The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Every garden-maker should be an artist’
From gnome armies to thundering grottoes, England’s most eccentric gardens were ‘living biographies’
Lamport Hall is one of Northamptonshire’s nicer mansions. Remodelled in the 1650s by Inigo Jones’s acolyte John Webb, and again by the Smiths of Warwick a hundred years later, it stands serene and resplendent in rolling parkland, the epitome of the English country house.
But Lamport’s fame does not rest on its architecture, lovely though that is. Lamport Hall is famous throughout the world simply because in 1874 its owner, a gardening baronet named Sir Charles Isham, decided to decorate his new rock garden with 150 grotesque little figurines he acquired from Nuremberg. And from this small seed a great British gardening tradition grew: the garden gnome, ancestor of a million capering, cavorting, mooning ornamental aberrations.
“Every garden-maker should be an artist,” declared Vita SackvilleWest, who knew more than most about the subject. “That is the only possible way to create a garden.” And every great garden in England from Stourhead to Stowe is a form of self-expression, an attempt to make a dream real, just like any other work of art. But unchecked self-expression can easily lead one up the garden path, so to speak, until before you know it the bucolic dream has turned into a gnomefilled nightmare.
If you need evidence, look no further than Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s new book, English Garden Eccentrics, where extravagant topiary and equally extravagant topiarists jostle for position with gothic follies, flamboyant fountains and entire menageries of exotic parrots and kangaroos and wolves, sometimes caged, sometimes chained to picturesque rockeries and sometimes stuffed. There is a deep strain of eccentricity running through the gardens of England: so deep, in fact, that populating a Victorian rockery with an army of miniature Bavarian goblins pales in comparison with the antics of the rest of LongstaffeGowan’s eccentrics.
At Enstone in Oxfordshire in the 1630s, for example, the royalist vegetarian Thomas Bushell turned a curious rock formation into a grotto (it helped that he was a mining engineer) and installed a formidable array of water-powered playthings: “artificial thunder and lightning... drums beating, organs playing, birds singing, the dead arising”. There were a couple of Egyptian mummies (one a present from Queen Henrietta Maria, no less) who definitely didn’t rise, but who suffered from the damp and went mouldy; and an ancient hermit who didn’t seem to mind the damp, since he was still lurking in his eremitical grotto when a visitor was surprised to come across him in 1663, “an old man of 105 years”.
Sir Rowland Hill’s Hawkstone in Shropshire also boasted a cavedwelling hermit, although this one
was mechanical, “with motions that surprise his visitants, who suppose him inanimate”. His lips moved and he spoke, with a hoarse voice, when visitors approached him. At Friar Park near Henley, the Edwardian lawyer Sir Frank Crisp topped off an enormous model of the Matterhorn in the rockery with artificial snow, edelweiss and, on the summit,
a chunk of the real thing. Crisp also excavated a frightening series of underground chambers filled with distorting mirrors and other oddities. (English garden eccentrics went for caverns and grottoes in a big way.) Lady Ottoline Morrell, who visited Friar Park in 1902, was unimpressed with the “sham Swiss mountains and passes decorated by
China chamois, which had to be spied through Zeiss glasses, and elaborate caves and underground lakes, lit up with electricity, and festooned with artificial grapes, spiders and other monsters.” George Harrison, on the other hand, fell in love with the underground monsters: he bought Friar Park in 1970, restored Crisp’s fantasies and made the place home for the rest of his life.
Longstaffe-Gowan calls the eccentrics’ gardens “living biographies”, noting that they usually declined in the absence of the spirits that created them, and it is true that few have survived into the 21st century in anything like their original form. They were, he says, “sanctuaries so inextricably entangled with their personae that they could not in their [creators’] absence survive them”. And sanctuary is exactly what they offered. They were safe spaces, in which the Ishams and Bushells and Crisps of this world could play their garden games for their own amusement, and also for the entertainment of others. When you fill a landscape with mouldy mummies and miniature Matterhorns you need an audience to be impressed, or at least to smile along with you. The majority of gardens in Longstaffe-Gowan’s book were open to the public in their heyday.
In the end, eccentricity is in the eye of the beholder, and sometimes the distinction between wonderful and weird seems quite arbitrary. Henry Hoare could populate his grottos at Stourhead with statues of nymphs and heroes; the 6th Duke of Devonshire could construct a 300ft-high fountain at Chatsworth; and we marvel at the former’s grasp of classical allusion, the latter’s love of majestic spectacle. Stick a mechanical hermit in a cave, on the other hand, and suddenly you’re bonkers. The best eccentric gardens might challenge our notions of normality, but they do it in a mischievous, unthreatening way. In fact, they invite us to share in the eccentric’s view of the world. And as Longstaffe-Gowan suggests, at a time when garden centres and TV programmes steer us into fashionable conventions, their stories tempt us to rebel, perhaps even to court a little gentle disapproval from our neighbours. Bring on the gnomes!
‘English Garden Eccentrics’ by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale, £30) is out on April 26. Adrian Tinniswood’s latest book is ‘Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House’ (Jonathan Cape, £30)