Publications

The Garden
January 2004

RHS Bicentenary debate
This house believes...

Is there an inevitable conflict between designer and plantsman in garden making? Are great gardens all about design or the plants they contain, or are both of equal importance? Sarah Higgens canvasses opinion ahead of the Society’s Bicentenary debate on the subject

Birthdays are occasions to celebrate but they also prompt reflection, allowing a moment to take stock and ask questions. What better time than now, as the RHS reaches its 200th birthday, to think about why we make gardens, what an ideal garden is now, and what gardens will become in the future. Of course, there is no simple answer to any of these questions and different people will have contradictory views. Controversy, though, need not be feared. It is sign of how passionate people feel about gardening.

The RHS will be airing some of these strong opinions on 14 January during a public debate, the opening event in its programme of Bicentenary festivities. Opposing panels of gardening experts will put forward their vision of the gardens of tomorrow. They are ready to predict what will most strongly influence the style and content of gardens during the 21st century. No scenario will be out of bounds, for even the most far-fetched idea can bring into the open our underlying responses and expectations.

Could there one day be a backlash against exotic plants, even perhaps legislation banning their use in gardens? Would this stifle artistic expression or would it simply be a new impetus for the imagination? Our responses to such questions are unavoidably connected to what we think about the gardens of today. For some people design is essential, while for others gardens are places to grow plants. This divide has a long history and continues to provoke reactions.

Such breadth of opinion is represented here by 15 prominent horticulturists, including the six panellists who will speak at the RHS debate. They have been invited to explain whether they think horticulture or design is more important to the essence of a garden, and name the garden that best illustrates their point of view. Among these statements you might recognise your own position and find others to disagree with - in which case you are probably in just the right frame of mind for the debate. Come along to this special event (or watch it on the internet) and help get the RHS Bicentenary off to a cracking start.

Sarah Higgens is a freelance garden writer

Ursula Buchan (garden writer)

Plants or design? This is a false dichotomy, of course, since no garden worthy of the name can exist without plants, while few, if any, contain absolutely no element of conscious or subconscious design. Certain ‘designed’ elements are needed. For example, paths will be laid which lead somewhere, walls will be built to retain soil, and hedges will be planted to shelter people and plants. If these are completely random and unthought-out, they will fail to solve practical problems.

All that said, everyone knows gardens where the cultivation of plants, and the placing of them where they will be most happy, are paramount considerations, coming higher up the scale of priorities than how the garden looks as a whole. And we also know gardens where a very limited range of plants is grown, for their overall look rather than individual merits.

For myself, I do not believe that, however coherent and imaginative the design of a garden is, it will ever be a satisfactory prospect for the onlooker unless time and care is given to the cultivation of the plants. Sissinghurst Castle Garden is obviously carefully designed, but it’s the planting and great maintenance that gives it so much more impact.

Nigel Colborn (writer and broadcaster)

Gardens, unlike indoor rooms, sculptures or paintings, are dynamic. They are a life form developed as a result of human handiwork co-operating with nature. Nature provides growth and seasonal change, but nature can also play tricks, undoing the gardener's best-laid plans here, enhancing his ideas there; covering his inadequacies in some instances, but laying weaknesses bare in others. Therein lies the joy of gardening.

It is possible to design an outdoor space without plants - Japanese Zen gardens for example - but it is difficult to classify such spaces as true, living gardens. Good structure and pleasing design are essential, but it is plants that bring life, dynamism and change, to an otherwise cold, static construction. Helen Dillon’s garden for me is an ideal combination of planting and design.

I think any landscape has to be inspired by nature. I have no time for gardens of ‘interior decoration’. Aspiring garden designers should abandon their drawing boards and just stare at real landscapes. Let them study fenland, moors, saltmarshes, river banks, even ex-industrial sites and old railway lines. Then, when they've spent a couple more years learning about plants, one or two may be ready to take garden design into the 21st century.

Therese Lang (Organiser, Westonbirt Festival of Gardens)

Design and plants are of equal importance but design leads the whole thing, how you place your plants or use structure in another form. We said when we launched the Westonbirt Festival that structure and form share equal billing with plants, but excellence of design is what gets you into the festival.

