Belgium
(Inge Nijs)
“I travelled a lot in England with my father [Jacques Wirtz, also a
landscape designer] when I was young. Back then, before the Channel tunnel,
exploring England still felt like an adventure. I see your tradition in the
perspective of the whole history of European garden design. Some places that
are not so well known in England, but which I am quite fond of, stretch the
perception of what English design is. I found that some of your older great
gardens – like Montacute, Athelhampton, Parham House – and also prehistoric
sites like Avebury, were fantastic, mind-blowing and also very modern to my
eyes.
“Such places take English garden design far away from the herbaceous
borders, the cottage style, and the fascination with planting schemes.
“Then there is the work of Lutyens – we saw Marsh Court, Folly Farm,
Castle Drogo. I also stayed at Little Thakeham when it was still a hotel.
There, he cuts through his perspective with a pergola – a raised pergola.
This is so bold. So modern. I find it almost more modern than the New
Perennials planting wave… As a boy of 14 I fell in love, I was moonstruck by
Sissinghurst. The tall walls covered with purple and blue clematis. For me
this is all about elevating the human being from the banality of everyday
life into the illusion of a higher state of mind. This is what English
gardens did to me.”
LUCIANO GIUBBILEI
Italy
(MARTIN POPE)
“From a global perspective, British garden design still stands at the
very top of the industry. When I’m speaking at events in Europe or the US, I
know that simply being based in London and making gardens in the UK is
something that draws people.
“I think the British will always be obsessed with the roses and a
romantic idea for their gardens; it comes with their love and connection to
their landscape. The openness and accessibility to the country with the
rights of way and rambling are entrenched in your national psyche – which is
something I have no reference to in Italy, because you’d get shot if you
wandered around like that!
“For centuries the British have been a nation at the vanguard of garden
design and planting. But it now feels like there is a chasm here that hasn’t
yet been bridged between herbaceous borders and roses and romantic gardens,
and how grasses and perennials are used in new ways. Not only in the scale
of the space, but also because the marine climate of Britain does not
provide the roasting summers or crisp winters that gardens of the Low
Countries or the East Coast of the US exploit to such effect.
“I feel that many garden designers are influenced too greatly by the New
Perennials movement and attempt to overlay it as some kind of template onto
spaces for which this approach is not necessarily the best. It becomes
fashionable; everything starts to look more and more the same. Perhaps
having 24/7 access to images from across the world has an effect of limiting
creativity; we no longer have the time and patience to engage with or become
immersed in landscapes, paintings and other things.”
LODEWIJK BALJON
The Netherlands
(Maayke de Ridde)
“I made a short trip to England in early November, so my observation is
influenced by that. At Houghton, Castle Howard and Chatsworth, the greatness
and splendour of British gardens was obvious again. But the walled garden at
Scampston, with its glorious plantings by Piet Oudolf, posed an interesting
question: can historic places be part of the present debate about the future
of gardens and parks? Since gardens and parks (and landscapes for that
matter) work with material that grows and decays, keeping them in good shape
is a design issue. Therefore, historic gardens should be included in the
current debate.
“The quality of Piet’s design is not only fantastic because of his
abundant planting schemes, but also for its new interpretation of the walled
garden.
“If we compare this with infill of the walled gardens at some of the
other grand houses, we see the difference in attitude. There also we have
well-kept gardens, but in a layout and with plantings that suggest that it
is all historic, when in fact the work is mostly relatively recent.
“The new naturalistic aesthetic, of which Piet is a great promoter, will
stay with us for some time, I think. Quite rightly – because it is
colourful, has visual interest and ecological merits.”
ANTONIO PERAZZI
Italy
“I am a great fan of English planting and I do believe that English
gardening represents an art form comparable to poetry, music, painting and
sculpture. On the other hand, I think it is difficult for young English
garden designers to create something that is truly modern.
“The romantic British garden still has its influence: there are several
young Chinese landscape architects who are now making real money designing
so-called modern gardens that look like a pale imitation of some
20th-century masterpiece of English garden design. But the line between
masterpiece and bad taste is very, very thin. Somehow William Robinson’s
natural gardens have had a devastating impact in Britain, destroying the
creativity of generations of garden designers. (It’s similar to what
happened to architects after Le Corbusier.) Of course, this does not mean
that England is without talented garden designers who are under 40 years
old.
“Six years ago, my wife, Benedetta, and I drove by motorcycle from Milano
to Dungeness, just to see Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage.
Amazing. For me, that small garden without any framing is an exquisite form
of modernity. The force of that garden is twofold. First, Jarman’s aesthetic
sense of a self-healing landscape, in which rust becomes a positive and all
the found objects do not simply become older but ripen with age. Second, the
way the extraordinary power of violent nature is understood as a blessing,
not a problem.”
FERNANDO CARUNCHO
Spain
“Obviously I know and admire the work of Dan Pearson, Beth Chatto and Tom
Stuart-Smith – their marvellous knowledge of the textures, mixes and
refinements of plants, the way they fine-tune the leaves, forms, colours and
flowers of plants, all the thousands of possible combinations, making the
gardener a magnificent connoisseur of botany.
“Much has changed in English gardening since Edwardian times and Gertrude
Jekyll. There are some similarities and some differences resulting from this
evolution over time. Both traditional and the newer English gardens remind
me of the millefleur tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn [at the
Cluny Museum, in Paris] and The Hunt of the Unicorn [in New York’s
Cloisters Museum]. In my opinion, this floral language represents a search
for the origins, the splendour and the primal variety of the world.
“Two British gardeners who undoubtedly changed the vision of gardeners
for ever are William Kent and Capability Brown. At Rousham, Kent showed his
admiration for the living landscapes he experienced during the 10 years he
spent on the Grand Tour, inventing landscape design in the process. As for
Brown, he was a genius and his work was immense in every way.
“These two both belong to the iconography of the soul of our
civilisation, and they continue to be a core inspiration in contemporary
British gardens.”
ULF NORDFJELL
Sweden
(Martin Pope)
“My main point is that even if naturalistic planting is a trend, you
should be very happy having the tradition of horticulture that you do,
because I think it’s easier to add ecological principles if you already know
the material well. Most landscapers in other countries do not understand
plants as well as you do in Britain. I thought the Olympic Park was a
brilliant project. It was quite modern but also reflected the historical
British interest of introducing plants from the whole world to British
gardens.
“Are the British obsessed with romantic gardens? Stop worrying! I think
what is really interesting in the UK is the wide range of plants you can
work with. As long as you can encourage young gardeners, new directions will
occur, because some of those gardeners are in the queue to become the
designers of the future. I don’t see anything like the range of interests
among designers in the rest of Europe.
“Of course your heritage can be a burden, but I would not be worried
because there are so many different groups of professionals in the UK –
plants people, university people, lighting architects, water specialists –
who are really interested in gardens. That isn’t the case in many other
countries, I would say.
“I don’t think any other country exports their designers in the way the
UK does.”
READ: British designers on Dutch gardening masters
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