Not the stuff of TV makeovers

Preferring to nurture talent over plants, garden master demystified design

Because John Brookes was English and in the business of creating gardens, you might have thought that he shared his compatriots’ mania for growing plants to some sort of perfection. He didn’t.

“I enjoy having plants around the place,” he told me when I last saw him, in 2003. “But I’m not obsessed with how to cultivate them.”

Instead, he commanded a different discipline, one of garden design. Over the years, he wrote some two dozen books about design — the first being Room Outside: A New Approach to Garden Design (Antique Collectors Club Dist, new edition 2007), in 1969 — for readers who wanted to make something of their yards. He also taught generations of budding garden designers at his school south of London.

I met him when he was in Washington to teach a course to students at what was then the Corcoran College of Art and Design. Brookes died March 16, aged 84.

His most important contribution wasn’t his design instruction — which was exceptionally good — but the mere idea that a garden must be designed.

You might think it obvious that designing a garden is fundamental to its creation. But you’d be wrong. Few, if any, books, television shows and offerings on the manic forum we call the internet actually tell you much about garden design. You will see pretty pictures of patios, arbours, balconies, and pools and fountains. To the extent that there are garden shows left on TV, they are about instant effect and the eye appeal of outdoor furnishings, built-in barbecues and brightly coloured awnings.

We are seeing photogenic vignettes, often staged and groomed, something that Brookes could instantly sniff out as bogus. “Gracious living,” he called it, rolling his eyes.

Design, on the other hand, is about the most effective and beautiful way to fix problems, meet needs and fulfil desires. It is successful when all the elements relate to a whole and the garden becomes greater than the sum of its parts. With design, it is understood that the plan will take several years to reach fruition, as trees and shrubs mature — it is not the stuff of TV makeover shows.

It is not realistic, perhaps, to think that everyone with a yard has the imagination or the knowledge to undertake garden design — perhaps Brookes was being too optimistic in producing books for a general audience. But his underlying premise, that every homeowner should think about design and that everyone with a garden should be involved in transforming it, is totally valid.

Before he came along, landscape design was something for wealthy people with grand properties. But Brookes was a product of his time. Brookes was a prominent guru, but I had believed that he was one of many, just as Julia Child, who embodied the rise of home cooking, was one among a number of other celebrity chefs. I later came to see that Brookes was a one-off. There were many garden experts telling you how to plant things or how to transform portions of the yard, but no one talking holistically about design.

As for the age of the do-it-yourselfer, that seems to have passed, too. In pricey East Coast cities, at least, debt-laden people in their 20s and 30s (and 40s?) find it hard to break into the housing market, and those who do aren’t spending their weekends erecting arbours or building raised beds. Society, it is generally accepted, is more sedentary than ever. Homeowners with means turn to design-build landscapers whose work seems to me to be modular and skewed toward the dreaded gracious living.

Fixing a drainage problem is a question of engineering knowhow, but the creative end of garden design is a murkier business. Brookes’s talent was in deconstructing the process of design and bringing a clarity to something inherently opaque.

Brookes was assailed for not being more plant-driven. So it was ironic that, more than anyone else I know, he was able to explain how plants played different roles. He sorted them into five distinct categories, which he labelled “specials,” “skeletons,” “decoratives,” “pretties” and “infill.” This was laid out in his Book of Garden Design (MacMillan Publishing Company, 1991).

Brookes was emphatic, opinionated, articulate and driven by an unshakable belief that garden design mattered, a true master. He was interested in historic traditions in gardens and once wrote a book about Islamic gardens, Gardens of Paradise: The History and Design of the Great Islamic Gardens by John Brookes (New Amsterdam Books, 1998).

The style of a garden gave it its character, he said, but primarily it had to be bold, well made and comfortable for its owners.