reason Italian villas (and Italianate gardens) built in the early twentieth century dot the Midwestern landscape like some alien species is largely due to the influence of one woman, Edith Wharton, who was rather the Martha Stewart of her day; chief arbiter of domestic taste. Her 1904 book, 'Italian Villas and the Gardens', with gorgeous illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, ignited a fad among the nouveau riche. Their resulting 'power gardens' represent one of the only times in American history that a garden style was used to confer high social status (though this is common in European cultures).

Speaking as it did of the urbane continental sophistication to which they aspired, the style was irresistible to midwestern oil barons still rough from the frontier. One of these was Waite Philips, whose landscape architect, Herbert Hare [who needs a biography by the way, and I would be pleased to write it!] was responsible for the grounds of Philbrook.

Link to source of the above illustrations, and more of the Parrish illustrations of Italian gardens

my first garden

Everybody knows a garden...quite simply a landscape that is in some way, more or less, intervened with--designed. But who planted it, and why, and how, and what did that say about who they were and their time and place?

The first garden I remember being aware of as more than just a planted yard was at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which I visited as a girl when it was still just the converted home of an oil baron, with a mummy in the sunroom and an Art Deco dancefloor that flashed colored lights, and its garden was the most beautiful space I'd ever seen outdoors.

It wasn't until I was grown that it occurred to me to wonder why there was an Italian villa on the Oklahoma prairie in the first place.

It's a small field

When I told people I was getting a master's degree in Garden History, their first response was usually to laugh. It does have something of the underwater-basket-weaving ring to it. Next they were surprised, as I myself was initially, to find out that it is a serious and scholarly 'field' of study; I would explain that it is much like architectural history, only about landscapes instead of buildings. Then, then, they were fascinated. It only took a little explaining for them to catch on that gardens were--are--so much more than just a pretty place. So much more than just a collection of plants. I hope to share what, and why, with this blog.

History begins with the last moment. So this blog will also include recent garden history...spaces and objects of interest now, as well as what is past. No generation has a lock on what is beautiful or innovative, so the best understanding, the best design, the most satisfying garden places, have some of past and present, now and then.