Life in the Garden Read online

  Ah, the Victorian garden. Photographs in a hundred-year-old family album show my grandmother’s first ever garden, in St Albans, with circular beds planted each with a standard rose, and bordered with an edging of alyssum and lobelia, planted alternately. She had not yet come across Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson and was, presumably, remembering what her own mother had done, whose gardening practice would have been rooted firmly in the mid nineteenth century.

  The Victorian garden was all about formality – plants whipped into submission, flowers rated according to colour performance. Though, that said, there was more going on in the gardening world, not least a fervent demand for all the new plant arrivals of the time, brought from China and elsewhere by the botanical collectors of the age, of whom more later. And an attention to gardening possibilities from the rising middle class, who were catered for by John Claudius Loudon, the prolific horticultural and landscape design writer, who published, alongside much else, the first, and widely influential, gardening journal The Gardener’s Magazine, and The Suburban Garden and Villa Companion. I like that title – both ponderous and nicely precise. Precise also was his categorization of gardens into four types: those pertaining to grand mansions with over ten acres; establishments with bay windows and gardens of two to ten acres; third-raters around seventeen feet wide with long gardens; and the fourth-rate terraced house with fourteen-foot frontage and small back garden. You would have known where you were with John Loudon; I know where I am today, as owner of a fourth-rater, in whose small back garden I appreciated the ‘Tête-à-Tête’ daffodils this morning, inspected the new Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ for signs of spring growth, and chivvied out one of those darn foxes. None of these a likely feature of the Victorian garden, except perhaps the fox – but maybe the urban fox is a contemporary addition. Loudon’s was class-system gardening, providing advice and information appropriate to the individual reader, according to their gardening status. He was widely popular, and his magazine can be seen as the forerunner of the gardening journals of the early twentieth century, notably William Robinson’s The Garden, and of today’s wealth of commercial garden advice and instruction, and, indeed, of television’s influence on the nation’s gardening. Though if Gardeners’ World classifies its viewers, it is discreet enough not to let that show; the programme is robustly democratic, serving up suggestions that cater for pretty well everyone, whether you are pruning a solitary rose, or coping with a vegetable garden on a Victorian mansion scale.

  Kitchen garden, the Victorians called it, and, forget the carpet bedding, I have a distinct weakness for the Victorian kitchen garden. Those high walls for espalier fruit, the glasshouses, the cold frames, the asparagus beds, the scritch-scratch of Mr McGregor’s hoe … But I am getting ahead of myself – Peter Rabbit and Mr McGregor are for later … The Victorian kitchen garden is alluring, satisfying, as a world of its own, dedicated to food production, but in a spacious, elegant, ritualistic way. Grapes in those glasshouses, a year-round supply of all the basic necessities – the potatoes, the onions, the carrots and all that, the apples for storing in the apple house. Labour-intensive, privileged, it is suggestive of a way of life hard now to envisage. Today, when grapes come from the supermarket and are nothing to get excited about (and pineapples too, another delicacy for the Victorian dining-table, and fiendishly difficult to coax into fruition in a northern greenhouse), the upper-class need for show-off table displays seems just rather bizarre. But behind it was the atavistic drive to impress: the fancy bowl of fruit showed you had the resources to grow it, and a head gardener with the skill to do so.

  The demise of the Victorian garden is for another chapter. We have been looking here at the apposition between reality and metaphor, where gardens are concerned, and a run through the evolution of the garden in reality was relevant. But there is one further use of the garden in the service of art that has to be considered: the painted garden.

  Monet’s water lilies must be an image familiar to many who have barely heard of the painter, let alone his garden at Giverny. The palette of blues and greens; that bridge. Why is it that a photograph of the same scene, however perfectly composed, does not have the same effect, cannot carry the same weight? I have a stack of hefty books filled with sumptuous garden photography, and I know that I like – appreciate – the photos, but I do not look at them with the same intensity that I look at a painted garden – painted by a masterly hand. The photograph reports; the painting examines, interprets, expands.

