Unity In Garden Design
One of the most helpful books was The Principles of Gardening by Hugh Johnson, copyright 1979. The following quotation is from this book, "Successful gardens that we remember and return to when we can, have a strong sense of place, a powerful identity which unites their various parts. They may agree with the landscape round about, sharing it's views, it's landform and it's trees, or they may have to shun it, shutting out a city or a desert and starting afresh to create a fantasy world. To be convincing, though, gardens must be coherent. They must settle on a theme and follow it all the way. They must not be waylaid by irrelevancies or seduced by decorations. They may change key for a passage; certainly they must vary their rhythm. But as music respects the dominant, so they must return to their basic style."
By "style" he didn't necessarily mean an established style which everyone recognizes as a certain style. He was writing about developing a personal style. It is usually best for a personal style to evolve out of a traditional style, by creating within an established tradition; you benefit from the mistakes that earlier designers have made. It is very rare for a garden style to suddenly appear in it's "perfect" form with all of it's elements in total harmony with each other; this develops over time as possibilities are tried and accepted or rejected.
Creating within a tradition is not the same as just imitating the gardens of the past. One of the reasons why I find garden design so fascinating is because so many plants were introduced during the 19th and early 20th centuries that all of the possible ways of integrating these plants into a unified garden have not been thoroughly explored. Another reason for not copying the gardens of the past is that we don't live the way that people lived at the beginning of the 20th century, let alone the way that people lived in the 16th century. Gardens should be a product of how we actually live.
At least a decade ago, I read about a classical revival which was happening in architecture. I was very excited about this, many new materials have been introduced since the last real classical revival in architecture back in the early 19th century. Also, Western civilization is less Christian now than it was in the early 19th century, we see the Classical world differently from our 19th century ancestors. I thought that a classical revival would be a reinterpretation of classical ideas, using new materials -what the ancient Romans would have created if they had plate glass. I was disappointed when I looked at these "Classical" buildings. Most of them were either copies of 18th and 19th century buildings, or rather bizarre creations which used classical details in very unclassical ways. Georgian houses were created for a society which always dressed for dinner, it is fine to wear jeans in a real 18th century house, but why build an imitation of an 18th century house if you don't dress for dinner every night? As for the bizarre use of classical details, those buildings are not classical. Classical details don't make a building classical, if you use classical details with the intent to startle the viewer, the result will be very unclassical.
Unlike architecture, the classical tradition in garden design never died. Formal gardens went out of fashion for a while, but they were replaced by landscape gardens based on classical landscape paintings. Now the two traditions exist side by side, complimenting each other. Into these two traditions, the West has been integrating plants from all over the world. At the same time, the West has been absorbing design influences from all over the world.
At first, the approach was eclectic; one estate would contain a formal Italian garden, an English landscape garden, a Japanese garden, and so on. I call this the Disneyland approach, you go from one "land" to another. Another eclectic approach is to take fragments of earlier gardens and arrange them in a very attractive manner, without changing them enough for the resulting garden to really be a unified garden, I call this the museum approach. Both approaches have resulted in some very beautiful gardens, but eclectic gardens tend to lack unity. Only the greatest designers can create an eclectic garden which is also unified, and these gardens are always dead ends. An attempt to go beyond them always results in a design which lacks unity. Eclectic gardens always have an underlying lack of unity, this flaw may not be obvious in the original, but it will show up in it's descendants.
In my articles on unity, I wrote about how to unify eclectic gardens, but it really is best to go beyond eclecticism. The step beyond eclecticism is for different traditions to hybridize. One of the most successful hybrids has been that of the Italian Renaissance garden with the English cottage garden, Hidcote and Sissinghurst are two of the most successful of these early 20th century hybrids. In mid 20th century California, Thomas Church created gardens which were the children of classical European gardens and abstract art. These are just two paths which have been explored and developed into established styles, there are other paths which have not been thoroughly explored. Let's explore them together.
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