Читать книгу The Grass is Greener: An Anglo-Saxon Passion - Tom Fort - Страница 11

These even and uniform carpets of green velvet, seen through their countryside, which other nations have not been able to obtain for themselves, make an admirable sight. People tried vainly to imitate them in France … the lawns that grow in France are not fine

ANTOINE JOSEPH DEZALLIER D’ARGENVILLE

Actually, that first ‘pleasant treatise’ of Thomas Hill, published in the first year of Elizabeth’s rule, 1558, does not – except for the chronicler searching for serviceable milestones – mark the beginning of anything; and since he has nothing to say about grass beyond the observation that turfed walks provide comfort and delight for the wearied mind, he need not detain us long. The interest of the little book lies not so much in the ragbag of other people’s experience and prejudice drawn together by its energetic compiler, but – as Hadfield points out – as an indicator of a public appetite. Gardening had begun to take root in Tudor England. People wanted to know from Thomas Hill ‘how to dress, sow and set a garden; and what remedies may be had and used against such beasts, worms and flies and such like that annoy gardens’. And they existed in sufficient numbers to make it worth Hill’s time to sift through the assorted tedious teachings of ‘Palladius, Columella, Varro, Pyophanes, learned Cato and many more’, to pick out the nuggets which might be usefully applied in his damp, temperate land, and – in his own word – ‘English’ them.

The first English writer to whom the lawnsman owes a bow of respect is Gervase Markham, whose The English Husbandman of 1613 (later refined and expanded into Cheap and Good Husbandry) made available a coherent programme of action to make best use of English earth. There is charm and sense in Markham’s counsel:

The mixture of colours is the only delight of the eye above all others … as in the composition of a delicate woman, the grace of her cheeks is the mixture of red and white, the wonder of the eye black and white, and the beauty of her hand blue and white, any of which is not said to be beautiful if it consist of single or simple colours; and so in these walks and alleys the all green, nor the all yellow, cannot be said to be the most beautiful, but the green and the yellow (that is the untrod grass and the well-knit gravel) being equally mixed, give the eye lustre and delight beyond all comparison.

The point is well made, in its roundabout fashion.

Markham’s recipe for producing that green to delight the eye is none the less valid for its close resemblance to that advocated by that sound old Swabian, Albertus Magnus. Cleanse the ground of stones and weeds, destroy the roots – in how many manuals of lawn care have those arduous principles been recycled? Gervase Markham (or Albertus) was there first. Boiling water should be poured all over, he says; then the floor beaten ‘and trodden mightily’. Place ‘turfs of earth full of green grass, the bare earth turned upwards’, then ‘dance upon with the feet’ until the grass ‘may begin to peep up and put forth small hairs … until finally it is made the sporting green plot for ladies and gentlemen to recreate their spirits in’. Hats off and raised spades to Gervase Markham, for even now one could do worse! And how pleasant is the picture of those Jacobean enthusiasts capering upon their upturned turves, and reaping their reward a year or two later, as they stroll forth with their ladies across the soft grass, stopping to play chess or ‘recreate their spirits’ with some verses of Spenser.

How extensively Markham’s advice was observed, we cannot tell. What we do know is that, by his time, it had become common for aristocrats and plutocrats to commission bowling greens in their grounds, as well as turfed and gravelled walks. By the early 17th century the game of bowls was already secure in the affections of all levels of society. Indeed, Richard II had banned it on the grounds that it was distracting the people from archery, and a Frenchman was never going to be downed by a flying bowl. The prohibition was renewed by Henry IV and Edward IV, and re-imposed by Henry VIII, who declared: ‘The game of bowls is an evil because the alleys are in operation in conjunction with saloons or dissolute places … a vicious form of gambling’. Innkeepers were threatened with a fine of two pounds for permitting the game to be played. But – perhaps because Henry himself was known to be a keen and accomplished player – little attention seems to have been paid, and bowls continued to flourish.

In medieval times, it was generally played on flattened cinders or clay. But by 1600, grass had become the preferred surface for the nobility and gentry (although it is thought likely that Drake played his immortal game on an expanse of camomile). An elementary science of grass culture must have evolved, too; the greens must have been as flat as they could make them, and the grass as short and thick and even as they could get it. By 1670 the rules of bowls had been formalized, and a few years later Randle Holme wrote in the Academy of Armory that ‘bowling greens are open wide spaces made smooth and even … orders agreed by gentlemen bowlers that noe high heeles enter for spoiling their green, they forfeit sixpence’.

