{"id":263,"date":"2011-07-25T07:17:31","date_gmt":"2011-07-25T15:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=263"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:34","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:34","slug":"william-robinson-and-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/william-robinson-and-i\/","title":{"rendered":"William Robinson and I"},"content":{"rendered":"

WILLIAM ROBINSON AND I<\/font><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 William Robinson and I are an odd couple.\u00a0 He was born in Ireland in 1838, only one year after Queen Victoria took the throne.\u00a0 I was born in New York City many, many years later.\u00a0 He was so successful in his garden writing and real estate investments that he was able to buy an estate, Gravetye Manor, in 1885.\u00a0 My “estate”\u009d is a standard-size suburban garden.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But despite the difference is time, background and just about everything else, William Robinson is in the process of improving my garden.\u00a0 He is the first of the great gardeners I am studying in an effort to bring more cohesion and beauty to my home landscape.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is only fitting to start with Robinson, who is known as “the Father of the English Flower Garden.”\u009d\u00a0 In his time he steered his readers away from the elaborate, formal “carpet bedding”\u009d 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.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Carpet bedding depended on the cultivation of scores of tender greenhouse plants and replanting of the “carpet”\u009d pattern several times during the growing season, as the various plants went out of bloom.\u00a0 Carpet bedding aficionados thought it creative and colorful. Robinson and others influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement thought it was an abomination.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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,”\u009d 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,”\u009d originally published in 1883, updated and revised through fifteen editions and still available today; and “The Wild Garden,”\u009d originally published in 1870, and also widely available from used booksellers today.\u00a0 He also expounded his philosophies in the publications he founded and edited, including “The Garden,”\u009d launched in 1871, and “Gardening,”\u009d founded in 1879.\u00a0 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.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most people would get tired just reading through Robinson’s publications list.\u00a0 Garden writers everywhere are in awe of the fact that he made such a handsome living from writing about horticulture.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Robinson’s great love was hardy perennial plants.\u00a0 He was also fond of alpine plants, tea roses, majestic trees and naturalized bulbs.\u00a0 He spent a long lifetime inveighing against topiary, plant grafting, overuse of exotic plants, and formal garden schemes of all kinds.\u00a0 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.”\u009d
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not all are grouped in his preferred “naturalistic”\u009d clumps of three or more.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Most of my roses “own root”\u009d plants, rather than grafted specimens.\u00a0 Over one hundred years after Robinson propounded the “own root”\u009d doctrine, it is in fashion once more, at least partly because skilled plant grafting is becoming expensive and its practitioners harder to find.\u00a0 In the fall, I will make an effort to naturalize more bulbs in the lawn.\u00a0 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.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He would probably counsel taking out all the privet and replacing it with hardy, non-grafted shrubs in naturalistic groupings.\u00a0 I really don’t know if I can do that properly on a property of this size.\u00a0 Robinson, who tended to irascibility, would probably have scowled at that.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The scowl would deepen if he saw the number of exotics–impatiens, verbenas, coleus and similar plants–that I use for color.\u00a0 Right now I have to water them so much that I am not particularly happy either.\u00a0 The answer is to get more hardy plants like phlox, rudbeckia and coneflowers, that shine in mid-summer.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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.\u00a0 If only William Robinson had written a how-to book on successful real estate investing.
\n\u00a0<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WILLIAM ROBINSON AND I \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 William Robinson and I are an odd couple.\u00a0 He was born in Ireland in 1838, only one year after Queen Victoria took the throne.\u00a0 I was born in New York City many, many years later.\u00a0 He was so successful in his garden writing and real estate investments that he was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1528,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions\/1528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}