'Arts & Craft' Gardens

• Back to the Country Cottage Garden
• Spreading the Word
• The Magnificent Mrs. Jekyll
• A typical 'Arts and Crafts' garden
• The whole town can be a 'garden'

As the nineteenth century wore on, Europe became increasingly industrialised, and ordinary homes were full of factory-made, mass-produced goods. Artists and writers started to react against this, as they thought it made peoples’ lives standardised and soulless; they were nostalgic for the time before machines started to take over. They wanted the objects that surrounded people to be more natural and individual, and they looked to traditional crafts and skills for inspiration. They called this the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement.

Back to the Country Cottage Garden

The same happens in our Garden Story. It now turns away from the Victorian towns, with their strictly laid-out parks and gardens, and back to the countryside. In the villages and hamlets, most people had never bothered with garden ‘fashions’ - they just went on growing a mass of useful and attractive plants, herbs, flowers and vegetables in their cottage gardens as they always had. The informal, unplanned, ‘cottage garden’ look inspired gardeners.

Spreading the Word

This approach spread very quickly through books and magazines by writers such as William Robinson. He started the magazine ‘The Garden’ in 1871, and it was incredibly popular with owners of ordinary little gardens as well as big estates. He encouraged amateur gardeners to try out a more natural way of planting flowers and shrubs.

The Magnificent Mrs. Jekyll

Gertrude Jekyll is perhaps the most famous name of the period, but she didn’t start out as a gardener. At Art College she was introduced to the Arts and Crafts movement, and became skilled in painting, photography and needlecraft. But she had to give up close work when her eyesight deteriorated. Instead she put her creativity into designing and planting gardens. She focused on the form, colour and beauty of the materials that she was working with .She often worked with the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, and they created over 100 gardens together. She wrote dozens of books and thousands of articles for ‘Country Life’ and ‘The Garden’. She raised and sold many of her recommended plants in her own garden at Munstead Wood.

A typical ‘Arts and Crafts’ garden:

• is formal in its layout, but cottage style in the use of plants
• uses strong architectural elements such as pergolas, summer houses and water channels
• sees the garden as a series of compartments or outdoor rooms with hedges of yew or beech planted as exterior walls
• often has entrance points denoted by hedges clipped into imaginative shapes.
• uses a mixture of rustic (rough) and dressed (shaped) stone for walls and arches
• uses a mixture of building styles, but with a strong classical Italian influence
• makes use of clumps and falls of billowing plants to soften hard edges.

The whole town can be a ‘garden’

Thomas Mawson promoted this approach, particularly in The Art and Craft of Garden Making which was very popular. But he realised that whole towns, not just gardens, needed proportion, balance and variety in shape, colour and texture, to give people a sense of well-being. So he designed new public parks and pedestrian boulevards. Towns competed with each other for the most impressive buildings and civic spaces that gave a sense of pride to the community. ‘Garden cities’ were another idea that grew from this movement, and new towns were based on the same ideas.

Hover over the thumbnail images to reveal an enlarged image.

Thornton Manor, Wirral 1893:

Home of William Lever (Lord Leverhulme, who created Port Sunlight). Thomas Mawson designed spacious gardens ‘for promenading’. The formal layout is softened by plants.

Thornton Hough, Wirral 1889:

A new ‘model’ (ideal) village for Lever Bros Soap Factory workers, built around a village green, with cricket pitch, churches, a school and ‘mock Tudor’ buildings.

Heathcote, W Yorks

A collaboration between Jekyll and Lutyens which is very architectural in its composition near the house, but becomes more informal further from the house. Note the form and use of stone and water.

'Garden Cities of Tomorrow'

Ebenezer Howard wrote ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’ in 1902 to counter the uncontrolled, sprawling city-growth that he saw happening everywhere. This is the start of the ‘Green belt’ idea.

Green belts

This diagram, showing cities and smaller towns each surrounded by ‘green belts’ of countryside, was the main planning strategy for the new towns. Today many green belts are under threat from modern development.

Garden Examples

Hestercombe Gardens  Hestercombe Gardens Part 2