The Art Review? on Gardening? Are works of gardening, then, to be considered works of Art?

Being permitted to raise the question, I solicit attention to certain recorded testimony upon it. The witness that I shall call may not be considered an expert in the technicality of art. I submit that it is not needed that he should be, the question being one in which studio wisdom is of less importance than knowledge of humanity and the manner in which certain forces delicately act upon it; and as an expert in this latter respect, no man can stand firmer and [437]none speak with more scientific precision, or with more perfect freedom from cant and fustian. His name is Francis Bacon.

It is the opinion of scholars, I believe, that more of what is sound in our present civilization is due to Bacon than to any other man. They say that the more important discoveries and inventions, the more critical advances of science of the last three hundred years, have been gained by holding to principles and pursuing methods that he was the first to clearly propound and systematically follow. They say, too, that he was a marvelously foreseeing man, and that it is unlikely that the best fruit of his study has yet ripened.

Like Darwin, and like Gladstone in later times, Bacon found relaxation from his profound studies and from social, political and judicial burdens, in what to most men would have been an exacting interest in matters of gardening. Like Darwin, and like Gladstone too, he was disposed to turn his recreations to philosophic profit. After his death, a great body of manuscript—memoranda was found among his papers, in which he had recorded personal observations upon the growth of plants and other like matters. Their character is indicated by the fact that they were first published in the form of a French translation, in Paris, when the Jardin des Plantes was there successfully cultivating a much more active, scientific interest in horticulture than existed in England.

But, while yet living, Bacon had given us in print a record of convictions to which he had been led, of much greater importance. To realize its significance, it is first to be considered that, wherever any other of the more sumptuous fine arts has been in high vein, it has been pursued contributively and subordinately to the art of Architecture; and that the greatest architects have been themselves masters of painting, sculpture and music. Architecture is the Art of Arts. Now, it was Bacon’s conviction that it was only because of a one sided immaturity of civilization, that gardening had never come to be generally regarded as a branch of art more refined and of higher spiritual moment than Architecture. He believed that it offered a larger and more productive field for the worthy exercise of specially-trained faculties, and that in no other class of works of art were men eventually to find such unmixed pleasure; in none, such vital relief from the depressing and repressing influence of over-much absorption in lay occupations.

Suppose that this conviction had been reached by Bacon by no excessively un-Baconian process, what might be reasonably thought to follow? Might not this, for example: That the higher the social condition of a people, the greater will be the respect in which works of gardening are held; the more general and the more vitalizing the pleasure taken in gardening, the more critical the popular judgment of the management of such works, the more [438]conservative the public dealings with them. And why not this again? That the lower the social condition of a people, the less will those ignorant of the higher fields of gardening be aware of their ignorance; the more supercilious will be their attitude to those who are less ignorant, and the less will they be held in restraint by public opinion from degrading and wasteful misdirection of gardening works.

It is not here and now asked whether all of Bacon’s claim for gardening should be allowed. It is asked whether it is even reasonable that projects of gardening should be taken up and continuously pursued with the serious and reverent study that befits works of art? With reference to this question, it is now further to be submitted that the mature conviction of a man of Bacon’s standing is entitled to much greater weight at this time than it might otherwise be, because of the limited resources of gardening and the restricted field that had been open for gardening works at the time when he wrote, compared with the present. The wealthiest man in England, let it be remembered, could not then command a single plant out of hundreds that are now common articles of the pleasure-gardening trade, so common that the poorest settlers in the remotest wilds of America or Australia may, for a few farthings, obtain nurslings of them through the mails.

As to the extent of the field of operations, to understand the difference between that open to Bacon’s contemplation and that which is, at least theoretically, open to ours, we have first to think under what restraints of custom and conventional decorum his imagination was obliged to act. Compared with his contemporaries, he was a singularly free-minded man. He was, for example, able to wholly discard what was then “good form” in respect to what is now called color-decoration and bedding work; daring to say of it, “You may see as good sights many times in tarts.” How many people of refined tastes have had that thought lying back in their minds during the last twenty years, without strength to admit it to themselves, much less to live by it? Yet Bacon himself never thought, apparently, of carrying a work of gardening beyond a garden. And a garden to him was little more than a well-built and richly-endowed convent of plants; a convent in which nothing was so well expressed as the idea of the withdrawal of its inmates from the outer world and their subjection to methodism and discipline.