  It has to be the intervention of a different vision. The water lilies are no longer the water lilies that I would see, or that the camera would faithfully reproduce, but have undergone a reincarnation. We see them as Monet saw them, and the effect is startling, illuminating. The water lilies had a potential that was conjured up by other eyes. Eyes – and skill. When it comes to how it is done, I am silenced. You look more closely at the painting; how could he so distribute dots and splashes of paint, contrive certain alignments of colour, that the effect would be thus? How could he transfer what the eye saw, and wanted to demonstrate to others, to the hand that held the brush? I don’t know. Perhaps you do, if you are a painter and if you have the words for it. For me, it has to remain this mystery.

  Claude Monet seems almost the painterly complement to Virginia Woolf in the way that he combined practical, applied gardening with use of the garden as image. He created the garden of his house at Giverny quite deliberately as subject matter: a garden for inspiration and to paint. Indeed, he called it ‘my most beautiful work of art’. And he did so in the most practical, hands-on manner, laying out the long, rectangular beds and square areas or orchards in front of the house when he went there in 1883, later extending the property to create the water garden beyond, which would become the prompt for his greatest works. He made himself into a plantsman, attending the summer exhibition of the French Horticultural Society in 1891 to get ideas for Giverny – tulips, anemones, narcissi, Spanish irises, large-flowered clematis. This was a time of great horticultural activity in France – new botanical introductions from China and elsewhere, hybridization. Monet took an acquisitive interest in new introductions, seeking out in particular hybridized chrysanthemums and water lilies. His chrysanthemums inspired an innovative painting of 1897 in which a mass of pink, red and gold heads are seen flat, without horizon, as though you looked straight at them, like wallpaper, or a carpet, a technique he would develop further in the series known as the Grandes Décorations, the great water lily paintings.

  As for the water lilies, it seems that new possibilities had been opened up by the crossing of exotic and hardy species to create new, hardy, coloured hybrids. And yes, you can see in the water lily paintings, in all their shimmering complexity, that the flowers are pink, red, white, yellow, blue.

  Water lilies are of the genus Nymphaea – the lovely name inspired by the nymphs of Greek and Roman mythology, and the name Monet gave to his series of water lily paintings when exhibited in Paris – Nymphéas. The water lily is one of several genera of plants known as lotuses, and the lotus is of course a frequent motif in ancient Egyptian wall paintings and architecture. The Egyptian water lily is blue, or white, and here I am taken back once more to the garden of my childhood: my mother had made a large pond on which floated white and blue water lilies, with a weeping willow alongside (dear me, pure Monet – is that what she had in mind?). For me, the fascination was the great leaf pads, which often held a pool of water in which trapped tadpoles wriggled around.

  A friend took me to Giverny for an eightieth-birthday treat. The modern garden, restored after long years of neglect and opened to the public in 1980, is faithful to Monet’s garden in its basic layout, but with the planting no longer the masses of a single colour that Monet had designed but a mixed border style with different varieties mingled everywhere – wonderful combinations of colour and texture that give an entirely different effect from season to season. Monet had laid out, as well as his main beds and the dramatic Grande
Allée, a palette of thirty-eight smaller ‘paintbox’ beds, in parallel rows, trial beds where he could test new introductions for colour and habit before massing them together for effect. Again, the practical gardener supplying material for the artist.

  Monet was to spend forty years at Giverny, until his death in 1926, but he was there for twelve years before starting to paint the garden. In the initial years of its creation, he did much of the work himself, with his children roped in as a labour force. Later, when success had made him better off, eight gardeners were employed, and by 1900 his response to the garden was such that his painting technique was directed by the garden itself, above all the water garden. It is intriguing to compare early paintings – Women in the Garden of 1866 – entirely representational, white-clad women with swirling skirts, one with a little pink parasol – and Lady in the Garden of 1867 – precisely depicted lady in white, again, another parasol, a floriferous standard rose in the middle of a bed of red geraniums, backdrop of dark trees, slice of hard blue sky. You look at these, and it is quite impossible to anticipate the Grandes Décorations of the early 1900s – the unique, innovative, self-contained world of watercolours, lilies, reflections. Similarly The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil of 1881, where two children stand staring at the viewer from garden steps that rise vertically through the middle of the painting, with banks of tall yellow-orange flowers on either side. Again, the water lilies to come are from an entirely different vision.