The problem with the Chelsea-type show garden, even those combining old and new brilliantly like Tom Stuart Smith’s ‘Homage to le Notre’ is that it’s theatre, it’s not real. It’s beautiful and inspiring but you can’t ever have it. Design always has to move on but ideas about gardens have been static for a long time. It’s time for a new approach because how people are using outdoor spaces is changing and gardens are getting smaller. In a small outside space there’s no possibility of herbaceous borders; you simply can’t have a lot of plants. There are no rules any more; traditional gardens are fine, but it’s time for something new and unashamedly contemporary. There’s room for both. For me, one of the joys of gardening is to nurture something, but I’m also keen on sculpture in gardens, traditional planting combined with modern art.

Chris Young (Editor, Garden Design Journal)

My immediate answer is design, a response on an emotional level. When a design works, when a garden really feels right, you know you are in a place that somehow has an extra dimension. Defining ‘works’ is the hard part: knowing that it feels right, that the elements relate, is the easy, instinctive part.

This does not mean that plants are superfluous. In most cases gardens need plants to help the design come to life, but they should be an element of garden design, just as hard materials, soil, water, light, air, and human interference are.

The primary reason why design is more important than plants is that a garden doesn’t need plants to succeed - yet a collection of plants by no means makes a designed space. The gardens that are most popular (such as Sissinghurst, Hidcote, Alnwick, Wisley) are the ones conceived as a study of design.

The most fundamental aspect of any garden is that of space. The space between different elements, whether a site is small or large, the way different areas relate is what is important. Spaces are essential for creating emotion, views and experiences, including the relationship between plants and other elements as at the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden.

John Watkins (Head of Gardens and Landscape, English Heritage)

If you look at garden history, you can see there’s a curve going up and down depending on who’s in fashion, the artist or the horticulturist. In one decade one gets the upper hand, then it’s the turn of the other. But really they depend on each other. A garden is where art and nature are brought together by horticulture and garden design.

For example, plant collections laid out in a formal way may be interesting, but don’t move you emotionally. If you go and see a collection arranged in a setting that creates an attractive, moving whole, the two come together. The design works and plants look their best.

Gardeners and designers rely on each other, although they can be combined in one person. Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd and Rosemary Verey have created places for plants, bringing the two together.

Problems come when inexperienced designers are unfamiliar with the materials they are using. You wouldn’t accept an architect who didn’t know about building materials, yet we accept designers who don’t know much about plants. That’s not to say that a good garden has to be crammed with plants: in the English Heritage design competitions often the simplest designs work the best.

Peter Seabrook (writer and broadcaster)

Gardens are grown, not designed. Designers can initially stamp their mark on the landscape - like branding cattle - but in time nature takes over again and one way or another covers the original artistic control. The Lost Gardens of Heligan are a perfect example of this.

Gardens change continually in the waxing and waning of the days and the seasons, and as plants grow from seed to flowering and then seed again. It is the horticulturist who controls the speed of growth, the size and colour of foliage and flowers.

Horticultural crafts, gardening skills and plant availability will always determine the true nature of gardens at the expense of artistic expression, but the future looks bleak without the retention of good gardens and a well-trained horticultural workforce. Recently we have seen the loss of huge areas of suburban soil to so-called artistic expression where hard landscaping runs riot. Suburban front gardens are disappearing under concrete and stone, the demands of multiple-car ownership making things worse.

It is a love of plants and the knowledge to grow them well that will sustain gardens in the future.

Jill Billington (garden designer)

Garden design embraces a vast spectrum. Any decisions on plant selection and placing involve an element of design. Collections of enthusiasms, sets of ordered beds, nurtured reminders of people and places, all require decisions about what to plant exactly where.

For some gardeners this is quite enough but many recognise a need for more, particularly some sense of overall coherence. The spirit of a garden should reflect the time, the place, and the needs and desires of its owner. Above all, fine gardens have elegantly judged spaces and masses that foster their individual character. The space may be large or small but the many parts, involving hard materials, special features and water as well as plants, should pull together to make it a distinctive place with a memorable atmosphere.