We can only speculate whether similar standards of care were translated to the ornamental grass plot; whether the Elizabethans and Jacobeans cared if it were flat or bumpy, whether they liked flowers and herbs intermingled, how often they cut and rolled, and how. In the absence of any surviving garden of the period, we again have to rely upon the ancient texts and illustrations, in which – regrettably – the attention paid to grass and its cultivation is at best fleeting, and at worst non-existent. If we wish, we can learn a good deal about their affection for the intricacies of the knot and the maze, and the eagerness with which they seized upon the fruits of exploration and commerce – not just the potato, but cedars, laburnums, tulips, yuccas, Jerusalem artichokes, oranges, lemons, cherries and a host of new flowers and shrubs. England was more prosperous than it had ever been, and more stable – until the Civil War – than any country in Europe had ever been. Men were inspired by the questing spirit, and gardening’s experimental, organic character made it a natural outlet. Sadly but understandably, that spirit was rarely exercised by the matter of grass. There was, however, one notable exception.

The authentic voice of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England is that of Francis Bacon, Viscount St Albans, one of the numerous distinctions of whose life was that it was ended by a chill caught while he was stuffing a dead fowl with snow to observe the effect of cold on the preservation of flesh. It is characteristic of the elasticity of Bacon’s mind that, in the midst of half a lifetime’s unscrupulous and serpentine manoeuvrings at court – whose sole guiding principle was the promotion of his own interests – he should have published his Essays, or Counsell Civill and Morall, which amounted to a manual of spiritual and cultural self-improvement. The range of these homilies, the richness of the learning they display, and the elegance of their prose, are amazing. But equally remarkable is the tone, its authority and confidence. Whether in routing the atheists, measuring the usefulness of novelties, or analysing the fruits of friendship, this supreme know-all is immune to the very notion of uncertainty.

Bacon’s intellectual arrogance is on magnificent display in his famous essay ‘Of Gardens’. In considering the garden, he does not stoop to concern himself with anything so mundane as the growing of things. His mind is on the moral dimension. The garden is, he asserts, ‘the purest of human pleasures … the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man’. ‘When ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely as if gardening were the greater perfection.’ The regulations are set out with impregnable assurance. Bacon scorns knots with ‘diverse coloured earths’ as toys. Images cut in juniper or ‘other garden stuff’ are for children. Aviaries are impermissible. Pools ‘marr all and make the garden unwholesome and full of frogs and flies’. The main garden must be square, surrounded by a ‘stately arched hedge’, with turrets above the arches to contain bird-cages. At each end of the side gardens there should be a mound, breast high; and at the centre of the whole thing, another, thirty feet high, with three ascents, each broad enough for four to walk abreast; and within the hedged alleys should be gravelled walks (not grass, which would be ‘going wet’).

Bacon’s ideal Eden in St Albans – it’s difficult to imagine him or anyone else actually creating and maintaining such an exorbitance – covered thirty acres. There were three essential elements: at the far end, a natural wilderness devoid of trees but rampant with thickets of sweet briar and honeysuckle; in the middle, the main garden; at the entrance, the green. Here is our first true English lawn:

The green hath two pleasures, the one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge which is to enclose the garden.

That is all. There is no hint as to how the precept is to be realized. The fount of wisdom does not dirty his hands with practical tips. For those we must consult our plodding friend, Gervase Markham. And in any case, it seems most improbable that this four acres of perfect turf ever existed outside Bacon’s imagination. That is not the point. The significance of Bacon’s essay on gardens lies, not in any practical application, but in the fact that he wrote it. It proves that, by the turn of the 16th century, the cultured Englishman’s apprehension of how to express himself included the concept of the decorative garden, and that an expanse of cultivated grass was fundamental to that concept. By and large, it has remained so ever since. And as Englishmen took ever greater pride in their Englishness, developing as a national pastime the habit of comparing themselves favourably to foreigners, so did they learn to see grass, not merely as a contributor to the beauty and harmony of the pleasure garden but, as of itself, another symbol and symptom of English superiority.

Sir Henry Wooton, diplomat, Provost of Eton, angler, scholar, poet, spent most of his adult life serving his country’s interests in the capitals of Europe. He studied our neighbours closely, learned their languages, became familiar with their habits, and concluded, with that quiet, unassailable certitude which over the centuries so impressed and irritated those who encountered it: ‘In our own country there is a delicate and diligent curiosity surely without parallel among foreign nations.’ Another eminent and complacent polymath, Sir William Temple, identified evidence of that divinely bestowed pre-eminence:

Besides the temper of our climate, there are two things particular to us that contribute much to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness of our turf … which cannot be found in France or Holland as we have it, the soil not admitting that fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that greenness in France …

Pepys subscribed wholeheartedly to what had clearly become a general assumption: ‘We have the best gravel walks in the world, France having none nor Italy; and the green of our bowling alleys is better than any they have.’

