Book Reviews

Head Gardeners By Ambra Edwards Pimpernel. 240 pages. £35.00. ISBN 978-1-910258-74-3.

Rarely do garden books move me to tears, but certain pages in Head Gardeners were so touching, I found myself welling up. For this is a book which celebrates a gardener’s resilience and imagination as well as the traditional gardening virtues. Almost all the 14 head gardeners included have faced personal challenges (one is a reformed drug addict) and all are far removed from the conventional image of the crusty, old-fashioned tyrant beloved of fiction from Wodehouse to Peter Rabbit. None of them is resistant to change: Troy Scott Smith even wants to rework the iconic White Garden at Sissinghurst. Many resent the expectation that they will drop hands-on gardening to organise events or chat to journalists – though Ambra Edwards points out that historically head gardeners also had to be managers, and she describes Michael Walker at Trentham as someone who is clearly happy with a managerial role.

She is brilliant at inserting garden history quite seamlessly into descriptions of the gardeners and their gardens. Her panegyric on Victorian bedding makes clear how thrilling it was: “Here were new forms, new textures and, above all, brilliant new colours.” I wish that more women had been featured: Andrea Brunsendorf, for instance, who did so much for the gardens of the Inner Temple.

Still, it is a woman who is the real hero of this book: Carol Sales, who works at Headley Court, a rehabilitation centre for injured armed forces personnel. e value of horticulture as therapy for mental and physical ills has never been more touchingly demonstrated.

Perhaps the most important point made by this thoughtful and well-written book concerns the lack of recognition given to head gardeners as the artists they are, combining the skills of hand, eye and brain to create major works of art.

As Andrew Woodall, photographed (left) at Broughton Grange by Charlie Hopkinson, says: “…it’s only if you live and breathe it that you’ll put up with the long hours, the low pay, the lack of status, the sheer uncoolness of it....”

Gillian Mawrey

Mainstreaming Landscape Through the European Landscape Convention Edited by Karsten Jorgensen, Morten Clemetsen, Kine Halvorsen Thoren and Tim Richardson Routledge. 199 pages. £37.99. ISBN 978-1-138-92230-3.

e European Landscape (or Florence) Convention was an initiative of the Council of Europe, not the EU, so affects 41 European states not 28. It was signed in 2000 and came into effect in 2004 –though of course landscapes had been protected in some countries long before that (in Switzerland as far back as the 1860s). e ELC’s aim was both to protect landscapes and to increase awareness of their cultural value – and this book reflects on the good it has done and what needs doing in the future.

One interesting theme which almost every one of the 20 authors considers is that of perception – “e Convention …. emphasises that landscape is constituted when people perceive it”. In effect, that different countries do not always mean the same thing by “landscape”.

Even professionals may see the same landscape differently, according to

whether they are ecologists, landscape architects or cultural historians.

e main message, though, is one that this magazine has always worked for. “Regardless of these differences…the most important point is that there is some progress in the development of definitions contributing to understanding across borders.”

GM

Cultural Landscapes of South Asia Edited by Kapila D. Silva and Amita Sinha Routledge. 276 pages. £95.00. ISBN 978-1-138-94757-3.

Some years ago I met a Frenchman who had just been to Sigiriya and I well remember how difficult it was to convince him that what he had visited as an archaeological site was also a landscape. For him, it was the ruined remains of a royal palace, set on a rock, with nothing of the garden about it, Le Nôtre not having worked in Sri Lanka in the 5th century. Sigiriya is one of the sites discussed in this book and his attitude encapsulates its subject: what is a landscape and how should it be appreciated, conserved and managed? e authors deal with places of very different kinds, urban and rural, in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, setting out to challenge “the prevalent views of heritage management in South Asia that are entrenched in colonial legacies...”

e various authors are critical of the idea of “the fenced-off monument-in-agarden” and suggest that heritage sites should be viewed in a context that is not purely historic.

Western ideas on restoration have, in fact, changed a good deal since Lord Curzon tidied up the landscape around the Taj Mahal but their plea for a more holistic view of cultural significance, and for conservation to balance static ideas of cultural significance with more evolving intangible heritage, is a potent one. Given the hefty price, the book is poorly edited and illustrated only in black and white – but it should be read because the debate about whether the same ideas of conservation are appropriate for every part of the world is relevant to places far beyond South Asia.

GM

Influential Australian Garden People Their Stories By Anne Vale Heriscapes. 200 pages. A$49.99. ISBN 978-0-646-95836-1.

It is trite but true to say that the historic gardens of tomorrow are being created by the designers of today. It seems a good idea, therefore, to examine the designers of today to find out their techniques and their philosophy. What would we not give for a contemporaneous in-depth interview with Le Nôtre or Capability Brown?

