Idiosyncratic style manual from one of the UK’s leading formalist designers inspired by the great Humphry Repton.
This is the ideal book for anyone who might feel a little wearied by the seemingly endless parade of fashionable New Perennials gardens, filled as they are with a familiar palette of veronicastrum and other late-summer thrusters.
As a rare formalist sitting in the middle of this sea of naturalistic planting, George Carter has long been a valuable figure on the British garden scene. This crisply realised book is presented as both an insight into his method and an ideas manual for those who might sympathise with Repton’s dictum that, ‘The colour of gold… makes everything pleasing.’
As a self-help gardendesign manual the book falls somewhat short, since the scattergun approach means that the author never dwells for long on any particular topic (‘light and shade’ probably deserves more than a few paragraphs). In addition, a rather monomaniacal adherence to the example and writings of Humphry Repton (alone) means the text – and reader – soon feel shackled to the Regency designer.
This shortcoming can be dismissed as an allowable eccentricity, however, given the sheer originality, verve, wit and invention bursting from the images on these pages. The author modestly tells us about Repton – but it is Carter from whom we learn. He gives the amateur designer the confidence to experiment with ornament and be bold with evergreen shapes.
Two garden projects are given much deeper treatment: Oxnead Hall, Norfolk, and Penshurst Place, Kent. At the latter Carter has made long, mixed borders that are strictly colour themed in a manner that might be described as deeply unfashionable at the moment, and are all the more innovative for that.