Is it any wonder that, meeting such impregnable smugness, visitors from continental Europe should have been moved to occasional outbursts against English arrogance? The paradox – one might say the hypocrisy – of this island pride is that it should have been accompanied by an extremely enlightened openness to Continental influence; an eagerness to purloin, adapt and improve upon the discoveries of others, and then pass them off as Anglo-Saxon inspirations. The extent to which post-Restoration garden design in England was shaped by, even copied from, the example realized with such overpowering magnificence in France is a matter hotly and inconclusively debated by the historians. The prosecution case is persuasive, resting as it does on the certain facts that, as a cousin of Louis XIV and a frequent visitor to his court during the years of exile, Charles II must have observed the unfolding in the Tuileries of André Le Nôtre’s grandiose geometric vision of a royal garden; that, on becoming king, Charles asked his cousin if he might borrow Le Nôtre, then engaged at Fontainebleau; that, although Le Nôtre probably never came, his precepts were put into practice at St James’s Park by André Mollet, whose father had worked with Le Nôtre.

The French tradition was founded on a delight in, and dependence on, geometric patterns. The lines are drawn by channels of water, by hedges and avenues of trees, by paths – all of undeviating straightness. Within the angles of intersection are arranged in symmetrical harmony all manner of attractions: fountains, flower beds, arbours, pools, grass plots and so on. All are where they are according to a grand design. For the first time, the garden becomes an overt statement of Man’s ambition and ability to control the world around him and make it reflect his image. In the case of the gardens of the Sun King, it may well be that what seems to us now their chilly and regimented splendour was the projection of the proprietor rather than their designer. But since neither Louis nor Le Nôtre – nor indeed, I’m sorry to say, King Charles – evinced any interest in the cultivation of grass, we need not dwell on their ambitions.

Others were more enlightened, and inclined to resist the French model. John Worlidge, in his Art of Gardening (1677) bemoaned the influence of the ‘new, useless and unpleasant mode’, denounced the banishment of ‘garden flowers, the miracles of nature’, contending that the French system of gravel walks and grass plots was fit for kings and princes only. He celebrated the delight taken in their gardens by Englishmen of all classes, the noble in his country seat, the shopkeeper with his ‘boxes, pots and other receptacles, plants etc.’, the cottage dweller with his ‘proportionable garden’.

Worlidge was an early pragmatist. Far removed from court circles, free from any need to fawn and flatter, he knew perfectly well that the vast spread of Versailles with its armies of gardeners was no sort of an example for an Englishman. For him gardening’s proper companion was common sense rather than high ambition. His approach – and that of his equally sensible contemporary, John Rea – was severely practical. Rea’s Flora of 1665 honoured on an epic scale the glories of flower, plant and fruit (the fashionable delight in patterns of grass and gravel, to the exclusion of all else, he damned as ‘an immoral nothing’).

Buried within its mass of instruction is some scanty advice about laying turf with a turfing iron, and disciplining it with a ‘heavy, broad Beater’. Rea’s tips echo those in the other influential guide of the time, John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense. Evelyn is remembered these days, if at all, for his voluminous diary which was discovered in an old clothes basket at his home more than a hundred years after his death. In his time he was famed as the first great advocate of tree planting, and a dispenser of generally sound, if exceedingly wordy, gardening lore. He tells the lawnsman that in October ‘it will now be good to beat, roll and mow … for the ground is supple and it will even all inequalities’.

It is improbable that a rich landowner such as Evelyn, or literate gentlemen such as Rea and Worlidge, would have done anything more strenuous in their gardens than giving the orders; so perhaps we should excuse their reticence on technical matters, annoying though it is. Beating was done with a mallet, rolling with a roller not materially different from our own. Mowing deserves a closer look.

The word is Old English, the science as ancient as the most ancient Egyptians, who used a sickle adapted from an animal’s jawbone to harvest their corn. The Romans used a one-handed implement and stooped to cut. But the Englishman of the Middle Ages preferred to stand up straight, wielding a scythe almost as long as himself. It had two handles attached to its slightly curved willow snead, and a long blade of soft metal at right angles, which was sharpened with a block of sandstone.