Anne Vale has taken Australia’s bestknown garden people of today and provided not only their own account of their work but an assessment of each by their peers. Australia makes a good field for study because garden designers there have long had to find a way of blending the traditional taste for garden design, and even plants imported from Britain, with incorporating native species and catering for the widely different climate zones. Some of the subjects may fade from memory but one or two might prove to be the next Edna Walling or Ellis Stones. Vale’s approach could profitably be followed in the northern hemisphere.

Richard Mawrey

The Book of Flowers By Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Edited and introduced by H. Walter Lack. Taschen. 608 pages. £50.00. ISBN 978-3-8365-6893-7 (English, French, German edition). ISBN 978-3-8365-7061-9 (English, Italian, Spanish edition).

Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759-1840) is famous for his paintings of roses, particularly those he made of the Empress Joséphine’s collection at Malmaison; but he painted many other plants, fruit as well as flowers, and in some, the redcurrants reproduced in this book (left), for instance, he even included insects, à la Maria Sibylla Merian.

The introduction by Dr H. Walter Lack starts almost two centuries before Redouté’s time, with the interest in botany which exploded in early 17th-century France under Louis XIII, led particularly by the king’s brother, Gaston d’Orléans. Botanists and noble patrons, as well as creating botanic gardens, including what is now the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, employed artists to record rare plants in paint, originally on vellum and later on paper.

Pierre-Joseph Redouté was the most prolific of these painters – thousands of his original works survive in various collections – and, because what Dr Lack calls his “delicate and pleasing style” was allied to “accuracy and faithfulness to nature”, his work has always been respected by botanists as well as loved by the public. He was much published in his lifetime, as well as in many volumes since, and this compilation aims to show what plants were being grown in Parisian gardens and greenhouses at the turn of the 19th century.

GM

Longford Castle The Treasures and the Collections By Amelia Smith Unicorn Press. 200 pages. £40.00. ISBN 978-1-910787-68-7.

Longford Castle in Wiltshire is not one of England’s better-known stately homes, which is surprising as it is not only a sumptuous Elizabethan house but contains an amazing collection of first-rate pictures and statues and is set in a garden by Charles Bridgeman (1690-1738). Its Tudor and Stuart owners, the Coleraine family, created a magnificent formal garden but when Longford was acquired by the Bouverie family, Huguenot refugees who later became the Earls of Radnor, they swept away the formality and adopted the ‘naturalistic’ landscape style in which Bridgeman was a precursor of Capability Brown.

Longford Castle: The Treasures and the Collections is beautifully produced and well researched. As its title suggests, the book majors on the collections but it also has much to say of the gardens which are in excellent condition. Pictured right, under a columned canopy is a statue of Flora, which may be by John Cheere.

Ursula Brown

Find more book reviews in the HGF Newsletter emailed to subscribers four times a year.

A Garden to be Explored

In a year when Britain is celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage, it seems appropriate to honour a woman who embraced emancipation and gained the admiration of the most crusty misogynists. Dame Freya Stark (1893-1993) was someone for whom the word ‘intrepid’ might have been coined. Self-taught in Arabic, Persian and other languages, in the 1920s and 30s she explored areas of Iraq, Iran and the Arabian peninsula where no European men, let alone women, had ever ventured, including the fabled Valley of the Assassins. In 1941 Stark, who was herself halfItalian, inherited and moved into a villa near Asolo, 73km (45 miles) north of Venice. e villa, now known as the Villa Freia in her honour, already had an old garden which incorporated some

Game of Tones

What could form a greater contrast than that between a Victorian sunken garden, bright with spring and summer flowers, and the mock-medieval murder and mayhem of the Game of Thrones television series? Yet the elegant Georgian mansion of Castle Ward overlooking Strangford Lough in County Down, Northern Ireland, is home to both. Much of the internationally famous television series was shot at Castle Ward, and the National Trust, which owns it, has much benefitted from visits by fans of GoT. Garden lovers, on the other hand, might prefer the more tranquil setting of its parkland and its famous sunken Windsor Garden. When created in the mid-19th century this was a formal terraced garden with elaborate parterres full of highly coloured bedding plants separated by gravel paths.

e garden was much altered over the years, including by the insertion of a large statue of Neptune, as in this photograph taken in 2003, but more recently the garden had become a bit lacklustre.

Now, with the support of local donors and the Ulster Garden Scheme, £37,500 has been raised and head gardener Andy Dainty is leading a team of volunteers to revive the garden and recreate the colourful splendour of Victorian times.

3-D scanning has been used to create the dimensions of no fewer than

of the ruins of Asolo’s Roman theatre. Stark transformed the 1ha garden into a space which visitors described as ‘magical’ and, somewhat oddly, ‘Wordsworthian’. e Roman ruins were incorporated into the design which featured towering hornbeam trees and box hedges, with wisteria, roses, camellias, hellebores, irises, delphiniums and peonies. Grapes, figs and plums for the table were also cultivated.

