Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement

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

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

A few years ago I went to stay at Little Thakeham in Sussex, an Arts and Crafts house by Edwin Lutyens with a Gertrude Jekyll garden. It is now a hotel. Looking through the leather information folder in my room, 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 helicopter. This was a legacy of the bumptious 1980s, I decided, and laughed at how out of place it seemed in the rarefied Arts and Crafts atmosphere, 'steeped in the vernacular tradition', as the familiar cliche goes.

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

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

This need to cater to interests of a thoroughly modern kind, as well as the cosmopolitan glamour that many gardens of the era exude, are some of the anomalous complexities of the Arts and Crafts movement, complexities that tend to be glossed 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 commercialism and modernity. The problem is, that if one examines Morris's own writings and garden-making on the ground, and how the movement (a look, really) developed through the 1920s and 1930s, such a view quickly becomes unsupportable.

In the preface to her new book, Tankard not only repeats but also reinforces traditional views--that Arts and Crafts was a coherent 'philosophical approach to design' based on the ideas of William Morris (rather than an attitude based on loose precepts); that it was a straightforward and somehow aesthetically 'pure' reaction against, rather than a development of, the decorative predilections of the mid nineteenth century; that all Arts and Crafts designs represented a unity between house and garden (when many Arts and Crafts gardens were in fact bolted on to the house design rather uneasily); that Arts and Crafts gardens represented 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 on an 'intimate scale' (but Thomas Mawson and others loved the grand gesture); and that their later influence on suburbia constitutes a 'rich legacy' (rather than a design vocabulary, derived principally from M.H. Baillie Scott, that emerged 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 true only of the relatively small number of projects completed by the ascetic socialists of the Cotswolds group (Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers), but certainly not of the movement as it developed, and in terms of its wider influence.

This adherence to the idea of Arts and Crafts as a perfectible design creed is my only major cavil with Tankard's otherwise excellent--and beautifully produced--book on the subject. A potential reader's view of the prevailing tone might be judged by a reaction to a statement such as this (from chapter two): 'Today Red House symbolizes the values that Morris honoured most: honesty and beauty'. If one can accept that judgment at face value, then one is indeed on the way to becoming a convert to the church of Arts and Crafts. (When I visited Red House, I was struck less by its 'honesty' than by the way the maids' quarters were so 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 confesses at the outset that she is a fan, writes so well, and the illustrations are so well chosen, that one is soon 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 Red House on hot autumn nights, and where Gimson and the Barnsleys live harmoniously in a kind of commune in Gloucestershire (the marital complications that arose as a result are not mentioned here).

There has been a good deal of work done on Arts and Crafts gardens, notably in David Ottewill's The Edwardian Garden (1989) and Wendy Hitchmough's Arts and Crafts Gardens (1997), and some of the same ground is inevitably covered here, but Tankard's book can be recommended not just because it is the best-illustrated study so far (the wallpaper-print frontispieces to each chapter were an inspired idea) but also because of the clarity and novelty of the scholarship.

The last two chapters, on gardens in America (Tankard teaches at Harvard), contain a great deal of valuable information and new insight, but the author is also illuminating on more well-trodden ground--on lesser-known Cotswold gardens, such as Drakestone and Cotswold Farm; in brisk yet superbly weighted summaries of the garden work of Voysey, Mallows and Clough Williams-Ellis; and with the best description yet of William Robinson's Gravetye Manor (on which she wrote in APOLLO in April).

Although the assumptions about Arts and Crafts that I railed against are so apparent in the opening pages of the book, they come to seem more and more irrelevant in the face of all of this detail and insight. Perhaps a pinch of salt, or even a sherbet lemon wedged in the cheek, is counterweight enough to the view that Arts and Crafts was nothing but sweetness and light.

Tim Richardson's latest book is English Gardens in the Twentieth Century, published earlier this year.

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