Efficient scything demanded – beyond the stamina to keeping swinging through the long days of harvest-time – precision, dexterity and a harmony between man, his tool and his task. Until the machine age consigned him to redundancy, the scytheman was highly valued, and there was a romantic appeal to him and his labour. His oneness with landscape excited writers seeking to distil its essence; most notably Tolstoy, who devoted a memorable passage in Anna Karenina to Levin’s spiritual flight into the boundless golden cornfields, where – scythe in hand – he mixed his sweat with that of the serfs as he tasted again the old bond with Mother Earth.

On a more modest scale, the poet Andrew Marvell explored the metaphorical possibilities:

I am the mower, Damon, known

Through all the meadows I have mown.

Despite presumably well-paid work and a healthy outdoor way of life, Damon is not happy. Love, of course, has made him so:

Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was

And wither’d like his Hopes the Grass.

Marvell makes play with his conceit:

… she

What I do to the grass, does to my Thoughts and Me.

The poem reaches an absurd climax, as:

The edged Stele by careless chance

Did into his Ankle glance.

The physical hurt Damon repairs, with ‘Shepherd’s-purse and Clowns-all-heal’. But there is a deeper cut, for which no cure this side of the grave can heal:

Til death has done that this must do,

For Death, thou art a Mower too.

Marvell’s lines –

While thus he threw his Elbow round,

Depopulating all the ground,

And, with his whistling scythe does cut

Each stroke between the Earth and Root

– are the closest to a description of 17th-century scything that I have been able to discover; and, of course, refer to corn and meadow grass rather than anyone’s grass plot. Clues about the tending of these are provided in a collection of drawings of garden tools executed by Evelyn to illustrate what was to have been his life’s crowning work, his Elysium Britannicum, a survey of his native land and its achievements envisaged on such a massive scale that his energies were exhausted before it had advanced much beyond the planning stage. These include a group of implements for the lawn: a turf-lifter, a turf-edger and a scythe.

We must assume that this was how it was done. That it was done, that by the end of the 17th century the cultivation of fine grass in the form of bowling green or ornamental lawn had become general practice in the gardens of the great and the rich, is given some circumstantial weight by the accounts of that endlessly curious and untiring traveller, Celia Fiennes. In Mrs Stevens’s ‘neat gardens’ at Epsom, she found six grass walks guarded by dwarf fruit trees; at Durdans in Surrey ‘three long grass walks which are also very broad’; at Woburn a large bowling green with eight arbours, and a seat in a high tree where she sat and ate ‘a great quantity of the Red Carolina gooseberry’. Visiting New College, Oxford, in 1694, Miss Fiennes much admired a great mound ‘ascended by degrees in a round of green paths’, and noted a bowling green.

Thirty years later the celebrated Oxford antiquarian Thomas Hearne lamented the rage for lawns. He noted sourly in his journal the destruction of the ‘fine, pleasant garden’ at Brasenose ‘purely to turn it into a grass plot and erect some silly statue there’. As early as the 1670s, Christchurch, richest and grandest of the Oxford colleges, had enclosed a smooth, green lawn intersected by gravel paths, and reached by a noble flight of baroque steps. The fellows of Pembroke had their bowling green, while at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton’s feet trod soft turf as his mind wrestled with the mysteries of gravitational pull and refrangibility.

It would be absurd to pretend that the gardeners of the later Stuart period were at all excited by the subject of grass culture – or, I suppose, to suggest that the real gardeners of any period have been. Thus, despite Sir William Temple’s already quoted tribute to English turf, it does not figure in his long, lyrical description of the garden at Moor Park where he spent his honeymoon in 1655: the ‘perfectest figure of a garden I ever saw’, with its gravelled terrace running along the house, its three flights of steps down to a rectangular parterre quartered by gravel walks and bounded by cloisters, its grotto, fountains, statues, summer house, abundance of fruit trees and marked absence of flowers. The gardens of the Russells at Woburn at least boasted that bowling green. But it was the flower and vegetable gardens, and particularly the orchards (in 1674 fifteen different species of plum and twelve of pear were planted) which received the attention of the head gardener, John Field.

