James Bateman’s garden of creation at Biddulph Grange

James Bateman came from a family made rich by iron and coal during the Industrial Revolution. A landowner and accomplished horticulturist, in 1842 he bought Biddulph Grange in Staffordshire where he set about creating what has been called ‘a Great Exhibition of a garden – the whole world in one green
space, with planting to reflect the spirit of Italy and China, Egypt, England and the
Americas’.

At the same time as Bateman developed his gardens to represent the variety of creation, he began work on a Geological Gallery at Biddulph Grange which, when it opened to the public in 1862, presented a selection of fossils and geological strata displayed in a chronological order – his attempt to reconcile his evangelical Christianity with geological understanding at the time. Resolute in his belief in divine creation, Bateman planned his Geological Gallery as a refutation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, unveiled in The Origin of Species, published in 1859.

A hint of spring: camellias

There has been a real sense that spring can’t be far away today, with the temperature rising to the the low sixties in old-fashioned fahrenheit.  The camellia in our back garden is always the first plant to put on a show, usually in late January or early February, the luxurious blossoms seeming so improbable appearing at a time when the weather is still nippy.

This year, it bloomed particularly early as a result of the mild spell over Christmas and New Year.  Then a week of hard frosts came and it looked as if someone had taken a blow-torch to the plant, as the petals were scorched brown.

But over last weekend it got a second wind, and the result has been these luscious flowers, photographed with the dew still on them, glinting in the morning sun.

I was surprised to learn from Wikipedia (whose entry informs much of this post) that the camellia in our garden, which  originates from eastern and southern Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan and Indonesia, is a relative of the tea plant.

Camellias were cultivated in the gardens of China and Japan for centuries before they were seen in Europe. The German botanist Engelbert Kaempfer reported  that the ‘Japan Rose’, as he called it grew wild in woodland and hedgerow, but that many superior varieties had been selected for gardens. Europeans’ earliest views of camellias would have been their representations in Chinese painted wallpapers, where they were often represented growing in porcelain pots.

The first living camellias seen in England were a single red and a single white, grown 1739 in the garden of  Robert James, Lord Petre at Thorndon Hall in Essex. Petre was one of the keenest gardeners of his generation, and his head gardener, James Gordon, was the first to introduce camellias to commerce, from nurseries he established after Lord Petre’s death in 1743.

With the expansion of the tea trade in the later 18th century, new varieties began to be seen in England, imported through the British East India Company.  By 1819, twenty-five camellias had bloomed in England, and that year Samuel Curtis published A Monograph on the Genus Camellia, with illustrations by Clara Pope that have usually been removed from the book and framed.

Clara Maria Pope, A Monograph on the Genus Camellia 1819

An English artist and artist’s model, Clara Pope was born in 1768. In her early years she derived an income from a modeling career, eventually marrying her primary employer, the artist Francis Wheatley. Pope possessed considerable talent as a painter and portraitist and climbed the social ladder with her talent for painting portraits of those in high society. Eventually Pope was discovered by Samuel Curtis, the editor of Curtis’ Botanical Magazine, who commissioned Clara to make the paintings for his Monograph on the Family Camellia. The book was published in 1819.

Monumental in scale, the colour plates measure 24 x 18 inches. The leather-bound folio was comprised of only five hand-coloured engravings. Very few copies were sold, probably because of the prohibitive cost. Today the work is recognized as the finest of all the great camellia books. Fewer than ten copies of the complete book are known to exist in the world today.  Kew Gardens has a complete set of the engravings.

By the 1840s, the camellia was at the height of its fashion as a luxury flower.  A decline in popularity followed as they were displaced by the new hothouse orchids. Camellias experienced a revival after World War I as easy to grow winter-flowering shrubs.

The Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore wrote a very long poem in the early 1900s entitled ‘Camellia’, about a young man who falls in love with a beautiful girl.  There’s a rather lovely recitation in Bengali on YouTube:

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

We’re driving north to the Scottish borders to visit the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, designed by Charles Jencks and open on just one day each year.  The road takes us past Lockerbie, which lies some miles south of Jenck’s garden.  There are unavoidable thoughts.  In the book he wrote about the making of the garden, Jencks recalled the December evening in 1988 that imprinted the name of an unassuming town in global consciousness:

Maggie [his wife] went out to speak with Alistair’s wife, Frances.  As they were walking in the kitchen garden Maggie saw the sky light up behind Frances’ head, in a great yellow and red ball of fire.  More extraordinary than this explosion was the way it reached a peak and then suddenly imploded as if sucked into a vacuum cleaner and then the eerie silence of many seconds – Lockerbie is twelve miles away – followed by the roar of the earth. […]

Lockerbie has still not got over the tragedy of that evening, one that has turned it into a global name for the sudden, arbitrary nature of the catastrophe.  Although the wreckage has been expunged and the visual scars healed, the citizens of the town are still marked by this fateful event.  Everyone carries the memories of it – and subsequent actions and media coverage – in the back of their mind like a constant bad dream.

During a glorious two days in the Borders, beneath cloudless skies as an extended spell of  high pressure continues, my thoughts would sometimes be drawn back to that event: the clear blue skies revealed the constant presence of con trails (above, over the River Nith below Portrack House) as planes regularly traversed the international flight path overhead.  By strange coincidence, we returned home to news of the NATO bombing of Gaddafi’s compound that left his youngest son and three of his grandchildren dead, and of the American special forces action resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden.  This is how we  have lived in the 21st century: distant turbulence intruding upon private pleasures.

The garden that Charles Jencks, an American-born landscape architect and historian, has developed at Portrack House has been inspired by questions of modern science and the laws of nature. The themes explored include the science of complexity and chaos, fractals, black holes and DNA, and concepts of space and time.  These themes are represented by the extensive manipulation of the landscape and siting of individual sculptures and forms. The entire 30 acre site is itself a deliberate, considered sculpture:

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is a landscape of waves, twists and folds, a landscape pattern designed to relate us to nature through new metaphors presented to the senses.
– Charles Jencks

The garden is situated at Portrack House, just outside the village of Holywood in Dumfries and Galloway, and was established by Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick, whose family had owned the property for generations.  After Maggie was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 1993, the couple founded the network of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres that has continued to grow and develop since her death in 1995.  The annual opening of the garden helps raise money for the Maggie’s Centres.

This is not a plantsman’s garden, but rather harks back to an earlier time when gardens were built to represent themes and ideas, rather than what is now generally considered to be their purpose – as a horticultural display. The garden is a landscape that celebrates the new sciences of complexity and chaos theory and consists of a series of metaphors exploring the origins, the destiny and the substance of the Universe: a celebration of the universe and nature, both intellectually and through the senses.  The greenhouse roof is decorated with 12 equations that throw light on the laws of the universe. And the garden’s most prominent feature is the Universe Cascade (top), symbolically tracing the story of life over 15 billion years.

The garden began to take shape when the couple dug out a lake for their children to swim in, sculpting the resulting mound of earth in a double helix – the basic form of DNA – and calling it the Snail Mound. Visitors in 2011 entered the garden at the point of Jenck’s newest creation – the Rail Garden, created alongside the resonant red of the new railway bridge over the river Nith.

The rail garden features an engine pulling metal plates which celebrate the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as Andrew Carnegie, Robert Burns and  the scientist Mary Somerville.

Below is the Willowtwist, a structure made from one single long sheet of aluminum, cut and split twice to form a series of intertwined loops, reminiscent of David Nash’s living Ash Dome.

The centrepiece of the garden is undoubtedly the complex of sinuous waveforms created by the Snail Mound, the Snake Mound and their related lakes.  Jencks writes:

Curved and counter-curved shapes are structural and often found in nature, for instance in the meander of a river.  Waveforms underlie so many natural activities: sea waves, of course, and sand forms left by the incessant waves on the ocean beach; the vortices caused by pulling a solid object through stationary liquid; the swirls of air currents where warm and cold air meet; and the rock curls evident in mountains, a result of a long, slow geological process of movement.

The DNA Garden is dominated by the silver aluminum curves of the double helix, while embedded in the paths are various codes and symbols. The garden celebrates the five senses, as well as the sixth sense of scientific intuition, called by Einstein fingerspitzengefuhl, that feeling at the tips of one’s fingers.

