Take Me To Your Garden: The Arts & Crafts Garden

Citing examples, define and describe the character, form and contents of the Arts and Crafts garden created by the Gertrude Jekyll & Edwin Lutyens partnership.

The Arts and Crafts garden is by far my favorite garden that we have explored in class. This type of garden is rich with color and actual plants, thus giving it an entirely unique and recognizable look, despite the design of individual gardens varying quite a bit.

The Arts and Crafts garden is a product of several stylistic and social influences. From the Victorian period William Robinson and Reginald Blomfield came two garden authorities (a gardener and an architect, respectively) whose clashing opinions helped spawn the A&C garden. Robinson stated that gardens were to have hardy plants (if not native to Britain) in them that looked wild or natural, which was in direct opposition to the idea of using bedding plants or exotic, greenhouse-reliant plants in the garden. Blomfield, being an architect, believed that the garden should complement the house and that the design of the garden should reflect the design of the house, which essentially led to Blomfield advocating for the formal garden. The A&C garden did both of those things in a unique way thanks to Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens. Jekyll, a gardener and writer, and Lutyens, an architect, teamed up to create some of the most sought-after English homes and gardens of the Victorian and Edwardian period. It was Jekyll who did the garden design and managed to complement the architecture of the home by laying out a natural garden that consisted of herbaceous borders, shrubs and ornamental grasses. Jekyll, a trained artist, applied color theory to the gardens to make them particularly beautiful and harmonious. While Jekyll created over 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and the U.S., the project that brought together Jekyll and Lutyens was Munstead Wood, near Godalming. As seen in the photo, the house and garden are close to one another and complement each other. Brick paths and balustrade terraces are softened by herbaceous plants placed in such a way that colors complemented one another and gave the garden a "natural" look.

Munstead Wood

source:http://www.phaidon.com/resource/munstead-1.jpg

The A&C garden not only arose out of competing styles but also a cultural movement towards the decorative and fine arts, which came as a result of the industrial revolution and the mass production of goods that came with it. The desire for originality that started the A&C movement was reflected in the A&C garden because each garden was quite different in design and use of color, but still distinctly an Arts and Crafts garden.