Passion was excited by the great advances in the science of botany and the ever-increasing availability of new plants. That ardour for the new triggered by pioneers such as the Tradescants, father and son, had enormously expanded the horticultural horizon. But on the whole, the grandees who commissioned the great gardens were not that exercised by subtle distinctions between varieties of gillyflower or nasturtium (although tulips, notoriously, were another matter). They were more inclined to involve themselves in novelties such as statuary and hydraulic engineering, and, in particular, topiary. The new king and queen, William and Mary, had brought with them from Holland their fondness for evergreen hedges and bushes, which clamoured for some artist with a pair of shears to work them into a resemblance of a camel or a griffin or some other diverting shape.

The desire common to the great men, of course, was that their trappings – including their gardens – should reflect and display their greatness. As is the way with the species, whatever image of greatness one great man presented to the world, another would seek to surpass it. Few strove harder, at greater expense and with more magnificent if ridiculous results, than James Brydges, successively Lord Chandos, Earl of Carnarvon, Viscount Wilton and Duke of Chandos, whose name is perpetuated in the series of anthems written in his honour by Handel.

The man who thought nothing of commissioning the greatest composer of the age to sing his praises had a home to match his estimation of his own importance, and gardens in proportion. The main parterre at Canons in Middlesex was studded with life-size statues, most prominent among them a gladiator who stood beside a canal fed with water piped from springs at Stanmore two miles away. The divisions of the parterre, most unusually, were of decorative ironwork. Vegetables were grown under beehives of glass. At the end of each of the eight intersecting alleys was a lodging for a retired army sergeant who, together, formed a guard for the place. There were flamingos, ostriches and blue macaws, and eagles which drank from stone basins. Tortoises from Majorca crept through the undergrowth, in little danger of straying outside the boundaries of an estate each of whose main avenues of trees was more than half a mile long. And there was turf at Canons, grown from seed imported, for reasons which remain obscure, from Aleppo. It must have thrived and been extensive, for when Chandos’s fortunes were at their zenith, it was scythed three times a week and weeded daily.

Miles Hadfield suggests a close correspondence between the layout of the gardens at Canons and an influential book entitled The Theory and Practice of Gardening, first published in 1713 under the name John James, for many years Clerk to the Works at Greenwich. This was, in fact, a fairly close translation of a work by a Parisian, Antoine Joseph Dezallier D’Argenville, who had studied with a pupil of the great Le Nôtre, and was, therefore, a textbook for an essentially French school of design.

To be honest, there is little pleasure to be had from studying The Theory and Practice today. It is as short on charm and humour as Hillard and Botting’s First Latin Primer. But one can understand why John James’s cluster of aristocratic subscribers were so taken with it. It presents, not reflections or suggestions or philosophical aspirations, but prescriptions, precisely plotted and illustrated with encyclopaedic thoroughness. There are pages and pages of elaborate designs to choose from, which offer – or appear to – a guarantee of success. At the same time, the book does have, in its pedagogic fashion, dirty fingers. The nobleman, desirous of stamping the reflection of his nobility on his domain, might select a suitable rectangular plan. His head gardener, assuming he could read, could then learn how to put it all into practice. No one before had made available such a reliable, all-encompassing code of gardening conduct.

Anyone interested in the evolution of the lawn and grass culture has particular reason to be grateful to Mr James of Greenwich, for he tackles the subject with great thoroughness – or, perhaps, one should say that D’Argenville does. But, curiously enough, while the main design fundamentals expounded in The Theory and Practice are undoubtedly French in origin and inspiration, the section dealing with grass is not. D’Argenville graciously concedes the case:

You cannot do better than follow the method used in England, where their grass plots are of so exquisite a beauty that in France we can scarcely hope to come up with it.

The essence of the overall doctrine is what James calls ‘contrariety’ – the ‘placing and distributing the several parts of the garden always to oppose them one to the other’. It would be tedious to delve into the detail of its application. Suffice to say that the importance of turf is properly recognized. ‘A bowling green’, James reflects, ‘is one of the most agreeable compartments of a garden and when ’tis rightly placed, nothing is more pleasant to the eye.’ It demands, he adds, ‘a beautiful carpet of turf very smooth and of a lovely green’. He proceeds to a succession of alternative plans, each presented with immense care. In one, the square of the green is edged in box and pierced with a star of paths, with a rounded hollow at the centre. Another is oval, ‘cut in Carts to make a diversity’. There is a Great Bowling Green, ‘adorned with a Buffet of Water made against the slope’; and an even greater one with compartments ‘cut and tied together by Knots and Cartoozes of Embroidery, very delicate’.