Such integrity is seen in two wonderful gardens, both in Cumbria where I grew up. Each has a unique spirit, one being the fantasy of Levens Hall where the flat site is formally planted with huge 18th-century topiary, now quite abstract, surrounded by a superb wealth of planting. The other is Stagshaw, where the wooded, rocky fellside is celebrated by ‘natural-looking’ planting, where native plants merge with exotics.

James Hitchmough (Associate Professor of Landscape, University of Sheffield)

I’m one of those people who’s equally interested in plants, design and cultivation. The debate is a nonsense in one way because it’s obvious you need to understand all three elements to make an interesting garden. It’s a melding, not a competition.

If you’re talking about garden-making, it’s hard to give primacy to any one discipline. However, looking at horticulture in the 20th century and now, there are clearly limits to what we can do by knowing more about cultivation. In the way that we use plants in a horticultural sense, we have run out of things to do. Good design continually offers opportunities to try out new ideas.

In the future we might ask more ecological questions. If you know about a plant’s ecology you can use it well and in a way that’s likely to be more sustainable. This will lead us away from sorting plants by flower colour towards the sort of ‘community first’ approach used in the Garden House, Devon.

The Victorians profoundly influenced the ‘we can do it, we’ve got the technology’ approach. This technocentric view doesn’t give us the best values long term, which is where design comes in. It makes you ask questions about context.

Tom Stuart-Smith (garden designer)

This question would only be asked in this country where we are so obsessed by plants that sometimes we cannot see over the leaf to the space beyond. The Barcelona pavilion designed by Mies Van der Rohe for the 1929 international exposition has no plants at all in its terraces, yet it could be said to be a seamless mix of building and garden.

At the other end of the historical spectrum, Rousham Park , undoubtedly one of the great masterpieces of British garden making, is almost devoid of exotic plants. A garden that comprises just a series of delectable plant associations without a coherent spatial strategy will always be ultimately unsatisfying, like a meal with too much monosodium glutamate.

On the other hand it is perfectly possible to create a garden masterpiece using just one species of plant or none at all. Sir Frederick Gibberd said that the true quality of a garden is best judged at the end of February when the froth has gone and the bones are left. As a passionate plantsman I think this is a little mean, but it properly stresses the importance of design in all the great gardens of the past. In that respect the gardens of the future will be no different.

Charles Jencks (architect and author)

I think the short answer is that design in the first instance is necessary, at least for a large garden. I lay out the bones and then fill in the spaces with plants. But there isn’t one right way. The design is led by an idea and the garden is plan-driven as it was with gardens of the Italian renaissance. The 16th-century Villa Lante in Italy had a concerto, a concept behind it. The idea behind a garden design can be anything; it needn’t be abstract.

In my DNA garden I have laid out a series of six cells and in each there is a different kind of idea. The planting is subordinate to the design but completes it and fills it out. Each part of the cell is symbolised by planting. I worked it out and drew it in detail, and planted it in detail. But a lot of plants died. Design first, plant second then, if they die, plant third. A garden isn’t completed without plants, but as even Darwin said: ‘When I experiment with nature it doesn’t do what I want it to do’.

Ignorance is the first thing you need before you can create a great garden. You need to be ignorant of thinking there’s a right way to do it. If you think you know the answers you won’t discover what you need to, but merely reproduce or replicate what has gone before.

David Jones (plantsman and former Director of Parks, London)

Nowadays the coupling of the words ‘garden’ and ‘design’ fills me with unease. Visions of itsy-bitsy trellis work, patios, decking, the white garden, the stage set. Today’s designs fill the space as if it was a supermarket trolley, but two years into reality are often a sad reflection of a squanderer’s whims.

‘Garden design’ says ‘I’ve closed the gate to free expression’. It has created an inward-looking face to gardening and horticulture in general - art for art’s sake.

My favourite gardens are those which have evolved; wonderful, simple, country gardens where paths lead somewhere, where plants grow to their full potential, chosen not to conform with the design but for their form, structure, elegance and decorative effect.
The great gardens of the past such as Stowe and Stourhead were created with a view to the future and evolved over many years. Today plants are shoehorned into the design, there to live out their miserable existence to please fashion and the whims of the consumers and designers.

