The Grass is Greener: An Anglo-Saxon Passion. Tom Fort

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СКАЧАТЬ of changing fashion – either Stephen Switzer’s The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener’s Recreation (first published in 1715) or Batty Langley’s New Principles of Gardening (1728).

      These dusty old volumes are useful to the chronicler, as reflections of the tastes of the age. But it would be idle to pretend that either could be read today for profit or amusement. Langley’s is considerably the more tedious, a Georgian equivalent to the collected works of Doctor Hessayon, without the jokes. Both Langley and Switzer adopted, to limited degrees, the new attitudes; Langley in his disapproval of topiary and ornate parterres, Switzer in his espousal of the ‘twistings and twinings of Nature’s lines’. And both showed a proper appreciation of the importance of cultivated grass. ‘The grand front of a building should be open upon an elegant lawn or plain of grass,’ instructs Langley. It should have no borders cut into it, ‘for the grandeur of those beautiful carpets consists in their native plainness’. It should be adorned with beautiful statues, he says, and ‘terminated in its sides’ with groves. A great range of suitable classical notabilities is recommended, among them Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Apollo, the Nine Muses, Priapus, Bellona, Pytho and Vesta. But on how to produce the ‘beautiful carpet’ to show off the gods and goddesses to best advantage, he is largely silent.

      Switzer is slightly more helpful. His tips are borrowed from John James: plenty of mould ‘to keep an agreeable verdure upon all your carpet walks’, plenty of ‘rowling, mowing and cleansing’ to keep the ‘daisies, plantains, mouse-ear and other large growing herbs at bay’. He advises that the seed should be chosen from those pastures where the grass is ‘naturally fine and clear’ – wherever they may be found – ‘otherwise you will entail a prodigious trouble on the keeping of Spiry and Benty Grass, as we commonly call it, which cuts extremely bad and scarcely ever looks handsome’.

      We have little idea how much attention was paid to these exhortations. Switzer’s and Langley’s books sold well, going through numerous editions. One or other, or both, must have been found on the shelves of a goodly proportion of the country houses which, with their surrounding parks, were sprouting across the land. We know from the correspondence between William Shenstone – who created one of the most celebrated gardens of the age at his home, The Leasowes, near Birmingham – and his friend Lady Luxborough, that he lent her Langley’s book. And we may guess that she derived some benefit from it when she set about beautifying the surroundings of the house to which she had been banished by her husband for allegedly immoral behaviour. In 1749 she tells Shenstone that she has stripped the upper garden of its gravel, and sown it with grass. By June it is ‘tolerable green’, but she is puzzled as to how to keep off ‘beasts of all kinds, those in human shape chiefly’.

      Shenstone himself was a curiosity: a minor poet, whose lyrics, in Johnson’s words, ‘trip lightly and nimbly along, without the load of any weighty meaning’; a large, clumsy, melancholic man driven by a consuming passion for his garden. The Leasowes was much visited, much admired, much described. The house, which was so neglected that the rain came straight through the roof, stood on a lawn bounded by a shrubbery and a ha-ha. Falling from it was a tangle of dingles, thick with shrubs and unkempt trees, enclosing little waterfalls and pools, cut by dark, twisting paths, and studded with a total of thirty-nine seats, on each of which the wanderer might rest and contemplate a view whose particularities were not duplicated from any other.

      Johnson, standing in judgement as ever, wondered if such a creation required any great powers of mind. ‘Perhaps a sullen and surly speculator,’ he concludes, ‘may think such performances rather the sport than the business of human reason.’

      Maybe; and it is true that Shenstone ruined himself in the pursuit of his vision, and that its realization was extinguished on his death, since his family had to sell the place to pay his debts. But it is also true that his ponderings on’ the matter of what man might do with his surroundings bore fruit:

      Yon stream that wanders down the dale,

      The spiral wood, the winding vale The path which, wrought with hidden skill, Slow-twining scales yon distant hill, With fir invested – all combine To recommend the waving line

      The verse may be insipid, but the sentiment is sound. The same may be said of many of the impressions and fancies collected in Shenstone’s Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening. He was no great enthusiast for cultivated grass – ‘a series of lawns, though ever so beautiful, may satiate and cloy unless the eye pass to them from wilder scenes’. His focus was on the relationship of Art and Nature. Addison had asserted that the value of a garden as a work of art was determined by the degree of its resemblance to nature. Shenstone had more sense. He separated the two: ‘Apparent art, in its proper province, is always as important as apparent nature. They contrast agreeably; but their provinces ever should be kept distinct.’

      All this wrestling with the moral dimension of Man’s responsibilities to the world given him by God may seem rather mystifying now, and most of its abundant harvest in the forms of prose and poetry lies at rest in dusty obscurity. Horace Walpole, another of those dimly remembered shadows of 18th-century literature, surveyed the age in his ‘Essay on Modern Gardening’. He identified Charles Bridgeman, who died in 1738, as the first designer to escape from the tyranny of geometry; and credited him (wrongly, as it had already featured in John James’s book) with the idea of the ha-ha, the sunken wall or ditch which physically separated the garden in front of the great house from the rest of the park, or the countryside beyond, without interrupting the progress of the eye across the scene. For Walpole, Kent was the hero of the age, a status in no way diminished by the fact that he was an architect and painter who worked with landscape, and had no evident interest in horticulture.

      Walpole outlived both Kent and the man he nominated as Kent’s successor, Capability Brown. Brown had ‘set up with a few ideas of Kent’, presumably acquired when both men were employed by Lord Cobham at Stowe. With Brown came a great deal more grass. Under his direction, it spread over the walls and terraces, devouring beds and shrubberies, to the very walls and doors of the mansion; so close that someone complained that the cattle could wander inside. This is not the place to grapple with the hotly debated issue of Brown’s contribution to landscape gardening: whether he was a genius whose famous concern for the capabilities enabled him to create a series of uniquely English masterpieces for his aristocratic patrons; or a barbarian who laid waste to the varied inheritance of the past in order to slap on his own bland formula of lake, lawn and tree clump. Brown’s guiding principle was that beauty must be founded on stability and harmony, and that these indispensables were most reliably achieved through fluent, easy lines, gentle convexities and concavities. Whether consciously or not, he echoed the creed expounded by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Smoothness, wrote Burke, is a ‘quality so essential to beauty that I do not recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth’. To support this fantastic assertion, he instances the shape and texture of leaves, of mounds in gardens, of streams, of the surface of furniture, of the skin of women. ‘Most people’, Burke contends, ‘have observed the sort of sense they have had of being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents and declivities. This will give a better idea of the beautiful, and point out its probable cause, than almost anything else.’

      Nonsense this may well be; but the notion was embraced with enthusiasm in the second half of the 18th century, and it sustained the development of the lawn as the essential canvas of the landscape garden. Capability Brown’s most voluble apologist, the Reverend William Mason, composed a long and unreadable poem, ‘The English Garden’, glorifying among much else the master’s deployment of the ha-ha, which

       … divides

      Yet seems not to divide the shaven lawn

      And parts it from the pasture; for if there Sheep feed, or dappled deer, their wandering teeth Will, smoothly as the scythe, the herbage shave, And leave a kindred verdure.

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