Anne Helmreich. The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870-1914. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xx + 282 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-59293-2.
Reviewed by Peter Mandler (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge)
Published on H-Albion (April, 2004)
Which Garden? Whose Nation?
Which Garden? Whose Nation?
This is a book about garden history, by an art historian, revolving around a topic (national identity) formerly the province of sociologists, currently the obsession of mainstream historians. Such a book illustrates the typical multidisciplinary range and ambition of cultural history nowadays--much to be celebrated. Yet it is a difficult trick to pull off: claims based on a specialist literature may not persuade non-specialists, while the specialists may be disappointed by too many distracting forays off of home ground.
At the center of Helmreich's book is the dispute between advocates of the "wild garden," as promoted by William Robinson in The Wild Garden (1881), and those favoring more formal alternatives, notably Reginald Blomfield, who launched an unusually strong attack on Robinson in the second edition of The Formal Garden in England (1901). This important debate has never been adequately treated in the general historical literature and even if it had no other virtues Helmreich's book would be worth commending for giving that debate due attention. To some extent Robinson and Blomfield were simply re-playing an ancient stand-off between romanticism and classicism. But a good deal more was at stake. Robinson represented a blooming new profession, that of landscape artist or garden designer, with a horticultural sensibility that blew a fresh wind through the design professions. Blomfield was defending the recently consolidated status of the professional architect--perhaps surprisingly, given his Arts and Crafts assocations (he was an early member of the Art Workers Guild), but by 1900 he was backing off and rediscovering classicism, a significant turn rather slighted by Helmreich. The Little Englandism (and possibly the radicalism) of the Arts and Crafts had begun to seem something of a dead end to people like Blomfield, eager for big public commissions, and eager, too, to find a style and an ideology suitable to a manly, imperial nation. Beyond this, Robinson's and Blomfield's visions for gardens represented different priorities in the emerging preservationist movement. As Helmreich neatly shows, the commissions executed by both camps were eroding the historic countryside: they were for large gardens around large country houses in still generally rural but now decreasingly agricultural southern English settings, where plutocrats and commuting professionals were dividing up the great estates into more manageable residential plots. In making their "new old" designs, both schools claimed to be "preserving" the traditional genius loci in quite different ways: Robinson claimed to be respecting the spirit of the rural landscape, Blomfield the spirit of historic architecture. Here Helmreich brings out an interesting fissure, often subliminal, in a preservationist movement usually treated as monolithic.
Both camps justified their strategies by reference to English history and (though it is not quite the same thing) a particular reading of "Englishness." Whether in fact this warrants the very central place given to "national identity" in Helmreich's treatment is, however, debatable. "Englishness" was an idiom of the day, to be sure, especially among artists and designers; whether it was equally so among their clients is a moot question, not really addressed here. It would be foolish to ignore it. But why make it the fulcrum of the book? Helmreich's story is, unavoidably, about the history of gardens. Dwelling so exclusively on the "national" elements necessarily causes her to shortchange other dimensions, the social, the professional, even some aesthetic elements, so that the garden is not consistently treated as a satisfying whole. On the other hand, it is not fully demonstrated that a "national" interpretation of the garden tells us something that alters substantially our understanding of "national identity" in this period. We have now so many treatments of "X and national identity" (where X could be anything from the ruin to Robin Hood to roast beef) that it no longer seems so arresting to be told that "X is constitutive of national identity" (which Helmreich does tell us about the garden). At the very least, we need to be told something about how the garden constitutes national identity more than or differently from ruins, Robin Hood, and roast beef. That is hard to do in a monograph based on a Ph.D. thesis, so it is not surprising that Helmreich--whose source base is almost entirely drawn from garden designs and garden literature relating to the properties of a certain class--does not even attempt it. She relies instead on a fairly conventional account of "Englishness" c. 1900, based on a thinnish reading of the secondary literature, and people familiar with that literature will not be surprised by much that she draws from--or, to be frank--contributes to it.
The garden does, of course, have special claims as an icon of national consciousness--not uniquely in England, however, nor uniquely in this period. Indeed, it is in the next generation, between the wars, that the English become routinely described--by themselves and by other Europeans--as "a nation of gardeners," a purposeful deviation from older stereotypes centered on John Bull and shopkeeping. But the referents in this usage are middle- and lower-middle-class suburbanites, whose terraced and semi-detached houses and gardens have only certain elements in common with the grander country houses discussed by Helmreich. There is another book to be written about which elements of Helmreich's discourse do and which do not filter into this other world--but it would be a very different kind of book, more social than intellectual or art history.
Helmreich closes her discussion by showing how the stark dichotomies represented by Robinson and Blomfield were resolved, again in a socially and intellectually elevated sphere, in the collaborative work of Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. At this point, the book reverts to a more traditional kind of garden history, with lavish illustration, precise technical descriptions of plants, building materials and layouts, and also an honest admission that for Lutyens especially the national dimension of the design ideology has receded into the background. The requirements of the site, of clients, of professional decorum, of artistic navigation between rival schools are all just as important as--if not more important than--making a statement about Englishness, old or new. These things are all socially rooted, too, as Robinson's and Blomfield's manifestoes were; it is just that they are rooted more specifically in the world of the garden, and if that makes them seem more specialized, that is only an honest reflection of the limits of the garden. In the end, the garden of the Edwardian country house is not the world; it is not all of England; it is not even all of semi-rural southern England.
However, it is a significant piece, and Helmreich gives non-specialists a satisfyingly accessible account of debates over it. Physically her book is a handsome product, benefiting from many of the author's own photographs as well as illustrations from contemporary designs and magazines, though not flattered by a gawky cover design, and on the whole well-written and (a rare thing nowadays) well-proofed. Helmreich makes a graceful apology in the preface for writing about such an English obsession from a non-native standpoint, but no apologies are necessary, as she handles the esoterica with confidence and authority. My only complaint on that account is an odd decision to refer to "the English" as "Englanders": how comfortable would Helmreich feel reading a book about her own people in which they were referred to throughout as "Yankees"?
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Citation:
Peter Mandler. Review of Helmreich, Anne, The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design, 1870-1914.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9202
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