Among garden designers there seems to be a lamentable lack of plant knowledge. There is a danger that the gardens of tomorrow will reflect badly on designs today.

Geoffrey Smith (writer and broadcaster)

Though we can exercise little control over what happens in the broader landscape around us, inside the garden’s boundaries our authority is near-absolute. No matter how limited the space, we can give free rein to our creative, artistic skill and practical handicraft.

Plants and design are of equal value. The essential character of any plant gains full expression only when placed in a proper context; thus the sculpted splendour of Cedrus libani is best viewed across a broad sweep of lawn, and Saxifraga oppositifolia, growing out of a crevice in a rock garden has a quality lost when it is confined to an alpine house.

There is one element in a particular garden that expresses my point of view precisely, and that was the long view from the wrought iron gates which once formed the entrance to Harlow Carr gardens . A broad stretch of lawn flanked on either side by borders of equal width filled with trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. The gates are now locked, for the entrance has been moved, reducing this main axis to a non-functional appendage. No matter, for I agree with Sir Francis Bacon: ‘Gardening is indeed the purest of human pleasures and greatest refreshment of the spirits’.

Chris Baines (writer and environmental campaigner)

For me, wildlife is the vital key to gardening pleasure. Gardens provide a safe, accessible window on the natural world, and I love the contact they provide with birds, butterflies and a host of familiar wild animals and plants. Most importantly I want a garden to reflect the subtly changing seasons. In a world where so much has been standardised and synthesized it is important for the smells and sounds of spring to contrast with summer and autumn.

Design is obviously important. Features such as shallow ponds, wild flower-rich lawns like those at Great Dixter and borders filled with nectar and fruit all help to make a garden irresistible to wildlife. Choice of plants is also critical. Native trees and shrubs help to simulate the ‘woodland glade’ that suits so many birds, while more exotic garden plants can boost the choice of food and shelter all year round.

What matters most of all is management. Minimal pesticide use is obvious, but the most valuable ingredient is decay. This does not mean a garden must be scruffy, but autumn leaves and dead wood must be given time to rot. We need to strike a natural balance in our gardens.

John Brookes (garden designer)

It all depends on who you are and what is your background. And one route is not exclusive to another. Personally, I first design the garden, or even before that decide on the ‘feel’ I want. This ‘feel’ or styling might be decided for me by existing planting, for example with a huge tree next door, I can either relate the planting design to that, or alternatively create a spartan space as a counterpoise to it. But I might have a landscape view, a howling gale from the sea or the back of a garage to cope with. Each situation affects my styling and what I might grow, but the design comes first.

The minimalist won’t think plants primarily, he or she will think in terms of shapes. The horticulturist will think plants and collect more and more of them, for their cultivation is his criterion. The garden designer I believe (and hope), is somewhere in the middle, perhaps softening the pure design eye, at the same time widening his plant palette, while simultaneously calming the horticulturist. Increasingly the middle way seeks less of the exotic. For to me the ideal garden is a peaceful place at harmony with its site not despite it; this is increasingly my goal as with the mix of gravelled areas, lawns and foliage plants at Denmans.

Penelope Hobhouse (garden historian and designer)

This argument has been going on since the earliest gardens in Persia, the dialogue between art and nature, locating where the partnership lies. The garden today is still an oasis, a refuge from city or work. We want peace and quiet, shade, coolness, tranquillity. Gardening is a partnership between nature and art but I believe that gardens should be designed rather than simply being collections of plants. Gardens are artificial creations and I feel strongly that a garden-designer’s job is to make them as beautiful as possible. It is vital to make a plan, but it is the plants that will implement it, as at Hidcote . The architecture is strong, but softened by the planting.

Sometimes biodiversity can be emphasised at the expense of design. Leaving logs for woodlice is fine but it is not gardening as an art form. In fact, garden-making in the UK has lost its way since William Robinson, whose influence is still strong in cottage gardens so stuffed full of plants that ‘design’ is almost a word that can’t be used. It wouldn’t suit me to have a garden without design, that had just happened. Nor would it suit me to have a plantless garden. A desert garden with a few cacti is still a garden, but I like green leaves and lawn or meadow.

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