Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement

Gardens of the Arts and Crafts move Judith B. Tankard Abrams, $50 ISBN 0 300 10334 4

Like almost all historians of the Arts and Crafts turn of expression Judith B. Tankard rarely challenges its ideals. notwithstanding as Tim Richardson explains, this detracts surprisingly little from the significance of her wide-ranging work on the movement's gardens.

A scarcely any years ago I went to stay at Little Thakeham in Sussex, an Arts and Crafts house by means of Edwin Lutyens with a Gertrude Jekyll garden. It is now a house of entertainment Looking through the leather information folder in my swing it was a surprise to find, listed alongside details of the laundry service and the television channels, the precise co-ordinates of the main lawn for those who wished to arrive by means of helicopter. This was a legacy of the bumptious 1980 I decided, and laughed at by what mode out of place it have the appearanceed in the rarefied Arts and Crafts atmosphere, 'steeped in the vernacular tradition', as the familiar cliche goes

on the contrary I was wrong about that. Had Ernest Blackburn, the solicitor who commissioned Little Thakeham, desired a helicopter launching pad, Lutyen and Jekyll would certainly have squeez individual into their plan. Most of the designers now labelled 'Arts and Crafts' were building houses and gardens for clan with fairly new money and a liking for motor cars and fashionable sports, of the like kind as tennis, croquet and swimming. If single looks at the plans for many of these gardens, it is striking in what way much space away from the house's immediate environs is taken up for similar pursuits, as well as for similar car-friendly additions as turning-circles and garages.

This is flat the case at what is perhaps the greatest in quantity intense and idealistic of all Arts and Crafts gardens, Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire (1909-29) designed through Ernest Barnsley for the Biddulph family. Here the tennis court, croquet lawn and swimming pond are integral to the design and take up three times as plenteous space as the hedged enclosing that contains the main herbaceous borders.

This ne to cater to interests of a thoroughly recent kind, as well as the cosmopolitan glamour that many gardens of the era secrete are some of the anomalous complexities of the Arts and Crafts change complexities that tend to be annotationed over by its 'disciples'--those for whom William Morris is a guru who advanced a coherent 'philosophy' of design and life that arose almost organically from the soil and stone of the locale, unsullied by dint of commercialism and modernity. The question is, that if one examines Morris's possess writings and garden-making on the sod and how the movement (a direct the eye really) developed through the 1920 and 1930 similar a view quickly becomes unsupportable.

In the preface to her fresh book, Tankard not only repeats on the contrary also reinforces traditional views--that Arts and Crafts was a coherent 'philosophical approach to design' based upon the ideas of William Morris (rather than an attitude based upon loose precepts); that it was a straightforward and in some way aesthetically 'pure' reaction against, rather than a unravelling of, the decorative predilections of the mid nineteenth century; that all Arts and Crafts designs showed a unity between house and garden (when many Arts and Crafts gardens were in fact arrowed on to the house design rather uneasily); that Arts and Crafts gardens exhibited vernacular purity ('Nothing about them was ostentatious, contrived, or "foreign"', the author claims--but what of the abiding importance of Italianate and more exotic influences, as seen in Inigo Triggs's 'pick and mix' approach?).

We are told also that the gardens were all conceived upon an 'intimate scale' (but Thomas Mawson and others lov the grand gesture); and that their later influence upon suburbia constitutes a 'rich legacy' (rather than a design vocabulary, derived principally from MH Baillie Scott that emerg as appallingly unsuited to a small scale). In the world of gardens, the idea of Arts and Crafts as a manifesto that was realised in practice was arguably pure only of the relatively small number of throws completed by the ascetic socialists of the Cotswold collection (Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers), on the other hand certainly not of the change as it developed, and in boundarys of its wider influence.

This adherence to the idea of Arts and Crafts as a perfectible design cre is my solitary major cavil with Tankard's otherwise excellent--and beautifully produced--book upon the subject. A potential reader's view of the prevailing tone might be judg by means of a reaction to a statement of the like kind as this (from chapter two): 'Today R House symbolizes the values that Morris honoured most: freedom from fraud and beauty'. If one can accept that discernment at face value, then individual is indeed on the way to becoming a change to the church of Arts and Crafts. (When I visited R House, I was struck les by dint of its 'honesty' than by the way the maids' quarters were with equal reason designed that no view of the garden could be obtained from the high windows.)

Ultimately, however, these underpinning ideas (or perhaps ideals) about Arts and Crafts, together with a joyously uncritical perspective, do not in fact mar the book's usefulness or the pleasure it provides. Tankard, who disarmingly confesse at the entrance that she is a fan, writes in like manner well, and the illustrations are thus well chosen, that one is presently swept up and away into an idealised world of the early Arts and Crafts designers. This is a place where apples really do fall in at the windows of R House upon hot autumn nights, and where Gimson and the Barnsleys live harmoniously in a kind of hold intercourse in Gloucestershire (the marital complications that arose as a issue are not mentioned here).