English Backyard Eccentrics begins with a citation from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), extolling eccentricity. Mill’s ingenious argument is that non-conformity is a weapon in society’s battle in opposition to tyranny: “the quantity of eccentricity in a society has usually been proportional to the quantity of genius, psychological vigour, and ethical braveness which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief hazard of the time.” Todd Longstaffe-Gowan adroitly hyperlinks this statement to case research of English eccentrics, who used gardening as a type of autobiography. The gardens vary from the Seventeenth to the early twentieth century, and they’re linked by a sort of lateral pondering that leads from grottos to rockeries, from mini-Matterhorns to topiary and aviaries—in brief, a world of allegory transmuted into gardens. On the identical time, the guide is wealthy in sudden insights into cultural historical past that give a broader context to its theme.
As lots of the gardens underneath evaluation have been misplaced or are in a method or one other inaccessible, their recreation right here required extraordinary detective work, aided by up to date illustrations and commentaries. Thus, Thomas Bushell’s Seventeenth-century grotto at Enstone in Oxfordshire embodied the Renaissance custom of hydraulics and boasted a wood statue of Neptune, flanked incongruously by a spaniel and a duck. There have been additionally caverns with a cover of rain and a menagerie of animals carved from the rock. Because the creator notes, the construction was within the Gothic revival model, among the many earliest in England, and the statue of Neptune bore a hanging resemblance to Bernini’s Neptune and Triton (1622-23), then nonetheless on the Villa Montalto in Rome.
Alpine elegy
Two of probably the most outstanding creations in English Backyard Eccentrics are variations on the theme of rock gardens: Girl Elizabeth Broughton’s miniature Swiss glacier at Hoole Home close to Chester and Joshua Brookes’s vivarium in Nice Marlborough Avenue, London. The previous was a rare recreation in miniature of the Mer de Glace at Chamonix during which fragments of white marble had been organized to seem like snow, edged by Welsh stone adorned with alpine crops. It was an early instance of the vogue for alpine surroundings, and Longstaffe-Gowan tellingly juxtaposes a print of the rockwork at Hoole Home from 1838 with an early watercolour of Chamonix by William Pars from 1770. Nonetheless, the supply of Girl Broughton’s inspiration stays a thriller. Was it prompted by an undocumented go to to the Chamonix valley or, because the creator suggests, merely impressed by an in depth studying of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which contained a celebrated account of the Mer de Glace?
Equally notable was the aviary created by the anatomist and naturalist Brookes, inhabited by an eagle and different raptors within the backyard of his home in London’s west finish. This construction was composed of stone from the Rock of Gibraltar and designed to resemble a truncated cone. It boasted a jet of water and an aquarium in addition to aquatic crops and chained birds; adjoining to this was a “pilgrim’s cell” customary out of the jaws of a whale and lit by a stained-glass window. Brookes wrote to the architect John Soane in some element in regards to the vivarium, clearly in hopes that one in every of his shoppers could be eager about buying all or elements of the construction for a rustic property. Soane doesn’t seem to have pursued the supply however, because the creator of a “monk’s parlour” at his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Soane should have been intrigued by the vanity of a “pilgrim’s cell”.
Altering fashions
No hint stays of Girl Broughton’s mini-glacier or Brookes’s vivarium, and this was the destiny of quite a few the eccentric gardens mentioned right here. Clearly, fashions in gardening modified, and one particular person’s mini-Matterhorn could be later dismissed as “an alpine peep present”. Virginia Woolf quite cruelly likened the stately houses of the English higher courses to “comfortably padded lunatic asylums”, and lots of the protagonists in Longstaffe-Gowan’s guide bear this out. Take, for instance, Girl Harriott Reade of Shipton Courtroom, Oxfordshire who spurned human society in favour of birds and monkeys to the extent that the noise and smells emanating from her home had been overpowering. Then there may be the case of the fifth Duke of Portland, whose interest was making a community of subterranean flats linked by passages giant sufficient for a coach and horses at his property in Nottinghamshire. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan aimed to encourage fellow gardeners “to dare to be eccentric”, which is nice recommendation even when lots of the personages in his guide seem to have used gardening as an alternative choice to remedy.
• Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, English Backyard Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries, Paul Mellon Centre for Research in British Artwork/Yale, 392pp, 198 color & b/w illustrations, £30/$40 (hb), printed UK 26 April and US 3 Might 2022
• Bruce Boucher is the director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