In the Jamesian garden, the principal feature is the parterre (French, derived from the Latin partire, to divide), which was regularly shaped, usually edged in box, and intricately designed in patterns of gravel, sand, box, flowers, shrubs, trees or grass. The grass parterre was known as the ‘parterre à l’Angloise’, and should, according to the master, ‘consist only of large grass plots all of a piece, or cut but little’.

These days the exemplars on which the Frenchman and his English disciple lavished such care are no more than historical curiosities; symptoms of a preoccupation with orderliness and control which seems almost obsessive. But John James’s instructions on how to get things to grow contained many of the eternal truths. All subsequent manuals on creating a lawn – up to and including those of our own Doctor Hessayon – elaborate on the principles laid down almost three hundred years ago. The ground should be dry, broken up, the stones raked and removed. A ‘good mold’ should be thrown on. Flat ground should be seeded, slopes turfed. The seed should be sown very thickly, then raked in. ‘Chuse a mild day rather inclined to wet,’ says The Theory and Practice, ‘that the rain, forcing down the earth and sinking the seed, may cause it to shoot up the sooner. Do it in autumn rather than spring which can require continual waterings which is a very great slavery and expense.’

These are, quite simply, the immutable fundamentals of making a lawn. Nor is the master any less sound on the pitfalls. ‘All the difficulty of making a fine green plot by sowing has in getting good seed.’ He delivers a stern warning: ‘You should not do, as many, that will gather their seed from some hayloft and sow it without distinction … the seed shooting too high, making large stalks, the lower part remains naked and bare, and mow it as often as you will it will never make handsome grass.’ James is vague on where you should obtain your seed; understandably, since a century and a half later gardening writers were still bemoaning the difficulty in finding decent seed. Turf, he says, should be taken from road sides or from the edges of pastures and meadows where cows and sheep feed.

Regrettably, the Jamesian advice on maintaining grass is somewhat skimpy. Beat it when it gets too high, roll it with ‘great cylinders or rolls of wood or stone’, and mow it ‘at least once a month’. These are the rules, and there is nothing wrong with them. But suspicions stir when the master proclaims: ‘It ought to be so close and even that no one blade should exceed another.’ Here, he succumbs to the proclivity of experts through the ages: for setting a completely unachievable target as if it were the easiest thing in the world, and intimating that it is merely our inadequacy or inattention which prevents us from emulating them. I would have enjoyed witnessing John James’s technique with the scythe, checking the condition of his sward, and perhaps pointing out to him that the occasional blade was a few millimetres at variance with its neighbour.

The last edition of John James’s book was published in 1743. By then fashion had moved on at a gallop. The design of gardens had become absorbed into a new cultural landscape and had become an issue for dispute. A generation of controversialists had come of age, thriving on the mockery and demolition of the traditions and tastes it had inherited. By 1743 the Duke of Chandos’s monumental extravagance at Canons had mouldered into something approaching disrepair, His Grace’s exchequer having been ruinously depleted by unsuccessful speculation (he died a year later, to be succeeded by his son Henry, who is reputed to have purchased one of his wives from an ostler as he was passing through Newbury). In a historical context, the more ludicrous aspects of the Duke’s folie de grandeur, and the reaction to them, can be seen as marking a turning point.

But the fact that John James and his publishers considered it worthwhile to issue a new edition of The Theory and Practice thirty years after the first illuminates a rather inconvenient aspect of gardening in Britain. For obvious reasons, historians seek to identify, within whatever great or trivial subject they are tackling, climacterics which can justify those satisfying words: ‘It was the end of an era.’ But in concentrating on the innovations of the innovators, the proclamations and passings of the prophets, it is easy to overlook the extreme slowness with which many changes in taste take hold. This characteristic is particularly pronounced in gardening, because of the gap between concept and realization, dictated by the speed at which plants mature.

Thus, long after the start of what the history books tell us was a new age in English gardening, ordinary Englishmen were still turning to John James to find out what they should be doing with their patch of land. They are forgotten, and in almost all cases the evidence of what they did with their gardens has been expunged. But they – the great majority among the tiny minority of the population who made gardens – continued to pay more attention to the precepts laid down in The Theory and Practice than to anything being trumpeted forth by the new pioneers.

However, it seems improbable that John James’s blueprints were duplicated across the land. Gardeners then would have done what gardeners of all ages do. They would have taken what was useful to them, what interested them and was applicable to their circumstances, financial as well as geographical; and ignored the rest. They would have learned through their own trial and error what in his theory and practice suited them. And if, having invested their time and money and love, they had discovered that the garden they had made had gone out of fashion, would they have hastened to dig it all up and start again?