After Stark’s death at the age of 100 the garden decayed, but it has now been fully restored by Italian landscaper Kristian Buziol. At first he only had old photographs to go on but then he met an aged retainer of Dame Freya who had a clear memory of what had been there in her day.

Now restored to the glories of its heyday, the garden can be visited on several days a year through a local travel agency, BellAsolo (www.bellasolo.it).

61 new beds, and 120 tons of soil and 4,000 bulbs have been deployed. Spring and summer will now see a game of tones to match the Game of Thrones. See visiting details on www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Rarities Recovered

Travellers taking the ferry in or out of the French cross-Channel ports are usually in too much of a hurry to stop and visit nearby gardens – which is a pity as there are many good places to see. La Fauconnière, in Cherbourg, is a private botanic garden, the result of collecting by several generations of the Favier family. Lawyer Alfred Favier bought 7ha of steeply sloping scrub land in 1869 and at first set about planting any tree that could cope with the cold salt-laden winds.

In the 1880s, advised by Cecil Guerney, who was British consul in Cherbourg, he began to add more botanically interesting plants, and this policy was continued by his son Léon, who made the first Eucalypttrials in France. (ere are now 33 species and five hybrids in the garden.)

e collections were almost completely destroyed in the Second World War, but Léon’s son, Dr Charles Favier, replanted and added more than 7,000 plants, travelling the world to bring back rarities, including rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias, adapted to the mild, damp climate. Charles’s son Alain took over in 1993 and enhanced the garden’s remarkable collections of plants at the limits of rusticity, particularly those from the Himalayas, the Far East, South America and New Zealand.

e garden was listed as historically interesting in 1978 and currently contains many rare species as well as several that were introductions to France – Magnolia Zenii, for instance, which may be extinct in the wild.

After Alain’s death, La Fauconnière (which is also known as La Roche

Fauconnière and as Dr Favier’s Garden) was bought in 2011 by the Conservatoire du Littoral Normand. Unfortunately, it was allowed to become neglected and covered in brambles – but a group was set up to save it, and last February 128 municipal gardeners, guided by specialist botanists, spent a week clearing the site, with wonderful results.

Now the city of Cherbourg has offered substantial funding and two permanent gardeners, so, once an inventory is made, La Fauconnière might be open to the public again soon.

Lucknow Relieved – Again

e Vilayati Bagh in the northern Indian city of Lucknow was created in the 1820s, probably by Ghazi-ud-din

Haider (1769-1827), the first king of Oudh. It was planted in the European style, in honour of his third wife, Mary Short, daughter of a doctor from the East India Company, who converted to Islam on their marriage and was known as Vilayati Begum, which meant the foreign (or British) queen. Located on the banks of the Gomti river, the square garden covered 4ha (10 acres) and was enclosed by high walls to provide privacy for the ladies of the court. e western wall had a massive ornamental gateway, with a smaller entrance facing the river to the east. Inside were pleasure grounds suitable for royal parties and entertainments, with a charming summer house, and mass plantings of trees and flowers of European origin.

Vilayati Bagh was all but destroyed during the uprising of 1857 and became best known for three tombs of British officers who died during the fighting and were buried in the garden. Today, it is being restored by the Lucknow branch of the Archaeological Survey of India. Overgrown brush and weeds have been cleared, walls built and heritage structures uncovered.

e next phase, budgeted to cost 48 lakh (£50,000), is to restore the ruins and plant the garden with ornamental shrubs and flowers that would have been popular in the 19th century.

Jill Sinclair

Wimbledon is famous the world over for its Grand Slam tennis tournament held every summer – but how many people are aware that this leafy south London suburb also contains a Capability Brown park?

Brown was commissioned in 1765 by the 1st Earl Spencer to redesign his Wimbledon Manor estate where both André Mollet and Charles Bridgeman had worked for previous owners. Over 20 years, Brown’s improvements included a large lawn in front of the house, the damming of two streams to create a lake, and the planting of 50 clumps of trees as well as belts of woodland.

The 4th Earl Spencer sold the property in 1861, heralding a period of decline and

reats to historic gardens can be internal or external. Sadly, sometimes they are both. One of Malta’s more interesting gardens was created by John Hookham Frere (sometimes spelled Frère) (1769- 1846). Frere was a politician and diplomat

Wimbledon Badly Served

dismemberment during which much of it was built on as London spread outwards. A railway line was constructed across the eastern side in 1889, central parts of the park were leased or purchased by private sports clubs, and the local council bought the lake and some of the land in 1912 for the laying out of a public park and recreation ground. In 1922 the private All-England Lawn Tennis Club was established on the western part.