Wishing to picture a supreme work of the highest order of princely gardening, Bacon took for its site a field of thirty acres of flat ground and, regardless of any distant beauty that might be had, first of all threw up an embankment all around it; and upon this set a lofty hedge, to be trained upon carpenter work and shorn into the fashion of a structure of masonry, with piers and alcoves, arches, battlements and turrets, but no windows. Beyond the limits thus established and so emphasized to the eye, he thought not that gardening was to be carried. And being thus compelled to have regard only to interior and confined effects, he went on to establish closer limitations by cross-lines of banks and hedges sub-dividing his space into apartments, each [439]apartment having a style and expression of its own, like the successive apartments of a palace—stateliness being aimed at, for instance, in one; escape from stateliness in another (the latter called the heath, having the character of what is now called the wild garden). Respectable and excellent gardening of this order is still practiced, and there are situations and circumstances in which there can be no better. But in other situations and circumstances we may now have an order of gardening widely different, and calling for widely different talents, and to be judged, as to its excellence, with reference to widely different standards. Few think how very widely different, and I will try to make it apparent by presenting an extreme hypothetical case.

From the pains taken by some of our railroad corporations to advertise the pleasure to be had in looking from their cars and stopping-places, it would appear that means to this pleasure, and means of enhancing it, are already a commercial commodity.

If, in the laying out of these railroads and the arrangement of their stopping-places, there shall come a desire to some yet later generation to turn this commodity to account otherwise than as an advertisement, and if there shall come to be an inquiry for books educative of judgment in this respect, it will be found that the principles of economy applicable to the purpose have been carefully studied, with much of Bacon’s faith and spirit, by men of erudition, industry and highly trained aptness for the work. In the few libraries and book-shops where the works of these instructors are stored, they are always ranged under the head of “Gardening.” Of such writers in our own tongue, fountain heads of railroad gardening wisdom, as Stephenson was of railroad engineering wisdom, there are to be named—Whately, Gilpin, and Price. It was a century ago that the first of these wrote, in his Observations On Modern Gardening, that whatever was to be done to make nature (meaning scenery) more beautiful was a work of gardening; and, though he did not in express terms add—whatever, also, is to be done to bring men to partake of scenery in such a way that it shall make a clean, unbroken coherent impression upon them, yet the context shows that this was his intention. And many men of good general literary standing, Horace Walpole and Walter Scott among them, accepted this definition and it became good usage.

Now let us think of a few operations that, under this view of the scope of gardening, are to be considered gardening-operations.

Clearing away trees, bushes or herbage, by which the more substantial and essential sturdy qualities of a headland had been obscured or softened. Felling a wood, in order that distant mountain-heights, or valley-depths, may be revealed. Demolishing obstructions, whether natural or artificial, in order to give a water course its old, natural, lively rippling way. Dredging a mud flat. Replacing painted and gilded structures of iron or wood with those of stone; and smooth, slick-faced granite with vigorous blocks raw from the quarry. Adjusting the site of a round-house, tank, coal-shed or signal station, with a motive to avoid unnecessary jar upon the foreground of a soothing prospect; or [440] (leaving the railroad), fixing with a similar motive the position and outlines of a stable, gate or laundry-yard or of a bridge or landing pier, the course of a walk, the moorings of a yacht, or the height of a fence or of a hen-coop. These, I say, under modern usage, might all be operations of gardening. But as many confound horticulture with gardening, let it be noticed that not one of them is an operation of horticulture.

It may be questioned whether all that passes now, more than in Bacon’s time, under the name of gardening, is wisely considered as simply a development of the old gardening. It might be that our ideas would be less confused, if what we call gardening outside of plant-convents had been classed as a different art and a different name had been given it. But it is only a question of expediency. Accepting the usage, we may consider how much more ground Bacon would have had for his opinions, how much greater the refreshment to be provided by gardening would have appeared to him, how much more a vital part of civilization, worthy of the highest thought of wisest men, he would have held gardening to be—could he have regarded it from a point of view that has thus been opened to us.

