The Alexander Craig House garden at Colonial Williamsburg.
(Sangjib Min / Daily Press / January 5, 2006)

WILLIAMSBURG — Just 18 days after forming Colonial Williamsburg Inc. and the Williamsburg Holding Corporation on Feb. 27, 1928, preservation pioneer W.A.R Goodwin made one of his most important hires.

Over the following 13 years, landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff would not only help define the look and feel of the emerging Historic Area but also make Colonial Revival garden design a nationally influential force in shaping the 20th-century American landscape aesthetic.

“From the very beginning, Williamsburg’s restorers appreciated the importance of reconstructing the gardens and greens as well as the houses and shops,” write M. Kent Brinkley and Gordon W. Chappell in “The Gardens of Colonial Williamsburg.”

Arthur Shurcliff was the original and principal architect behind the Colonial Revival gardens that helped make Colonial Williamsburg’s landscape design world-famous.
(Lombardi; Barbara Temple / February 4, 2009)

And the “clear, simple, direct, energetic and, personally, very charming” Shurcliff — as he was described by his colleague and lead restoration architect William Graves Perry — served not only as the original and principal architect of the Historic Area’s world-renowned landscape but also — as Brinkley and Chappell note — “a pivotal figure in the development of the discipline of landscape architecture in America.”

Educated in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in art history, design and horticulture at Harvard University, Shurcliff began his career in 1896 working in the famed Brookline, Mass. office of Frederick Law Olmsted — the father of landscape architecture in America.

In 1904, he set up his own practice in Boston, where he drew national attention for his work on the layout of Old Sturbridge Village and the Charles River Esplanade in Boston, among many other projects. He also was influential in the early development of the American Society of Landscape Architects, where he served two terms as president (1928–1932).

Shurcliff had more than 30 years experience, in fact, when he began developing designs for Colonial Williamsburg on March 17, 1928, and he was well known for an academic style marked by its fondness for symmetry and geometric features.

But long before such distinctive elements began to show up in the Historic Area, he conducted an intensive investigation of nearly 40 surviving colonial-era gardens in the Virginia Tidewater, measuring and photographing plans that reflected the period’s conservative fondness for the formal Anglo-Dutch tradition born nearly a century earlier.

He also made an exhaustive study of the detailed garden maps and sketches left by French cartographer Claude Joseph Sauthier in 1769 after studying towns in northeastern North Carolina.

Shurcliff traveled to historic Charleston, South Carolina, too, in addition to exploring surviving period gardens in England. He then combined these critical sources with the physical evidence being unearthed by Colonial Williamsburg archaeologists as they explored the Historic Area.

With gardens and open green spaces making up nearly 30 percent of this 300-acre expanse, the impact of Shurcliff’s synthesis was felt almost immediately in a design vocabulary characterized by brickbat, marl and oyster-shell paving; evergreen and flower plantings; and symmetrical geometric patterns laid out in fence-enclosed spaces.

So great was the influence of the resulting gardens that Colonial Williamsburg has been cited as one of the Top Ten gardening sites in the world, Brinkley and Chappell note.

Though some critics later complained that Shurcliff’s designs did not reflect the colonial era as accurately as originally believed, they still rank among the most influential and widely recognized examples of the American Colonial Revival style that grew out of Colonial Williamsburg’s efforts.

In 2006, five of the Historic Area’s most scenic formal gardens — including those at the Orlando Jones House  and the Custis Tenement — were endowed by donors to insure the preservation of Shurcliff’s legacy.

“(He) has by extensive investigation and rare imagination recaptured the form and beauty of the colonial gardens,” Godwin wrote, “and created vistas of loveliness to intrigue the thought and vision of visitors to recapture a vanished past.”

— Mark St. John Erickson

Pioneering landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff designed the renowned Orlando Jones House garden in 1939.
(Courtesy of Colonial Williamsburg / April 23, 2004)

Kent was a virtuoso designer of interiors and, as the exhibition shows, able
to turn his hand to anything from dog kennels to state barges to pier
glasses to silverware to uniforms. As a “total designer”, perhaps the
nearest equivalent to Kent today is not any garden designer but a figure
like Thomas Heatherwick, the architect-designer who cheerfully turns his
attention to a wide range of design challenges, from his signature bridges
to furniture, buildings, graphics – and not forgetting the Olympic torch.

But range is not everything; Kent’s abilities as a painter were limited and
most experts agree that his legacy as a furniture designer is founded on his
appropriation of styles encountered in Italy (all that gilding!). It could
be argued (see 4, below) that Kent’s interior work was, in effect, a
training area for the greater wonders he was able to work outdoors. Kent’s
training as a painter helped, of course, but this underestimates the impact
of literature on landscape gardening, and also in Kent’s case the importance
of spatial felicities. He was a master at manipulating outdoor space to
create intense and distinctive garden episodes, as well as an underlying
rhythm that links them together. One has a strong sense of this at Rousham,
his greatest surviving work.

Here are four reasons why William Kent might be considered first as a great
landscape designer:

_{Portrait of William Kent}

1 In the 1730s and ’40s, Kent perfected the English landscape garden
with boldness and imagination, developing the work begun by designer Charles
Bridgeman, poet Alexander Pope and others. Rousham is his surviving
masterpiece, and perhaps the greatest and best-preserved garden of the era
(it is still in the hands of the same family, and open every day of the
year). The 18th-century aesthete Horace Walpole stated that Kent was
“painter enough to taste the charms of landscape… He leapt the fence, and
saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and
valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the
gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an
easy eminence with happy ornament.”

