William Robinson (gardener)

Robinson began his garden work at an early age, as a garden boy for the Marquess of Waterford at Curraghmore, County Waterford.[5] From there, he went to the estate of an Irish baronet in Ballykilcavan, County Laois, Sir Hunt Johnson-Walsh,[6] and was put in charge of a large number of greenhouses at the age of 21. According to one account, as the result of a bitter quarrel, one cold winter night in 1861 he let the fires go out, killing many valuable plants. Other accounts consider the story to be a gross exaggeration.[7] Whether in haste after the greenhouse incident or not, Robinson left for Dublin in 1861, where the influence of David Moore, head of the botanical garden at Glasnevin, a family friend, helped him find work at the Botanical Gardens of Regent's Park, London, where he was given responsibility for the hardy herbaceous plants, specialising in British wildflowers.[8]

At that time, the Royal Horticultural Society's Kensington gardens were being designed and planted with vast numbers of greenhouse flowers in mass plantings. Robinson wrote that "it was not easy to get away from all this false and hideous "art"." But his work with native British plants did allow him to get away to the countryside, where he "began to get an idea (which should be taught to every boy at school) that there was (for gardens even) much beauty in our native flowers and trees."[9]

Robinson was a vegetarian but did not impose it on others.[10]

Writing

"Colonies of Poet's Narcissus and Broad Leaved Saxifrage" from The Wild Garden, illustration by Alfred Parsons.

In 1866, at the age of 29, he became a fellow of the Linnean Society under the sponsorship of Charles Darwin, James Veitch, David Moore, and seven other distinguished botanists and horticulturists. Two months later, he left Regents Park to write for The Gardener's Chronicle and The Times, and represented the leading horticultural firm of Veitch at the 1867 Paris Exhibition.[11] He began writing many of his publications, beginning with Gleanings from French Gardens in 1868, The Parks, Gardens, and Promenades of Paris in 1869, and Alpine Flowers for Gardens, Mushroom Culture, and The Wild Garden in 1870. In 1871 he launched his own gardening journal, simply named The Garden, which over the years included contributions from notables such as John Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Gertrude Jekyll, William Morris, Dean Hole, Frank Miles, Canon Ellacombe, and James Britten.[12] The Garden: An Illustrated Weekly Journal of Horticulture in All Its Branches was published from 1872 to 1927.[13]

His most influential books were The Wild Garden (1870), which made his reputation and allowed him to start his magazine, and The English Flower Garden (1883), which he revised in edition after edition and included contributions from his long-time friend Gertrude Jekyll, among others. She later edited The Garden for a couple of years and contributed many articles to his publications, which also included Gardening Illustrated (from 1879).

He first met Jekyll in 1875—they were in accord in their design principles and maintained a close friendship and professional association for over 50 years. He helped her on her garden at Munstead Wood; she provided plants for his garden at Gravetye Manor. Jekyll wrote about Robinson that:

...when English gardening was mostly represented by the innate futilities of the "bedding" system, with its wearisome repetitions and garish colouring, Mr William Robinson chose as his work in life to make better known the treasures that were lying neglected, and at the same time to overthrow the feeble follies of the "bedding" system. It is mainly owing to his unremitting labours that a clear knowledge of the world of hardy-plant beauty is now placed within easy reach of all who care to acquire it, and that the "bedding mania" is virtually dead.[14]

Robinson also published God's Acre Beautiful or The Cemeteries of The Future, in which he applied his gardening aesthetic to urban churchyards and cemeteries. His campaign included trying to win an unwilling public to the advantages of cremation over burial, and he quite freely shared unsavoury stories of what happened in certain crowded graveyards.[15] He was instrumental in the founding of Golders Green Crematorium and designed the gardens there, which replaced the traditional Victorian mourning graveyard with open lawn, flowerbeds, and woodland gardens.[16]

Gravetye Manor

"The Wild Garden: view in Moat Mead, Gravetye Manor, with Poet's Narcissus in bloom in early summer 1891, planted five years" from The English Flower Garden, sketch by W. E. Norton.

