WILLIAM GILPIN AND THE PICTURESQUE

An aesthetic revolution that occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century revolved around several main theories, but the most important theory that applied to landscape was that of “the Picturesque”, most often associated with the writings of William Gilpin.

Originally an ordained minister in the Church of England, he began writing these popular treatises as a means to raise funds for his school. 

The picturesque emphasized roughness over smoothness, boldness over elegance, and variety over uniformity. These concepts were initially influential in painting and then to landscape design.

Gilpin’s defining ideas influenced friends such as Horace Walpole and the royal family, including King George.  While the wealthy could afford to indulge themselves with the Grand Tour (the traditional travel of Europe undertaken by upper-class European society), appreciating and purchasing great paintings and ultimately contracting landscape designers such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton, Gilpin was instrumental in influencing the rising upper-middle, the minor gentry and tradesmen.  By leading tours through the countryside and publishing aquatint landscape prints he created an aristocratic taste level among the rest of the public.

anonymous engraving, Ackerman's Repository of Arts, The Strand 1809

 Edward Austen (Jane's brother) on the Grand Tour unknown creator, the Jane Austen trust

His concept of "the Picturesque," which first appeared in the Essay on Prints as an additional concept to "sublime" and "beautiful," was intended to formulate an appreciation for landscape in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain.  

Essay II: On Picturesque Travel is a manual for appreciating travel and sketching the landscape as a way to preserve the beauty in one’s mind.

Lorrain: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, 1660

Meanwhile, Jane Austin’s novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,

Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Emma) used the picturesque as a backdrop. While a fan of her writings illuminated his concepts to a larger audience, although at time it has been suggested that she satirized him. 

Throughout each of these novels the landscape holds a defining and center-stage role.   Her heroines are brought up in well-established homes and were receptive to the matters and opinions of current taste. Her novels reflect the social and landscape history of England.  

Her novels assimilate and promote the ideals of Gilpin, yet also satirize them.  In one of Gilpin’s publications he provided instructions for the groupings of cows in a pasture – “to unite three and remove the fourth.” Many landscape painters followed suit.  But, in Pride and Prejudice, one character refuses to join in a stroll with the teasing observation, "You are charmingly group'd, and...The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth."

William Gilpin illustrations of how to group cows Bodelian Library In Sense and Sensibility, one character is dismayed that another is apparently ignorant on picturesque theory and promptly instructs him… “ I shall call the hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged: and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the sift medium of a hazy atmosphere. It unites beauty and utility – and I dare say it is a picturesque one too.”   When Elinor Dashwood teases her sister about her passion for “dead leaves” she responds by reminding Elinor that it is her appreciation of the picturesque.

Humphrey Repton, General View of Longleat, Stapelton Collection

Thomas Cole (Hudson River School), The Garden of Eden 1828  wikimedia commons

FOUNTAINS

Once upon a time it became the fancy for many of the ruling class in Europe to include concealed fountains, controllable at a distance in their ornamental gardens.  Seats became flooded, grottoes became showers, trees sprouted a shower of water, water jets would spring up under ladies dresses and statues would spray passing visitors from their body parts… including (the statues’) private parts. These amusing “joke fountains” were used to provide entertainment for the visitors and guests at significant estates and castles.

Water had originally been used in Rome within sculpture as a way to animate these allegorical figures. This evolved as fountains created in medieval times (overflows from spring-heads) were in the shape of an animal heads spouting water. (Windsor Castle had a stone fountain on its grounds in the mid 1200’s). A popular feature of the Italian Renaissance garden (including

Villa d’Este

) was these hidden fountains, which could be turned on to drench unsuspecting visitors.

Among the fountains of

Peterhoff Palace

, one of Russia’s most famous tourist attractions a joke fountain was constructed -- one which sprays passers-by who step on a particular paving stone. The Palace is sometimes referred to as the Russian Versailles, built and primarily designed by Peter the Great, beginning in 1714. Peter had visited the Garden of Versailles and had been so impressed by the fountains there that he was inspired to make the fountains in the same cascading style.  Subsequent Russian rulers and regimes had augmented it up until the Second World War when the German Army essentially destroyed it. Thankfully, restoration work began immediately after the war, and continues today where it has become a UNESCO World heritage site.