The Universe Cascade emerges from a terrace at the back of the house, looking, with its brilliant white architecture, like something that might have originated in New Mexico or the canyons of Los Angeles.  Actually, it should be read from bottom to top, a cascade of steps each representing  a ‘jump’ in the development of the universe, beginning at the beginning of time 12-13 billion years ago in  a ‘hidden mystery conveyed by steps descending into a reflective, murky surface of water the depth of which is beyond seeing’.

With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world – which, of course, is only another way of saying that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth….It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected.
– Hannah Arendt

Beyond the house is a sweep of meadow that leads to Crow Wood and the Nonsense.  Here, on the Black Hole Terrace, a 20th century sort of ha-ha has been created, incorporating forms that act as a metaphor for bending of space and time in the vortex around a black hole.

Speaking of the ideas that underpin the garden, Charles Jencks has said:

Over several years I have worked on a Scottish landscape called, immodestly, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, speculating with scientists and others on the fundamental laws and forces behind nature and what they might mean to us. Using growing nature to conjecture on what is basic to the Universe is an old practice common to gardeners, but it raises some unlikely questions.

Most people understand a big distinction between living nature and the laws of nature, that is, organic growth and electromagnetism, and they do not reflect that in a garden as elsewhere the latter may underpin the former.  Furthermore, gardens of the last hundred years are for pleasure and relaxation, games and flowers, and not a place for public art.

My late wife Maggie and I started work on this garden around her family home in 1988 and slowly, area by area, it has grown into a landscape with about twenty areas dedicated to the fundamental units of the Universe:  a Black Hole Terrace for dining on in the summer months; a DNA Garden of the Six Senses; the Quark Walk; the Universe Cascade and so on. Each insight into deep nature, many of which are recent, becomes translated into nature and sculpture. Landform is my generic name for this  genre that cuts across art, landscape, architecture and the customary categories, and there must be something like twenty-five of them throughout the garden. Some landforms refer to theories of folding and fractals, others (when they fail) to catastrophe theory. As every gardener knows, the dialogue with nature is always two-way, and it pays to exploit the unintended consequences of nature’s acts.

Why dedicate a garden to the laws of nature? Partly because everybody relates, consciously or not, to the larger picture; we identify with nature and its various moods and states. …  In the Garden of Cosmic Speculation I try out questioning metaphors, and this means that all design is really double design: that is, solving formal and functional problems, and coming up with new, appropriate metaphors (both visual and verbal).  For instance, the Black Hole Terrace shows the space-time warps of super-gravity, the event horizons and rips in spacetime.

Public art must of course be understandable and moving, but I believe it also should engage with the basic insights on the cosmos.

Placing the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in the context of symbolic garden design in the past, Roman Krznaric has written:

Look around most of our own gardens today and you’re unlikely to find much symbolism. In fact, since around 1700 gardens in Europe have been largely devoid of allegory and metaphor. Instead gardens are more for pleasure and beauty. We aim to create harmonious combinations of flower colours and foliage textures. We want plants of different heights and shapes. We desire visual splendour in the garden throughout the year. The emphasis is on the senses, especially visual impressions. But this is not the only way to think about garden design…

The idea of symbolic garden design has its origins in ancient civilisations. Thousands of years ago the Persians invented the ‘Paradise Garden’. To enter the garden you would have to cross water channels, which represented the four rivers of heaven. Once inside you would find a profusion of fruit trees, symbolic of the fruits of the earth created by God.  The most important contemporary example is Charles Jencks’s ‘Garden of Cosmic Speculation’ in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, which has a DNA garden that is taking symbolic garden design into the future. It contains a series of six cells and in each there is a different kind of idea, which is symbolised by the planting. ‘The planting is subordinate to the design,’ he says, ‘but completes it and fills it out.’

Slideshow

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Links

• BBC radio interview 2003
• Charles Jencks explains the ideas behind the Garden

Hidcote Manor garden

On our way back from Stratford yesterday we called in at Hidcote Manor Garden, regarded as one of England’s great gardens. It was the lifelong passion of  self-taught gardener Lawrence Johnston who created his ‘garden of rooms’ in the Arts and Crafts style.  being so close to Stratford (though over the border in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds) we were able to get there for opening time and experienced a usually busy garden in peace and tranquillity.