With his writing career a financial success, in 1884 Robinson was able to purchase the Elizabethan Gravetye Manor near East Grinstead in Sussex, along with about 200 acres (0.81 km²) of rich pasture and woodland. His diary of planting and care was published as Gravetye Manor, or Twenty Years of the Work round an old Manor House (1911).[17] Gravetye would find practical fulfilment of many of Robinson's ideas of a more natural style of gardening. Eventually it would grow to nearly 1,000 acres (4 km²).[18]

Much of the estate had been managed as a coppiced woodland, giving Robinson the opportunity to plant drifts of scilla, cyclamen, and narcissus between the coppiced hazels and chestnuts. On the edges, and in the cleared spaces in the woods, Robinson established plantings of Japanese anemone, lily, acanthus, and pampas grass, along with shrubs such as fothergilla, stewartia, and nyssa. Closer to the house he had some flower beds; throughout he planted red valerian, which he allowed to spread naturally around paving and staircases.[19] Robinson planted thousands of daffodils annually, including 100,000 narcissi planted along one of the lakes in 1897. Over the years he added hundreds of trees, some of them from American friends Charles Sprague Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted. Other features included an oval-shaped walled kitchen garden, a heather garden, and a water garden with one of the largest collections of water lilies in Europe.[20]

Robinson invited several well-known painters to portray his own landscape artistry, including the English watercolourist Beatrice Parsons, the landscape and botanical painter Henry Moon, and Alfred Parsons. Moon and Parsons illustrated many of Robinson's works.[21]

After Robinson's death, Gravetye Manor was left to the Forestry Commission, who left it derelict for many years. In 1958 it was leased to a restaurateur who refurbished the gardens, replacing some of the flower beds with lawn.[22] Today, Gravetye Manor serves as a hotel and restaurant.[23]

"Edge Hall, Malpas, Cheshire. Lawn garden with hardy flowers in beds and groups" from The English Flower Garden, engraving from a photograph.

In The Wild Garden[25][26][27] Robinson set forth fresh gardening principles that expanded the idea of garden and introduced themes and techniques that are taken for granted today, notably that of "naturalised" plantings. Robinson's audience were not the owners of intensely gardened suburban plots, nor dwellers in gentrified country cottages seeking a nostalgic atmosphere; nor was Robinson concerned with the immediate surroundings of the English country house.[28] Robinson's wild garden brought the untidy edges, where garden blended into the larger landscape into the garden picture: meadow, water's edge, woodland edges and openings.

The hardy plants Robinson endorsed were not all natives by any means: two chapters are devoted to the hardy plants from other temperate climate zones that were appropriate to naturalising schemes. The narcissus he preferred were the small, delicate ones from the Iberian peninsula. Meadowflowers included goldenrod and asters, rampant spreaders from North America long familiar in English gardens. Nor did Robinson's 'wild' approach refer to letting gardens return to their natural state—he taught a specific gardening method and aesthetic. The nature of plants' habit of growth and their cultural preferences[29] dictated the free design, in which human intervention was to be kept undetectable.

Without being in any sense retrograde, Robinson's book brought attention back to the plants, which had been eclipsed since the decline of "gardenesque" plantings of the 1820s and 30s, during the use of tender annuals as massed colour in patterned schemes of the mid-century. The book's popularity was largely due to Robinson's promise that wild gardening could be easy and beautiful; that the use of hardy perennials would be less expensive and offer more variety than the frequent mass planting of greenhouse annuals; and that it followed nature, which he considered the source of all true design.[30]

In The English Flower Garden, Robinson laid down the principles that revolutionised the art of gardening. Robinson's source of inspiration was the simple cottage garden, long neglected by the fashionable landscapists. In The English Flower Garden he rejected the artificial and the formal, specifically statuary, topiary, carpet bedding, and waterworks—comparing the modern garden to "the lifeless formality of wall-paper or carpet." The straight lines and form in many gardens were seen by Robinson to "carry the dead lines of the builder into the garden."[31] He admired nature's diversity, and promoted creepers and ramblers, smaller plantings of roses, herbaceous plants and bulbs, woodland plants, and winter flowers.