But it may be asked what is there in common between the gardening had in view by Bacon and this which has since been added to the field of gardening?

The answer in one word is—design.

The best dictionary-definition of design is that one of Dr. Johnson’s, which says that it means “an idea to be expressed.” If this does not go far, it is at least good as far as it goes.

But design is one of those words to which a semi-technical signification may be attached by the circumstances under which it is used. We learn to use it discriminatingly only through familiarity with these semi-technical usages. Let us consider some of them.

We have an institution called the National Academy of Design. It has for its object the fostering of what is called the Art of Design. Among them it includes Architecture, but not building; not engineering, not carpentry, nor plumbing. Among them it includes painting and sculpture, but not the manufacture of canvas, brushes, pigments or varnish; not quarrying, stone-cutting, or bronze casting.

When the Academy shall begin to take Bacon’s view of gardening, it will not show it by inviting trees and bushes or samples of manures to be sent to its exhibitions. To foster improvement in these, is the business of horticultural academies. The Academy of Design will foster gardening as it fosters architecture (supposing that it does that a little).

But design is a word to be applied to works of gardening yet more discriminatingly.

When confectioners arrange various-colored sugary materials in a manner approaching that in which various colored yarns are arranged in a carpet, or as various colored stones in mosaics, their handiwork may be highly [441]praised, but it is not praised with regard to the standard academically applied to “works of design.”

Again, if a crop of flowers is raised with a view to a pleasure to be taken in them, similar to the pleasure that may be provided if they are cut and sent to a dinner-table or a sick-bed, or if they are laid upon an altar or heaped on a coffin, the work is not to be academically brought in comparison with “works of design.”

Where does design in gardening begin?

William Morris, poet and unquestioned prince of certain provinces of design, gives this advice about a particular work of gardening:—

“Don’t have ferns. The hart’s-tongue in the clefts of the rocks, the green things that grow within the reach of the spray of the waterfall, these are right in their places. Still more the brake of the woodside, whether in late autumn when its withered haulm helps out the well-remembered woodland scent, or in spring when it is thrusting its volutes through last year’s waste. But all this is nothing to a garden and is not to be got out of it, and if you try it, you will take away from it all possible romance, the romance of a garden.”

He is speaking of tiny gardens of the order of Lord Bacon’s, though not lordly; tiny gardens of working-men, to be planned and carried out by them in the dingy outskirts of a crowded town; and of poetic ideas practicable to be expressed through gardening under such circumstances. He does not ask from the point of view of a milliner, are ferns pretty things? He does not ask from the point of view of a horticulturist whether, set in a peaty soil in a shady place and skillfully treated, their beauty can be secured in a town garden? He does not ask from the point of view of a decorative artist about the harmonies and contrasts of colors that may be obtained by the introduction of ferns. He asks: Would ferns be helpful to the expression of a general elevating and refreshing idea or sentiment, which it will be appropriate and, on the whole, practicable to lastingly secure in the place, and with the means and the technical skill at the command of the strong gardener and weak horticulturist in question?

This brings us round the corner; brings into view not high art, not great work, not costly or sumptuous work, not necessarily skillful work; brings us in view of very modest and not very beautiful work, but “work of design” in the academic sense, as appropriately to be so called as the most costly painting, the most imposing temple ever seen.

It is to be added, design is not a matter simply of expression, as Dr. Johnson’s definition implies. It is also a matter of impression. If you say that gardening of design gives you, as a looker-on, no more pleasure than gardening not of design, remember that the same is said by many not only of works of building, of painting, of music, but of passages of natural scenery which to the better educated are singularly valuable. The word is not often used in this [442]way, but it is logically subject to such use, and the idea that would be thus represented is to be kept in mind—the idea that there is receptive, as well as constructive design, to be thought of in connection with gardening.