A Nation of Gardeners

Britain this summer is pretty bloomin' bloomin'

God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures ... men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.

So wrote English Essayist Francis Bacon in 1625. For centuries his countrymen have been doing their best to turn their rocky little island into a facsimile of Eden. England is a nation of gardeners, and at no time has the national green thumb been more visible. The English Tourist Board has declared 1979 "The

Year of the Garden." Three historic floral parks have been restored and opened to the public. And London's Victoria and Albert Museum is offering an exhibition that illustrates the nation's continuing effort to tame nature through art.

The exhibition, titled "The Garden:

A Celebration of One Thousand Years of British Gardening," includes architectural plans of medieval and Tudor landscapes, assorted tools of the trade (including the first mechanical lawnmower, a green-and-red contraption patented in 1830), and paintings that preserve the image of estates long since lost to the taxman and the decline of great fortunes. Many of Britain's fine gardens still flourish, however, thanks largely to the conservation efforts of the National Trust, a volunteer organization that administers 100 gardens and some 200 historic buildings. This year, using funds collected from its 816,000 members, from legacies and from small admission fees, the National Trust completed the restoration of three beautiful historic gardens: Ham House, an 18-acre compound on the banks of the Thames on the outskirts of London; Erd-dig, a 13-acre retreat in North Wales; and Claremont, a 50-acre spread near Esher, 40 minutes from Charing Cross.

The evolution of British gardening from Ham House, the oldest of those restorations, to Claremont, the youngest, is a story of art conquering artifice. Ham House, completed around 1675, is one of those formal, highly decorative gardens popular during the 17th century. Such landscapes were influenced by the fussy Dutch and autocratic French traditions, which attempted to organize nature into geometric perfection. The Ham House gardens are meticulously divided into parterres, groves and banks by avenues.

Fountains, statues and aviaries suggest the Cartesian excesses of Versailles. Other English formal gardens such as those at Sissinghurst Castle, Blenheim Palace and Henry VIII's Hampton Court featured mazes, topiary animals, tiny canals and ornate fountains

By the mid-18th century, however, the old classicism was replaced by a new aesthetic. The purpose of art, philosophers and poets of the day argued, was not to impose an artificial order on nature, but to reveal, as John Dryden put it, "God's first idea." Mocking such conceits as clipping bushes into the shapes of beasts, Alexander Pope urged that the three arts of poetry, painting and gardening be united. The first to execute Pope's grand vision successfully was Architect, Painter and Landscape Artist William Kent, who began work on Claremont around 1725. Nature abhors a straight line, maintained Kent, as he set about demolishing walls and ploughing parterres. The result: an elegant wilderness that resembled a painting by Claude Lorraine. Claremont gives the appearance of an untouched landscape complete with grassy knolls and an irregular lake.

Kent's garden at Claremont was refined by Lancelot Brown, a royal gardener who was known as "Capability" for his habit of looking at a site and declaring that it had capabilities. His was a romantic vision, sweeping away the last vestiges of formalism in broad pictorial vistas of lawn, woods and streams. In his work, Continental influences were finally replaced by a kind of landscaping thoroughly in harmony with the damp English climate and the contour of the land.

Other gardeners took the back-to-nature bent of Kent and Brown one step further. To fulfill the romantic fantasies of their patrons, they attempted to make nature look even more "natural" by use of simulated rock outcroppings, false ruins and crumbling bridges. They disguised gatehouses as Gothic chapels and tool sheds as moss-covered battlements. Lord Cobham, a disaffected official who left Robert Walpole's government in 1733, determined to make an allegorical statement in his garden and persuaded his architect to build a ruined Temple of Modern Virtue amidst his flower beds. During the mid-18th century, another landowner, Charles Hamilton, tried to turn his estate into a scene from a painting: he hired an aged man to inhabit his fake hermitage. (The would-be recluse resigned after three weeks.)

Only the very wealthy could carry on gardening on such a grand scale, of course; the vast majority of British gardens today are no larger than one-tenth of an acre. Through the National Gardens Scheme, a plan started in 1927 to raise money for charity, 1,250 private gardens are now open to the public. The owner may be a duchess in Mayfair or a police sergeant in Clapham; the garden, big as a country club or small as a driveway.

A tidy example is the backyard of William Thackeray's great-granddaughter, Belinda Norman-Butler, in London's Kensington section. It is a cozy 20 yds.

by 10 yds. Little more than bare dirt when the Butlers bought the house shortly after World War II, the garden now blooms with some 300 varieties of flowers, shrubs and trees. Other amateur gardeners stop by to ask for cuttings and to trade notes on lush hybrid ivy. Such a bower well fulfills that dream of true Englishmen expressed in 1664 by Poet Abraham Cowley: "I never had any other desire so strong ... as that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.