Robinson compared gardening to art, and wrote in the first chapter:

The gardener must follow the true artist, however modestly, in his respect for things as they are, in delight in natural form and beauty of flower and tree, if we are to be free from barren geometry, and if our gardens are ever to be true pictures....And as the artist's work is to see for us and preserve in pictures some of the beauty of landscape, tree, or flower, so the gardener's should be to keep for us as far as may be, in the fulness of their natural beauty, the living things themselves.[32]

The first part of The English Flower Garden covered garden design, emphasising an approach that was individual and not stereotypical: "the best kind of garden grows out of the situation, as the primrose grows out of a cool bank."[33] The second part covered individual plants, hardy and half-hardy, showing artistic and natural use of each plant—with several articles included from The Garden and chapters contributed by leading gardeners of the day, including Gertrude Jekyll, who contributed the chapter on "Colour in the Flower Garden"[33]

This book was first published in 1883, with the last edition published in 1933. During Robinson's lifetime, the book found increasing popularity, with fifteen editions during his life. For fifty years, The English Flower Garden was considered a bible by many gardeners.[34]

• Garden hotels

• Bisgrove, Richard (2008). William Robinson: The Wild Gardener. frances lincoln ltd. ISBN 978-0-7112-2542-8.
• Clayton, Virginia Tuttle (2000). The Once and Future Gardener. David R. Godine. ISBN 978-1-56792-102-1.
• Davies, Douglas James; Lewis H. Mates (2005). Encyclopedia of cremation. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. pp. 221–223. ISBN 978-0-7546-3773-8.
• Duthie, Ruth E. (1974). "Some Notes on William Robinson". Garden History. The Garden History Society. 2, Number 3 (Summer, 1974): 12–21. doi:10.2307/1586538. JSTOR 1586538.
• Massingham, Betty. "William Robinson: A Portrait". Garden History. The Garden History Society. 6, Number 1 (Spring, 1968): 61–85.
• Quest-Ritson, Charles (2003). The English Garden: A Social History. Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0-14-029502-3.
• Robinson, William (1895). The English Flower Garden: Design, Arrangement, and Plans (4th ed.). John Murray, Albemarle Street.
• Stuart, David (2004). Classic Garden Plans. Timber Press. ISBN 978-0-88192-643-9.
• Tankard, Judith B. (April 2005). "Gravetye Manor: home of the Robinsonian garden". Apollo.
• Wolschke-Bulmahn, Joachim (1997). Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century. Dumbarton Oaks. ISBN 0-88402-246-3.

By William Robinson

• Gleanings from French gardens (2nd ed.). London: F. Warne and co. 1869.
• The parks, promenades, & gardens of Paris (1st ed.). London, J. Murray. 1869.
• The Wild Garden (extended edition) (1st ed.). Timber Press. 2010 [1870]. ISBN 978-0-88192-955-3. Archived from the original on 14 August 2011. Retrieved 12 July 2011. (with Rick Darke)
• The subtropical garden, or, Beauty of form in the flower garden (1st ed.). London : J. Murray. 1871.
• The parks and gardens of Paris (2nd ed.). London: MacMillan. 1878.
• God's acre beautiful; or, The cemeteries of the future (3rd ed.). John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1883. ISBN 978-1-4368-6001-7.,
• The English Flower Garden: Design, Arrangement, and Plans (4th ed.). John Murray, Albemarle Street. 1895. ISBN 978-0-7475-3833-2.
• Alpine flowers for gardens : rock, wall, marsh plants, and mountain shrubs (3rd ed.). London, J. Murray. 1903.
• The garden beautiful; home woods and home landscape (1st ed.). London, J. Murray. 1907.
• Nelson, Charles (2010). William Robinson, The Wild Garden – a new illustrated edition with photographs & notes. Collins Press. ISBN 978-1-84889-035-0.

About William Robinson

• Bisgrove, Richard (2008). William Robinson, The Wild Gardener (1st ed.). Frances Lincoln. ISBN 978-0-7112-2542-8.
• Tankard, Judith B. (2018). Gardens of the Arts & Craft Movement (Hardback). Portland, Oregon: Timber Press. ISBN 978-1-604698-20-6.

• History of Horticulture website: William Robinson
• "Archival material relating to William Robinson". UK National Archives.
• Gravetye Manor – official website
• Works by William Robinson at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about William Robinson at Internet Archive
• Works relating to William Robinson and Gravetye Manor on the Royal Horticultural Society's Digital Collections website