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CONTEMPORARY INFLUENCES

Sadly, by the eighteenth century scented plants had become undesirable in fashionable gardens. This was due to the influence of the landscape movement, designed and implemented by ‘Capability’ Brown, Humphry Repton, and others from 1720 onwards. They systematically destroyed the old formal gardens of the earlier centuries, such as the Elizabethan garden at Longleat, to replace them with the landscaped garden. Scented flowers were banished from sight and were kept at a distance from the house or planted in walled flower gardens so as not to disturb the new sweeping designs. Later, when Repton and John Loudon did recommend plants to be grown closer to the house, they made no particular reference to scented plants, in comparison to the earlier enthusiasm and ardour of the sixteenth-century writers. This decline continued throughout the nineteenth century in Britain with the Victorians’ passion for brightly coloured bedding. To the credit of the Victorians, however, they did bring flowers closer to the house, but fragrance was secondary to colour and dramatic massed effect.

It was not until the nineteenth century with William Robinson, more renowned perhaps as a horticultural writer than a gardener, and Gertrude Jekyll, who combined both strongly aesthetic and practical gardening knowledge, that sweetly scented planting came back into fashion in Britain. William Robinson devoted a whole chapter to fragrance in his classic work The English Flower Garden:

A man who makes a garden should have a heart for plants that have the gift of sweetness as well as beauty of form and colour … No one may be richer in fragrance than the wise man who plants hardy shrubs and flowering trees … families of fragrant things.

In The Wild Garden, Robinson encouraged the natural development and respect of different plant forms, flowers and foliage, and it was his insistence on informality and his concept of permanent planting which marked the beginning of the garden as we know it today. Although primarily known for her colour-coded planting, Gertrude Jekyll was also responsible for reviving a number of fragrant old plants that had fallen out of fashion, including several old-fashioned rose varieties. Together they made an enormous impact on the development of English, continental and American gardens in the twentieth century.

Hidcote Manor Garden, designed as a series of ‘rooms’. Many of the plants at Hidcote are scented, including old-fashioned scented roses.

David Hughes

Beginning in 1946, another British designer, Vita Sackville-West, began writing regular columns for the Observer in London and transformed the direction of contemporary gardening ideas. Her greatest masterpiece was undoubtedly the garden at Sissinghurst, still considered the most quintessential British garden, which was styled around a series of interconnecting ‘rooms’. The inspiration for its design was derived directly from her love of Renaissance gardens, the medieval hortus conclusus and from the magical walled gardens of Persia ablaze with colour and endowed with wonderful scents. In many ways, Sissinghurst could be said to epitomise the ancient scented paradise ideal within a contemporary setting: the ‘white garden’ especially, redolent with scent, is of international renown. Hidcote Manor Garden, in Gloucestershire, England, conceived by the American designer Major Lawrence Johnston, who purchased the property in 1907, has also been an inspiration to gardeners internationally. Like Sissinghurst, the overall plan is based on a variety of garden ‘rooms’ set around a central axis, and shows a definite Italian and French Renaissance influence.

The American landscape architect Nellie B. Allen (1869–1961) was particularly impressed by her visits to these English gardens, as well as Gertrude Jekyll’s own garden in Surrey and Great Dixter in Sussex, laid out by Jekyll’s collaborator, the English architect Edwin Lutyens. Allen’s own specialties were knot gardens, geometrically designed enclosures bordered by green hedges, and walled gardens which showed her love of the medieval hortus conclusus and the ancient scented Persian paradise gardens. An original watercolour design entitled A Persian Garden (1919), for example, shows an enclosed garden with a central pool set beside arched columns encircled by cypress trees. Ellen Shipman, who collaborated with Charles Platt on many famous gardens across the USA, also employed the ‘walled garden formula’, frequently using fragrant plants and symmetrical designs with a central sundial or fountain feature. Other Americans, including Helena Ely, Charles Gillette, Martha Hutcheson, Beatrix Farrand, Louisa King and Rose Nichols, were also influenced in their work both by the English traditional garden and by European designs – and in the case of Nichols (better known as a writer), by Moorish and Middle Eastern paradise gardens. But it is important to note that these are not the only gardening writers of the last one hundred years to have had an impact. Roy Genders’ Scented Flora of the World, first published in 1977, is a modern classic on fragrant plants, as is Rosemary Verey’s The Scented Garden (1981), which covers a range of traditional and modern aromatic garden styles.

Great Dixter house and garden, home of gardener and garden writer Christoper Lloyd.

Gordon Bell