The Bench Fountain - walking on the cobblestones initiates the spray of water

images: flicker.com

The water for the Peterhoff fountains is drawn from springs and aqueducts at a higher elevation, thereby creating the technological achievement of eliminating the need for pumps by the use of a gravity fed system!  All the fountains run simultaneously. As a contrast… there were so many fountains at Versailles that it was impossible to have them all running at once; when Louis XIV made his promenades, his fountain-tenders turned on the fountains ahead of him and turned off those behind him. “Louis built an enormous pumping station, the Machine de Marly, with fourteen water wheels and 253 pumps to raise the water three hundred feet from the River Seine, and even attempted to divert the River Éire to provide water for his fountains, but the water supply was never enough.”1

Young Princess Victoria, who was to become Queen of England, was particularly fond of the artificial willow tree at

Chatsworth

Gardens, originally created by William Cavendish in 1693. Cavendish hired Grillet, a pupil of

Andre LeNotre

to design it.  It was composed of 8,000 pieces of copper and brass and had 800 jets of water hidden in the branches and leaves. Supposedly, it would spurt into life squirting water from every branch and leaf over the unsuspecting passer-by. To be soaked to the skin in the early 1700s was generally no laughing matter, as fine clothes were very expensive and not usually washable.

Spouting Willow 

image:www.linklux.com/rosemaryvereyfavourites.htm

Was that anyway to treat your guests?

1.

Robert W. Berger, The Chateau of Louis XIV, University Park, PA. 1985, and Gerald van der Kemp, Versailles, New York, 1978

FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost “parkmaker.” Olmsted moved his home to suburban Boston in 1883 and established the world's first full-scale professional office for the practice of landscape design. During the next century, his sons and successors perpetuated Olmsted's design ideals, philosophy, and influence.

Over the course of his career projects

 he designed, established and contributed to scenic reservations (i.e.: Yosemite Valley 1865, Niagara reservation 1887), major urban parks (i.e.: Central Park 1858, Prospect Park 1866) park systems (i.e.: Buffalo Park system, Boston’s ‘Emerald Necklace’, Rochester and Louisville), residential campuses (Stanford University, Hartford Retreat), government building grounds, parkways and site planning for the World’s Exposition of 1893.

Lesser known and spoken of are the designs of country estates for wealthy clientele, of which Olmsted designed a number of.  His greatest private client was the Vanderbilt family and it’s many heirs to the fortune of William Vanderbilt. (Olmsted had actually been a neighbor to William Vanderbilt on Staten Island in th 1840's and was now designing the family mausoleum in that same area.)   Olmsted created the Biltmore estate (beginning in 1888) in Asheville North Carolina for George, the youngest of the eight children. Three of George’s sisters had also engaged Frederick Law Olmsted to design their properties.

One of these sisters was Eliza Vanderbilt who married Dr. William Seward Webb, who left the medical profession at the urging of the Vanderbilt family. Webb was propelled into the finance and railroad industries, eventually increasing his fortune as builder of Adirondack Railway Services. The couple lived in New York City and built an ambitious estate in Shelburne, Vermont, which has survived and become notable for its agricultural, technological and architectural achievements. A working farm, at it’s peak in 1902, "Shelburne Farms" included nearly 4,000 acres of farmland with 300 employees to maintained this estate. Between 1886 and 1902, the Webb’s purchased 32 farms on Shelburne point, amassing all this land situated on Lake Champlain in Northern Vermont, framed views of the Green Mountains in the distance, just south of Burlington. 

Shelburne House

view from house looking east

view from south lawn of house looking west

The architect was Robert H. Robertson, who worked alongside F.L. Olmsted.  Shelburne Farms includes four major building on the site – “Shelburne House” (now an inn) the “Coach Barn,” Farm Barn,” “Horse Breeding Barn  Sheep and “Dairy Barn” -- dairy cattle, horses, pigs, gaming pheasants and poultry were raised on this farm.  As many as 100,000 trees a year were planted to create the sculptural landscape, (Capability Brown would be envious), 20 miles of roads and carriage trails were built.

serpentine road leads through...

woodlands...

opening to a clearing in the distance..

. 

with the house perfectly sited on a hill.

Olmsted brought to this site an organizing concept that separated the farm into three types of spaces: farm, forest and parkland.  He also brought design principles learned from his early European travels and mastered in parks such as Prospect Park, Brooklyn.  