These are innovations generally ascribed to Capability Brown, but Kent was
able to call in distant prospects or conversely to create intense episodic
atmospheres as his will dictated. Kent was the first true artist of the
landscape garden, which was itself England’s greatest contribution to the
visual arts.

_{A William Kent sketch for the Chinoiserie garden temple}

2 Kent was a consummate professional, who rose from humble origins in
time-honoured British fashion. A lad from Bridlington in Yorkshire, he
started as an apprentice coach-painter, was talent-spotted in London by
painter William Talman and then catapulted over to Italy in 1709 for a
decade in company with a wide range of so-called “milordi”: young gents off
on the Grand Tour of Europe. With little money and less social standing,
Kent’s role in Rome developed as a kind of artistic adviser, “teacheroni”
and procurer of objets d’art. He flourished as a result of his manifest
talents and friendly, pragmatic nature. Unaffiliated politically, he got
along well with a wide range of patrons of all political persuasions – in a
fractious period – including the snootiest and most intellectually demanding
of them all: Lord Burlington of Chiswick House. He also worked for the royal
family, notably for Queen Caroline at Richmond, for whom he designed a suite
of notoriously avant-garde buildings including a hermitage and “Merlin’s
Cave”.

3 Kent was bold and brave enough to design the most explicitly
political landscape ever conceived: the Elysian Fields at Stowe. In the
1730s and ’40s, landowners habitually expressed their political and dynastic
affiliations through the ornamentation of their estates. Lord Cobham of
Stowe was sacked from the Whig power base by prime minister Robert Walpole
when he publicly attacked his plans for an Excise Bill, which would
introduce new taxes on freeborn Englishmen. Cobham was so enraged by his
treatment that with Kent’s help (and Alexander Pope’s) he turned the heart
of his landscape garden into a searing critique of what he viewed as the
debased, nepotistic and corrupt Whig government. The Temple of British
Worthies is a curved wall adorned with statue busts of “true Whig” heroes
such as John Locke, Isaac Newton, King Alfred and John Hampden, while the
Temple of Ancient Virtue facing it is a perfect temple peopled by heroes of
the classical past. Adjacent to this he built the sarcastically named Temple
of Modern Virtue: a ruin presided over by a statue that was identifiable as
Walpole himself.

_{The Temple of British Worthies at Stowe (ALAMY)}

4 Kent deployed many of the design ideas he honed in house interiors to
greater effect outdoors. A key Kentian principle is “stacking” elements of
ornamentation one on top of the other – the way chairs, sofas or beds lead
on and up to gilded mirrors and picture frames, to doorcases, ceiling
paintings and chandeliers. (Kent inherited the habit of drawing “elevations”
of his furniture designs from his first master, Talman.) He used this idea
of verticality in his exterior design, too, so that at Rousham, for example,
one has a sense that statues, lawns, groves of trees, buildings, seats and
more distant elements are piled one on top of the other, with the view
foreshortened. In the same way he used the interior idea of the enfilade – a
succession of connecting rooms – in garden spaces, creating visual links
horizontally between them while also manipulating the visitor’s sense of
rhythm. In these and other ways, Kent brought a new level of sophistication to
landscape design.

*Designing Georgian Britain, March 22-July 13, Victoria Albert Museum,
London SW7 (020 7942 2000; vam.ac.uk)

ARLINGTON — Those who missed the debut of the new Arlington gardening group on Feb. 22 will have another chance to catch up with the club on Saturday, March 22, from 10 a.m. to noon in the Stillaguamish Conference Room of the Arlington Utility Office Building, located at 154 Cox Ave.

“We’re meeting monthly, and we aim to benefit those who may not be available on weekdays, but can meet on Saturdays,” said Master Gardener Bea Randall, who has access to free materials and low-cost handouts from the Snohomish County Master Gardener Foundation, in addition to her knowledge about gardening in the Pacific Northwest. “Our first four meetings will serve as opportunities for folks who would like to know more about the art of gardening to ask questions about the upcoming planting season.”

Randall herself will be leading the next session. While the Feb. 22 program focused on landscaping your yard, with an eye toward incorporating local plants, Randall’s class on March 22 will cover various aspects of sustainable garden design.

“We’ll offer tips, tricks and hints on saving money, all while getting the same results and making gardening easier,” Randall said. “The general public is welcome to attend this meeting, whether they’re just looking for a one-time information-gathering deal, or are maybe interested in eventually joining the club.”

The cost of admission is $4 for the first meeting attended, and $1 for each meeting thereafter, with all the money going to the group’s future treasury, when it officially becomes a club.

“Even though I’ll be leading the discussion and I’m a Master Gardener, I’d encourage participants to bring their own tips for easier gardening, that they could share with the rest of the class,” Randall said.

The next scheduled Saturday meetings of the Arlington gardening group after March 22 will address natural lawn care on April 26, and cool bugs and surface water management on May 24. These meetings will also run from 10 a.m. to noon in the Stillaguamish Conference Room.

For more information, contact Randall by phone at 360-435-3892, or via email at kinzu@aol.com.