Week 1 – A bit of background: Garden styles

English Landscape Garden (picturesque): 1740-1820

• Aristocratic estates
• Seamless landscapes (use of hahas)
• Picturesque, tidied up, bucolic, painterly landscapes
• Landform, copses and water
• Often with classical allusions (greek temples/pillars) and narratives
• View from the house of a rolling, pastural landscape
• Whole villages often moved to accomodate size, trees moved
• Designed “natural” landscape
• Notable influence: Capability Brown

Gardenesque (Victorian garden): 1830-1914

• Plant collections/ arboretums and public parks
• Displaying of plants
• Exotic Plants (as people gained better education they began to leave the empires and to explore and”discover” the world)
• Fashionable specimens
• Bedding annuals
• Ferneries
• Glass houses (required to store exotic species in controlled environments)
  • Glasshouses became public
• Formal Gardens
• Plant Breeding
• Commercialisation of plant supply and plant nurseries
• Anti picturesque
• Element of common touch (as opposed to elitists of english landscape gardens)
  • Gardens for common people
• Public open spaces for everyone
  • Consequence of industrialisation as people needed somewhere other than the poor living quarters they had
• Notable influence: John Claudis Loudon
• Example: Albert Park – Symmetrical, garden beds, statue of Queen Victoria (park named after her husband Prince Albert), exotic trees, flower clock

Arts and Craft Movement: Architecture 1850-1910, Gardens 1880-1930

• Rustic house and buildings
• Structure: Garden rooms (walled or hedged) architecture as garden infrastructure
• Mass planting
• Herbaceous (perennial) border
• Plant design – sequential, seasonal, colour
• Middle class
• Rural settings
• Gardener owners
• Look back at pre-industrial times
  • Gothic revival
  • Created locally
  • Idyllic rural aesthetic
  • Emphasis on craftsmanship
• Notable Influences: John Ruskin, Gertrude Jekyll, Edwin Lutyens

Botanic Gardens

• 1545 Padua Botanic Gardens, Italy were the first botanic gardens
• Kew Gardens, London
  • 1759 Princess Augusta, mother of King George III, founded a nine-acre botanic garden within the pleasure grounds at Kew in
  • 1840 transferred from Crown to government and opened to the public
• Scientific classification of plants (herbarium, database, seed banks)
  • seen as understanding world in familial terms (related/evolutionary nature)

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Glasshouses and Environmental Modification

• Plants set requirements for design (design around the plants, what do they need?)
• Variety of conditions needed, including heat
• existing landscape conditions ignored, even hermetically separating the indoor/outdoor environments
• Wintergarden modified environments: Tropical/temperate, water, shade, climbing structures (modified environment to suit range of plants)

Ferneries

• Common in NZ
• Often sunken