Shelbourne Farm: a (Lancelot "Capability') Brownian landscape via F.L. Olmsted

These design principles, commonly though of as the  English naturalistic landscape tradition of the early 18th century – are broad meadows with occasional clumping of shade trees, undulating hills, rich and diverse woodlands that transition into these meadows, looping roads strategically through the landscape to alternately reveal and obscure views and the appreciation of an expanse of water to reflect the sky.

rolling hills + meadows meets lake

(framed views from house)

Guests would tour the farm and horse operations, enjoy carriage rides, boating on Lake Champlain, croquet or golfing on the estate’ golf course. Presently, the site is designated a national historic landmark and has evolved into a non-profit (supported by significant donations) with a teaching component (environmental education center) working farm and an inn.

**With exception of F.L.Olmsted public domain portrait, all photos ©Todd Haiman 2010

FAMILY IN THE GARDEN

Edith Wharton, Beatrix Ferrand and Mildred Bliss.

Within the last two months I have had the pleasure of visiting both Edith Wharton’s estate “The Mount” in Lennox, Massachusetts and “Dumbarton Oaks” in Georgetown, D.C. 

As I recall both visits and the design of the sites I thought it would be interesting to research some background material regarding the two sites, the property owners and the relationships with and about Beatrix Ferrand.  Beatrix Ferrand was arguably the first female landscape architect of note (although she preferred the term “landscape gardener”) and the lone woman among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

The Mount reflects the taste of Wharton and to some degree her indirect influence on the future masterpiece that Ferrand created with the owners Robert and Mildred Bliss - Dumbarton Oaks.  Through Edith Wharton’s social connections, Beatrix was introduced to many of her future clients, among them the owner of Dumbarton Oaks, Mildred Bliss.

Edith Wharton was many things -- writer, socialite, gardener a supreme arbiter of taste.  (She claimed to be a better garden designer than writer!) Among the forty books she authored – best selling novels and collections of short stories, were authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design and travel. Wharton is credited with designing the gardens at The Mount, with additional landscape design/architecture by Beatrix Ferrand.  While Edith Wharton was laying out the gardens she was also working on the book “Italian Villas and their Gardens” – a strong Italian influence can seen in the Mount’s landscape design.  According to the Edith Wharton Restoration organization, Ferrand completely designed the maple-lined drive leading to the house and an elaborate kitchen garden (no longer functioning) that occupied the field in front of the stable.

The Mount is essentially a house with a grand terrace built overlooking the Italian inspired gardens.  A broad Palladian staircase leads down from the terrace to gravel walks that descend to a lime walk (linden trees).  This serves as a connecting hallway between the two major garden rooms.  

View of the flower gardens

View of the flower gardens

Views of the giardino segreto from the house and return view looking back at the house. 

The “giardino segreto” was paid for with the proceeds from Wharton's first bestseller, “the House of Mirth.”

dolphin fountain

dolphin fountain

To the right, facing away from the house is the walled garden (or “giardino segreto”).  On the left there is a French-style flower garden with arborvitaes arranged around a pool with Wharton’s dolphin fountain.  Other items of interest include two flights of grass covered earthen steps, which lead up to the terrace, a rock garden, and various other niches. What I found of pure delight was the pet cemetery.

Grass steps

Grass steps leading up to the house

Pet cemetary

As a supreme arbiter of taste within her social circles, Wharton carefully planned the grounds of The Mount. Similarly, Mildred Bliss had a very controlling “hand” in the creation of Dumbarton Oaks.  Bliss’s ideas for the gardens began well before she brought a professional onto the scene. Her ideas were primary to the design of the Oaks. British Landscape Architect Lanning Roper, a friend to both Bliss and Ferrand, has stated that ‘Mrs. Bliss knew from the start what she wanted to create.  She had definite conceptions, some of which she treasured from childhood.” *

Grass steps at Dumbarton Oaks

Both properties/gardens have strong Italianate influence – in the topography built upon, design of the garden rooms and aesthetic within these “rooms.” Historian Walter Whitehead suggests that the pre-existing, rudimentary terracing of the steep slope that Dumbarton Oaks was built upon suggested to Mildred Bliss the siting of many of the great Italian country house of the 16th through 18th centuries.  She was familiar with such renaissance villas both from her extensive travels to Italy and from Edith Wharton’s influential Italian Villas and their Gardensof 1919. *

Plan of Dumbarton Oaks

Several years earlier Bliss had arranged to meet Edith Wharton in Paris after reading her novels and influential articles on interior decoration. Later in her life, Bliss eventually wrote of her admiration for Wharton who had been “her stimulus for nearly forty years.” 

From that meeting in Paris, they consistently traveled in the same social circles – during WWI both sharing France’s highest civilian award for their wartime charitable activities in Europe. 