  Other Impressionists had gardens, and painted gardens. Bonnard lived within walking distance of Giverny, and cultivated a jardin sauvage in contrast to Monet’s more contrived effect, influenced perhaps by William Robinson’s book The Wild Garden of 1870. Caillebotte was also a skilled gardener, but neither of these seems to have had quite Monet’s dedication as an applied horticulturalist. He had an impressive library, with specialist books on the cultivation of irises, chrysanthemums, dahlias (three of his favourites), and himself oversaw all the growing from seed, the trial and error. This is what makes the whole Giverny exercise so intriguing – the expert and practical as facilitators, as prompts for artistic experiment and achievement.

  The water garden was a later addition to the main garden – the rafts of water lilies, the banks planted with bamboo, flowering cherry, weeping willows, agapanthus, irises. That bridge. The hump-back bridge – delicate, see-through with its slender struts, eventually covered with Wisteria sinensis – was inspired by those in the Japanese woodblock prints of Utagawa Hiroshige (Monet owned some). The arch of it – before the wisteria canopy – would provide the bold central sweep in paintings of 1899, as the same scene responded to changing light, the pouring willows reflected between the horizontals of the water lily drifts.

  The water lily paintings are the great departure, Monet’s triumphant capture of an environment of water, light and air that changed and changed again, so that several paintings may have the identical subject, but be entirely different. What is at issue now is the nature of art itself, for which the plants, the created landscape, are the prompt, the source of effect after effect of light and colour. Monet’s creation of Giverny, and his work there, seem a unique instance of art inspired by a deliberately contrived environment.

  One artist, one way of using a garden. And there have been others. The Royal Academy’s 2016 exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, and its accompanying catalogue, offered an unparalleled opportunity to consider what a number of painters did with gardens – far from just a collection of agreeable paintings of flowers, but an illuminating demonstration of differing responses to dahlias and chrysanthemums and roses and lilies and grass and trees and the garden path (remarkable how often a path served as compositional feature). For other Impressionists too, the garden was a study of light and colour. Manet’s Young Woman among Flowers is a luminous figure in white against a background of glowing green and yellow, contemplating flowers that are unidentifiable drifts and splodges of blues and pinks. Berthe Morisot’s Woman and Child in a Meadow has the seated woman playing with her child amid swirling grasses, all colour and movement. A meadow, not a garden, but the difference is academic – the point is the atmospheric treatment of nature, of plants.

  Everyone painted dahlias – Renoir, Caillebotte, Monet. What was it about the dahlia? Colour, I imagine, and contrasting colour and texture – the dahlia is wonderfully various. Out of fashion for a while – labour-intensive, can be too assertive – but back in favour now. I remember my grandmother’s two large beds above the rose garden: tulips and wallflowers for spring, and then up with those and in with massed dahlias for summer and autumn, the tubers carefully overwintered in the potting shed. Much work; much effect. Late-nineteenth-century France clearly favoured the show dahlia bed, never mind the staking and the tuber storing. Renoir painted one – vibrant reds and oranges – as did Monet in The Artist’s Garden in Argenteuil of 1873, and Renoir painted the young Monet painting that, in a kind of artistic symbiosis; oddly, the two paintings could almost be by the same hand, and I find myself wanting to know if the dahlias are cactus or pompon or those blowsy, full-petalled ones – you can’t quite tell, the Impressionist dahlia is a somewhat hazy affair.