Today, Earl Spencer’s 480ha are reduced to just 60ha, of which 27ha are public park. is contains Brown’s 9ha lake, a water sports centre, an athletics track, public tennis courts, a bowls club, a crazy golf course, beach volleyball courts, a picnic area and children’s play facilities. Because of its historic importance, Wimbledon Park is listed Grade II* on Historic England’s Register – and in 2016 it was added to HE’s At Risk list as well. e reasons include the silting up of the lake and Brown’s vistas being obscured by over-mature trees, under-managed vegetation and obtrusive new buildings.

Such problems stem largely from the divided ownership, with owners having different requirements. The site’s current role for sport and recreation may also be a higher priority among local residents and politicians than its historic significance. In 2016, the London Borough of Merton, which owns the public park, commissioned a masterplan and is now working with the other owners to improve the condition and appearance of the lake. But Brown’s landscape will continue to deteriorate unless all the owners are prepared to work together to come up with a shared vision and a historically informed strategy for what remains of the Brown landscape in its entirety.

Have Pity in Pietà

who played important roles in Britain’s fight against Napoleon. Crucially, he was ambassador to Madrid when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, but he fell from favour after advising the British army to retreat via Galicia and not Portugal, which led to the disaster of Coruña. He married a rich countess with delicate health and in 1820 retired to Malta, where he acquired what is now the Villa Frère on the sea front at Pietà. Within its 8.5 acre (4 ha) grounds he created a magnificent garden embellished with well-heads and carved benches – and with an arch known as ‘the gibbet’. In the late 20th century the gardens fell into complete abandon and a large part was taken over to build a primary school (with a helipad!). Eventually a conservation group, the Friends of Villa Frère, was formed under architect Edward Said to save the remaining third, the Upper Garden, now listed Grade 2 with Grade 1 structures such as the tempietto. Unfortunately, the work has received a serious setback as a ten-storey retirement home is to be built immediately adjacent to the gardens, destroying the sea views as well as what remains of the ambience of the gardens.

The Shadows Lengthen

The skyscraper has been a dramatic feature of our cities for well over a century and those who build skyscrapers, particularly for residential use, like them to have good views. After all who would not like to overlook Central Park, Kensington Gardens or the Luxembourg Gardens?

Skyscrapers, however, cast long shadows, and these can be highly detrimental to parks and green spaces, causing a problem that is poorly recognised by the public and frequently overlooked by planners. Whether it is Central Park itself, where skyscraper blight has long been the subject of unavailing protest by high-profile objectors from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis onwards, or Green Gardens, Croydon, a popular park in Outer London, demand for housing, jobs and economic progress leaves the environment way behind. Two stark examples from the north-eastern United States highlight the problem. In Massachusetts there is actually a 1990 state law designed to prevent the adverse effects of shadow on green spaces but, sadly, this is subject to being over-ridden by politicians. Boston Common (above), created in 1836, is one of the oldest and most famous parks in the USA, older than Central Park and contemporaneous with the earliest parks in the United Kingdom and continental Europe.

A proposed 700-foot (215m) tower would undoubtedly breach the state’s shadow law but Governor Charlie Barker has signed an exemption. Unless it is blocked by Boston’s Planning Department, the damage will be done.

In downtown New York, the charming ‘vest-pocket’ Greenacre Park (right), designed by Masao Kinoshita nearly 50 years ago, is seriously threatened by the

City Council’s plans to rezone the Greater Midtown East area, which will result in tall buildings halving the available light for the people who use the park and the plants that grow in it. Homes and offices are, of course, important but, then, so are the green spaces we need to breathe.

Baroque not Beer

Only three terraced gardens with water features remain in Austria from the High Baroque period. One is the garden around Castle Schlosshof to the east of Vienna, the second is the Belvedere Garden in central Vienna, made by Prince Eugen of Savoy, and the third is the Schwarzenberg Garden which lies very near the Belvedere Garden. The Schwarzenberg Garden consists of four plains beginning in the south main axis of the garden palace. This main axis still exists, but since the second half of the 18th century areas in landscape garden style were implanted in the baroque scheme. The so-called upper cascade, an impressive baroque construction accompanied by a huge bassin, lies under the plain. This plain also changed in

landscape garden forms, but under the ground there still exist two water reservoirs since the baroque time.

One of the four parts of the Schwarzenberg Garden and the baroque water system will be partially destroyed if a project to build a restaurant in this area is allowed. There is already a small restaurant, but the new plans propose building a mini-brewery and a new restaurant, which will have seating for 880 diners. This includes 224 places in the garden and another 260 on a new outside terrace on pilotes.

Schwarzenberg is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Historic Centre of Vienna site and all parts of it, apart from the plants, are protected by Austrian federal law. Furthermore, the whole garden is protected under Viennese zoning category. Unfortunately there is still the possibility of building on a small part within the protected area. It is here that the new restaurant will be erected.

The relevant Viennese planning authorities have given their agreement this project. The only missing license is the license of the manufacturing plant.

Eva Berger