“Years later when Milded Bliss returned to the United States, she used memories of civilized life in Europe before the war as the model for the home she planned to create.  The Oaks would be based upon the Mediterranean model, first developed by the Romans, in which outdoor spaces, and especially those nearest the house would be treated as rooms – extensions of the interior living areas.” The steep slope at the Oaks suggested an organization along the lines of the Italian Renaissance gardens, with these individual rooms dropping down the hillside in terraces, their character gradually devolving from formal and architectural near the house to informal and naturalistic at the perimeter.” *

Ferrand had the good fortune to grow up in the gilded age with her aunt, Edith nurturing her career that began with her design of the Kitchen garden at the Mount. Wharton was only ten years her senior and in much of my readings, is seemingly just as much a close friend and confidant than niece.  She was introduced to many of her future socialite clients not only by her aunt, but her lifelong dear friend, Henry James.

Interestingly, while Edith eventually introduced and spoke of her niece to Mildred Bliss, the first commission of Ferrand’s career was working with a swampy area on a family’s property in Bar Harbor, Maine.  The property owner was Anna Bliss, Mildred’s mother!  (Mildred was several years younger than Beatrix and in her writings had no recollection of this coincidence.) Twenty-five years later they worked together on Dumbarton Oaks.

*

Dumbarton Oaks, Garden into Art; Susan Tamulevich, Monacelli Press, N.Y., N.Y.

** All photographs ©ToddHaimanLandscapeDesign 2014 New York City

BROWNFIELD REMEDIATION

On the north bank of the Thames River, between North Woolwich Road and Thames Barrier in Silvertown (on the outskirts of London, England) lies one of the finest modern parks in Britain.  The Thames Barrier Park was opened in the new millennium (2000), a regenerated formerely contaminated site that once housed timber treatment plants, petrochemical and acid works for over 150 years on the riverbank. It is a 27-acre site of inner city greenery wedged between two modern housing developments along the riverside.

French designers Alain Provost (designer of Parc Citroen in Paris) and Alain Cousseran of Group Signes teamed up with Brit architects Patel Taylor and Ove Arup to transform this former brownfield site.

A parti diagram of this landscape would be a simple rectangle sliced by a diagonal line.

What you see is a vast carpet of rolling hedgerows and lawn blanketing a space between the railway line and the silver domes (or as locals refer to them –“cockleshells”) of the Thames Barrier (the dramatic engineering structure that prevents the centre of the capital being inundated when floods of water are coming down river, and high tides advancing from the east.)

To remediate this brownfield a significant amount of the soil was hauled off, but the bulk of the materials were simply rearranged to reflect the vision of the design team. This profile was then capped with crushed concrete and a geotextile layer and topped off with imported clean soil to confirm the site's suitability for use.

Fields of wildflowers, a grid network of birches and stretching the length of the park is the largest and perhaps most modernesque sunken garden in London – known as the “Green Dock”.  This simulation of a marine dock is accessible by the public and crossed by two viewing bridges.  The planting is a tidal flow of wave-cut hedges alternating with beds of perennials such as Geranium cantabrigiense, Nepeta (catmint), Papaver (poppies) and more.

A group of local friends regularly play hide + seek in the park

Note the separate trash can for fido waste

**all photos Todd Haiman 2010

RALPH HANCOCK

Additional information on the life work of Ralph Hancock can be found through a site was developed by his family www. ralphhancock.com.

And here's a podcast link off BBC radio...

Ralph Hancock - Dear Tempestuous Genius from Robin Hull on Vimeo.

KENSINGTON ROOF GARDENS

Created by Ralph Hancock in the 1930’s, it is still functioning as a public space after 75 years.  Originally the Roof Garden above Derry +Tom’s department store, it is now owned by Sir Richard Branson and known simply as

The Roof Garden

.

A bit about Ralph Hancock…

Clarence Henry Ralph Hancock (known as Ralph) was born in Albany Road, Cardiff, in 1893.  In 1926 he paid his membership fees and became a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society. The following year the family moved to Surrey. It was from here in 1927 that Ralph undertook the first of his more famous garden projects designing and constructing a rock and water garden and also an Iris garden for HRH Princess Victoria, (Edward VII’s daughter) at her home” in Buckinghamshire. Photographs of the garden show a naturalistic style with the use of huge rock outcrops. This fondness for the use of rock combined with the influence of the “arts and crafts” movement is not surprising given the time that Hancock was constructing gardens.