Lawrence Johnston was an American who came to England to study at Cambridge University.  His mother had bought Hidcote in 1907 and Johnston spent 41 years creating what would become one of England’s most influential 20th-century gardens. He became interested in making a garden out of the fields surrounding the house.

It’s a beautiful garden to wander in, with new vistas opening up constantly as you move from one outdoor ‘room’ to another through archways in high yew hedges and along winding paths.  The small chapel building in the courtyard at the entrance (above) was never consecrated: the wisteria must be spectacular in the spring.

The Old Garden was probably the first of Johnston’s plantings and is dominated by the cedar of Lebanon (above).

Johnston designed Hidcote as a series of outdoor ‘rooms’, which combine masses of colour with traditional garden crafts such as topiary. Each room has its own distinct atmosphere and character.  The hedges that divide the rooms were designed to compensate for the plot’s exposed aspect. Johnston planted hedges of holly, beech, hornbeam and yew for shelter and structure.

Another key feature of Johnston’s scheme is the Red Borders (below) which incorporates all kinds of red and orange flowers, as well as purple foliage for contrast.

The Beech Walk (below) was planted by Johnston to protect the garden from the damaging north-westerly winds.  It is now a fully-mature cathedral nave of beech trees.

There’s an orchard, as well as an extensive kitchen garden (with a huge pumpkin patch).

Two pigs are employed in the kitchen garden, preparing ground by turning over the soil, digging out roots and grubs.This one is as happy as the proverbial…

The gardens are so extensive that can be difficult working out whether you’ve seen everything.   There’s a garden of Japanese maples, an alpine terrace, a garden with a circular bathing pool, and a series of gardens that follow the winding course of a stream.  There’s a ‘wild garden’ called The Wilderness and The Long Walk – an extended grassy walk bordered by hedges, with twin gazebos at one end and superb views across the surrounding Cotswold countryside at the other.  And if you have a snack at the outdoor cafe tables, you’ll find the sparrows are very attentive!

In 1948, Johnston gave his garden to the National Trust. For the next few decades, the National Trust struggled to maintain the original Arts and Crafts style of the garden on limited funds. Several of the garden rooms became somewhat overgrown, and some of Johnston’s original plant specimens had to be replaced. Recently, following a major donation, the Trust has been able to begin to return the gardens to their original state, and Hidcote has become one of the most popular destinations on garden tours and tours of the Cotswolds.

Postscript June 2011

BBC 4 showed a documentary telling the story of Hidcote – the most influential English garden of the 20th century – and Lawrence Johnston, the enigmatic genius behind it. Hidcote was the first garden ever taken on by the National Trust, who spent 3.5 million pounds in a major programme of restoration. This included researching Johnston’s original vision, which in turn uncovered the compelling story of how Johnston created such an iconic garden.

Until recently, little was known about the secretive and self-taught Johnston. The documentary told how, in 1907, Johnston’s mother bought Hidcote Manor and Johnston began a programme of 40 years’ work on its gardens. Here, beginning tentatively before 1914, and more confidently after after being wounded in the First World War, Johnston combined a feeling for structure (creating a surprising series of discrete spaces) with a love of plants and a willingness to experiment with novel plant-combinations. An enthusiastic plant collector, he sponsored or undertook several expeditions in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America to bring back rare specimens.

In 1924 Johnston bought Serre de la Madone, near Menton, on the Mediterranean coast of France; and from then on would spend most of the year at Menton and a few summer months at Hidcote. At Serre de la Madone he turned terraces of vines and olives into a garden notable for its design and rare plantings of sub-tropical plants.

He kept few, if any, records on Hidcote’s construction, but current head gardener Glyn Jones made it a personal mission to discover as much about the man as possible to reveal how, in the early 20th century, Johnston set about creating a garden that has inspired designers all over the world.

See also

• In pictures: Hidcote Manor Garden restoration completed (BBC)
• Hidcote Garden – National Trust
• Who was the quiet american gardener? Lawrence Johnston profile (National Trust)
• What Ho Hidcote!: daily life in an historic garden