WILLIAM ROBINSON AND I
William Robinson and I are an odd couple. He was born in Ireland in 1838, only one year after Queen Victoria took the throne. I was born in New York City many, many years later. He was so successful in his garden writing and real estate investments that he was able to buy an estate, Gravetye Manor, in 1885. My “estate” is a standard-size suburban garden. I have yet to get into real estate investments beyond my house and half of our family’s summer property in Central New York State. But despite the difference is time, background and just about everything else, William Robinson is in the process of improving my garden. He is the first of the great gardeners I am studying in an effort to bring more cohesion and beauty to my home landscape.
It is only fitting to start with Robinson, who is known as “the Father of the English Flower Garden.” In his time he steered his readers away from the elaborate, formal “carpet bedding” schemes that were so popular in the Victorian era, towards a new, less formal style of gardening that is still with us, albeit with many variations.
I am way too imprecise and impatient for carpet bedding, a style that emerged in the 1860’s when gardeners–from great estate owners to humbler members of the middle and upper middle class–began to create beds that contained scores of tender flowers like the newly fashionable alternantheras, caladiums and succulents, to create elaborate patterns reminiscent of oriental carpets. Often these patterned arrangements were assembled in shaped beds that might have the outlines of geometric figures or even butterflies. Carpet bedding depended on the cultivation of scores of tender greenhouse plants and replanting of the “carpet” pattern several times during the growing season, as the various plants went out of bloom. Carpet bedding aficionados thought it creative and colorful. Robinson and others influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement thought it was an abomination.
Robinson, who began his working life as a teenaged estate gardener, moved up rapidly in the gardening world, publishing his first garden book, “Gleanings from French Gardens,” at the age of thirty. Though he wrote on subjects ranging from cremation to alpine plants, his best known works are “The English Flower Garden,” originally published in 1883, updated and revised through fifteen editions and still available today; and “The Wild Garden,” originally published in 1870, and also widely available from used booksellers today. He also expounded his philosophies in the publications he founded and edited, including “The Garden,” launched in 1871, and “Gardening,” founded in 1879. In total, through his ninety-six years of life, he wrote eighteen books and was founder/editor of eight gardening periodicals. He wrote for many other publications and, from 1885 until his death in 1935, supervised the development of extensive gardens at Gravetye Manor.
Most people would get tired just reading through Robinson’s publications list. Garden writers everywhere are in awe of the fact that he made such a handsome living from writing about horticulture.
Robinson’s great love was hardy perennial plants. He was also fond of alpine plants, tea roses, majestic trees and naturalized bulbs. He spent a long lifetime inveighing against topiary, plant grafting, overuse of exotic plants, and formal garden schemes of all kinds. Of course, the gardens at Gravetye were created by scores of men manipulating the landscape in all kinds of ways, but the end result was, to Robinson’s way of thinking, “natural.”
In my garden, Robinson’s influence is in every border, which I have filled with as many hardy perennials as I can get my hands on. Not all are grouped in his preferred “naturalistic” clumps of three or more. Sometimes this is only a matter of waiting until the single specimen that I could afford at the garden center increases, self-seeds or otherwise expands into a healthy clump. Most of my roses “own root” plants, rather than grafted specimens. Over one hundred years after Robinson propounded the “own root” doctrine, it is in fashion once more, at least partly because skilled plant grafting is becoming expensive and its practitioners harder to find. In the fall, I will make an effort to naturalize more bulbs in the lawn. Daffodils are great for this, as they expand into clumps on their own and are unpalatable to the deer that have recently shown up in the neighborhood.
I am not sure what Robinson would have thought of my privet hedge, which is clipped so that it forms a living fence on three sides of the front of the property. Odds are he wouldn’t like it and there are days when I dislike it myself, especially when I haven’t had time to clip it into submission. He would probably counsel taking out all the privet and replacing it with hardy, non-grafted shrubs in naturalistic groupings. I really don’t know if I can do that properly on a property of this size. Robinson, who tended to irascibility, would probably have scowled at that.
The scowl would deepen if he saw the number of exotics–impatiens, verbenas, coleus and similar plants–that I use for color. Right now I have to water them so much that I am not particularly happy either. The answer is to get more hardy plants like phlox, rudbeckia and coneflowers, that shine in mid-summer.
I am not truly Robinsonian yet, but I continue to study his copious writings, carry out some of his theories in my garden and long for the days when garden helpers were both cheaper and more readily available. If only William Robinson had written a how-to book on successful real estate investing.