On May 31, 1930, Ralph, set sail for New York. In order to promote his work in the US, he published an illustrated booklet titled English Gardens in America and described himself as being “Landscape Gardener to HRH the Princess Victoria of England”.

The gardens show some of Hancock’s trends, the use of low Cotswold stone walls combined with wrought iron used to construct the gates. He comments that “Cotswold stone harmonizes perfectly and is difficult to beat for this purpose”.

The promotional booklet must have worked as Hancock went on to design an exhibition garden at Erie Station in New Jersey. He also staged exhibits at the Massachusetts Horticulture Show where he won several awards, including in 1933 the Presidents Cup. He was one of the designers of the Lydia Duff Gray Hubbard garden in New Jersey which now forms part of the Garden Club of America Collection. Between 1933 and 1935 Hancock was to embark on the construction of one of his most ambitious projects, a series of roof gardens called the “Gardens of Nations” on the 11th floor of the Rockefeller Centre in New York.  The gardens at the Rockefeller Center were visited by Trevor Bowen, the managing director of Barkers who had taken over Derry and Toms in Kensington, London. Bowen liked what he saw and employed Hancock to create a similar effect in the heart of London. Again the logistics involved in the construction are impressive. On opening, the gardens contained over 500 different varieties of trees and shrubs.

I

n common with the gardens at the Rockefeller the gardens at Derry and Toms had an international flavor and featured Spanish, Tudor and English woodland gardens. The gardens were completed in 1938 at a cost of £25,000. In common with the Rockefeller there was an admission charge of a shilling (5p) but this time the money went to support local hospitals. Over the next 30 years it was to raise over £120,000.

This must have been a particularly busy time for Ralph as he was also winning Gold Medals for his display gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. Ralph continued to be a very successful exhibitor at Chelsea, winning gold medals in 1936, ’37 and ’38. The gardens constructed at Chelsea had moved away from the naturalistic rock garden style towards the more arts and crafts style that we associated him with. One of Ralph specialities became the use of Moon Gates, which he used both at Chelsea and a number of other gardens.

Original illustrations of Derry + Tom's Roof Garden (courtesy Ralph Hancock archives)

Present day photographs I took earlier this month on a rainy day.

A thoroughly lovely video off of YouTube on this garden...

RILL

A rill is a narrow and shallow incision into soil resulting from erosion by overland flow that has been focused into a thin thread by soil surface roughness. A rill may also refer to narrow channels of water inset in the pavement of a garden, as a water feature. The precedents come from Persian Gardens and Moorish Spanish Gardens. One of the most historically significant is found at the Alhambra in Granada Spain.  At the Court of the Lions (within the Alhambra) a central fountain links the surrounding buildings through a cruciform pattern of water channels or “rills”.

image from wallpapers.bassq.nl

More London is a new development on the south bank of the River Thames, immediately south-west of Tower Bridge in London. It includes the City Hall, a sunken amphitheatre called The Scoop, office blocks, shops, restaurants, cafes, and a pedestrianized area containing open-air sculptures and water features, including fountains lit by coloured lights. The Hilton London Tower Bridge hotel opened in September 2006. Set on 13 Acres, it uses water (The Thames, rills and fountains) as the backbone, the design gesture that links it from one end to the other.  

image from morelondon.com

Beginning at London Bridge Station/Tooley Street a series of simple fountain pools evolve to a rill that runs diagonally (a thousand feet, approx) through the buildings at the center of a pedestrian esplanade to the River Thames with the Tower Bridge as it’s focal point. Before you arrive at the River Thames you are greeted at the Scoop, an open air ampitheatre with at grade fountains. A thoroughly engaging public space.

follow this onsite model--entrance is at bottom, photo tour following bring you to the top of model.

pools of water @ entrance w. rill on left/Tooley street to right

Master planning and design for the area was by Foster + Partners, while the water features (rill, pools and fountains) were developed with Robert Townshend Landscape Architects.

all imagery unless noted otherwise are ©Todd Haiman 2010

ENGLISH LANDSCAPE

I will be attending the Chelsea Flower Show in late May.  The “Great Spring Show” (as it was once labeled), has become an annual pilgrimmage for my family.  As a precursor to this show and as a way to share my enthusiasm for it, I will frequently be writing posts about context, history of the show and providing past designs of show gardens from recent years. Enjoy.

A very young and spry (then) Princess Elizabeth at the Chelsea Flower Show (circa 1949)