  Chrysanthemums got them going too, serving up the same colour variety and contrast – raided to the full in Monet’s 1897 painting that masses them into a single, horizonless display. Caillebotte saw promise in the humble nasturtium, using the same technique in a painting that has red nasturtiums and their grey-green leaves against a pink-mauve background, again like a wallpaper design.

  Particular flowers, then, offer possibilities, but the concept, the perception of the garden, was crucially important. This is the use of a garden for the creation of mood and atmosphere, with a place of privacy and tranquillity at one end of the spectrum, and much else at the other end. Bonnard’s The Family in the Garden has a richly textured and coloured garden in which are a woman and half a dozen or so children scattered around, playing with a ball, sprawled on the grass. His Earthly Paradise goes considerably further. We seem to be back with the Garden of Eden; a naked man – pink man with blue and red highlights – stands with his back to a tree, gazing into a blue-and-mauve distance, a little apart from the woman reclining on her back, hands behind her head, her body white tinted with blue. A palette of strong colours – blues, greens, dappled with yellow light. No animals in Bonnard’s Eden, but the man holds something in his hand. The apple? Paul Gauguin too has an Adam and Eve, the garden barely apparent, just dark foliage as a backdrop to the two dominating orange-ochre figures, the woman with Asian features, the only animals a duck and what seems to be a miniature donkey.

  Édouard Vuillard’s gardens become disturbing. Women in the Garden is all orange, ochre, red and green – two figures against indefinable swirls of colour, possible flowers reduced to pink, red or yellow blobs. A diminished, uncomfortable garden. And Beneath the Trees displays a garden you really wouldn’t want to spend time in – dark and gloomy with three figures at the foot of a tree that is one of the two great white columns of tree trunks that dominate the painting, supporting the dark canopy of leaves, and reducing the human figures to insignificance.

  The German Impressionist Max Liebermann had a garden at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, which became the subject of 200 of his paintings. It looks like a fairly formal garden, with beds islanded in grass, but if he was dahlia-addicted you wouldn’t know – all his flowers are drifts and smudges, though I suspect roses in Garden Beds with Paths and Flowers, and yes, he wields a path time and again as compositional device. His trees are delectable, a soft palette of all the greens, but he is not capturing fleeting effects like Monet; rather, he is thought to have been expressing his feelings about nature, and interpreting the timelessness of nature itself.

  With Emil Nolde we are moving into Expressionism, and the paintings done of his Danish garden are exuberant with colour, rich massed reds, blues, yellows, but plenty of identifiable flowers – purple irises and red roses in Flower Garden of
1922, white peonies and orange-purple irises in 1916 – an applied gardener, again, with the garden in the service of an exploration of colour.

  And then there is Matisse. He was another gardener, ordering seeds from catalogues, fascinated by nature: ‘Flowers provide me with chromatic impressions that remain indelibly printed on my retina … So, the day I find myself, palette in hand, in front of a composition, that memory may suddenly spring within me and help me.’ His garden paintings are interestingly different. In Tea in the Garden of 1919 two women sit by a table under trees, a dog scratching itself in the foreground, the garden path (yes, again) leading away up the painting to a lawn beyond, not a flower in sight. Whereas Young Women in the Garden (same year) has a girl in white lying on a rug, or possibly a sofa, in the foreground, propped on one elbow and either bored or cold-shouldered by the two others who sit at a table beyond. Again, no flowers. Though in Acanthus of 1912, there are robust vivid green acanthus leaves against a cobalt-blue background from which shoots up the purple trunk of a tree – a striking palette of green, blue and mauve.

  I think of Gustav Klimt mainly as the creator of all those fin-de-siècle golden ladies, but he did indeed paint flowers also. There is his Cottage Garden of 1905, an elegant pyramid in which a peak of white chrysanthemums rises from a base of poppies, marguerites, petunias, asters. And two dark crimson dahlias in one corner. No horizon, no background, nothing but a flourish of flowers. He was enjoying, it seems, the traditional German farm garden.