Garden writing
Writing about gardens takes a variety of literary forms, ranging from instructional manuals on horticulture and garden design, to essays on gardening, to novels. Garden writing has been published in English since at least the 16th century.
Atkinson suggests a two-part division of garden writing, at least in the 19th century. On the one hand, she notes, some garden writers produced utilitarian guides on garden maintenance and horticulture. On the other hand, garden writing also included higher-brow works on the "pleasures of landscape aesthetics".
British garden writers are just about able to cover differences in regional climates with the odd reference to "hilly" or "northern" districts, and issue general advice for the whole country; the great majority are based in Southern England. This polite fiction is not tenable for the US and Canada, and much garden writing is regional, taking into account the very different ranges of temperature and rainfall.
Early history
Early writing, in Latin and Greek, is nearly always more concerned with agriculture, the main element of the economy, than gardening, and there is no surviving single classical authority on techniques of gardening who has the position of, for example, Vitruvius in architecture. Dioscurides is the leading author of herbal literature, with a mainly medical purpose, and much more about how to use and identify plants than how to grow them. After being unavailable in Christian Europe in the Early Middle Ages, he became known again through Arab manuscripts, and then remained the most respected herbal until the 18th century, though even by 1750 only some 400 of the plants he described had been identified and collected. In medieval manuscripts he was often combined with "Apuleius", a late Roman translation of ancient Greek herbal material, revived in England from the 11th century.The important theologian Albertus Magnus in his De vegetabilibus et plantis rewrites De Plantis, a book then wrongly believed to be by Aristotle. This is a fundamental philosophical enquiry into the nature of plants, only peripherally concerned with how to grow them. But he does recognize and describe gardens with a large element of purely ornamental planting. The Italian Piero de' Crescenzi's, Ruralium Commodorum Liber is the most important practical medieval work, still mostly about agriculture, and drawing heavily on classical sources. His experience came from buying a country estate, as a successful lawyer.
The first significant text in English is a translation into Middle English verse, as On husbondrie, of Palladius, the Late Roman author of Opus agriculturae, sometimes known as De re rustica. This covers mostly farming rather than gardening. The first version of Thomas Tusser's poem Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry was published in 1557, and William Lawson's The Country Housewife's Garden followed in 1608, with a further work in 1618; both were in the library of John Winthrop the Younger, governor of Connecticut 50 years later.
Tusser's books were in simple rhyming verse, and notable for assuming that the gardening among his middle-class audience would normally be the province of the housewife, though many may have needed to have the book read to them by their husbands. Tips and tasks were given for every month of the year. The book was hugely popular and often reprinted, remaining a favourite until 1800 at least.
17th century
This was the century of growing French dominance in large-scale gardening, and the Mollet dynasty of royal gardeners published books with much on garden design. Claude Mollet, did the garden sections in his friend Olivier de Serres' Le Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs, a book mainly dealing with agriculture. Mollet's own Théâtre des plans et jardinages, was published by his son in 1652, after his death, but had been first written around 1613-1615, and some manuscript copies had probably been in circulation.Claude's son André Mollet spent most of his career working for royalty in Sweden, England and the Netherlands. His Le Jardin de plaisir , was published in Stockholm in 1651, illustrated with meticulous engravings after his own designs, and which, with an eye to a European aristocratic clientele, he published in Swedish, French and German. In his designs the rich patterning of parterres, which had formerly been a garden feature of interest in isolation, was for the first time arranged in significant relation to the plan of the house. Mollet's designs coordinated the elements of scythed turf—making its debut here as an essential element of garden design—with gravel paths, basins and fountains, parterres, bosquets and allées.
Among the many subjects that John Evelyn published about, gardening was an increasing obsession, and he left a huge manuscript on the subject that was not printed until 2001. He published several translations of French gardening books, and his Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees was very influential in its plea to landowners to plant trees, of which he believed the country to be dangerously short. Sections from his main manuscript were added to editions of this, and also published separately.
He spent much of his later life working on the enormous Elysium Britannicum, covering all aspects of gardening. This was never completed, and was finally published in 2001, from his 1,000-page manuscript now in the British Library. Small parts of it were published as he began to realize the main task would never be completed. These included Kalendarium Hortense, or The Gardener's Almanac – a monthly list of tasks for the gardener, Pomona on apples, and Acetaria on "sallets".
The late 17th century saw the height of the French formal garden style, whose best representation in writing had to wait for the next century. The retired English diplomat and politician Sir William Temple wrote an essay in 1685, "Upon the Gardens of Epicurus" in his rather enforced retirement. Temple wrote of "the sweetness and satisfaction of this retreat, where since my resolution taken of never entering again into any public employments, I have passed five years without once going to town". As a result of his introducing the term sharawadgi in this essay, Temple has been sometimes considered the originator of the English landscape garden style. Temple was rather typical of his period in England, but perhaps to an extreme degree, in being highly interested in growing fruit trees of all sorts and very little interested in flowers:
I will not enter upon any Account of Flowers, having pleased myself only with seeing and smelling them, and not troubled myself with the Care, which is more the Ladies Part than the Mens; but the Success is wholly in the Gardener.
18th century
In France, the lawyer Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d'Argenville first published in 1709. It had been translated into English by 1712. Since none of the leading gardeners in the French formal garden style left books, this remained the leading manual on the style, and perhaps the last time a foreign gardening book was very popular in English. It was a large and expensive book, with many excellent images, designed mainly for the large gardens of English country houses.Gardening had become a major preoccupation of the English upper classes in the late 17th century, and was spreading to the middle classes. The 18th century saw a great increase in books by English authors, by no means all just covering the new English landscape garden style. In the 1710s the highly influential essayist Joseph Addison, often touched on gardening, though his practical experience was virtually nil. He favoured a looser style, though still fairly formal.
Stephen Switzer was an English gardener, whose first and most general title was Ichnographica Rustica, or The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener's recreation. He is most notable for his views of the transition between the large garden, still very formal in his writings, and the surrounding countryside, especially woodland. The book came rather too early for the flood of new American trees and shrubs that led to the development of the shrubbery a generation later, and subsequently the woodland garden, and Switzer's schemes for the more distant parts of sites from the house seem to have firmly remained woodland rather than garden. Like many later gardening writers, his views are often expressed with more intemperate fervour than clarity, as when he poured scorn on "several Northern Lads which...by the help of a little Learning, and a great deal of Impudence... invade the Southern provinces and...pretend to know more in one Twelve-month, than a laborious, honest Southern Countryman does in Seven Years....".
Batty Langley another professional gardener and garden designer, published three gardening books in 1728-29, with his many later works covering building and architecture. He reflected the desire for increased freedom in planting and trimming trees and hedges, but somewhat cautiously. His books were at least as popular as those of Switzer, but much the most popular book of the century was The Gardeners Dictionary by Philip Miller, first published in 1729 and regularly appearing in new revised and expanded editions until 1768, with another version "based on" it in the 1830s. Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden, a famous foundation in London, for almost 50 years, and was a plantsman rather than a designer, who played an important part in the influx of new foreign plants to English gardening.
The English landscape style was not fully described until George Mason's Essay on Design in Gardening in 1768, soon followed by the far more influential, Observations on Modern Gardening, illustrated by descriptions in 1770, by the lawyer and politician Thomas Whately, which was translated into German and French the following year. This was a very early example of a book largely devoted to describing a series of individual gardens, a sub-genre that came into its own when good quality colour photography became relatively cheap, in the mid-20th century. Thomas Jefferson had a copy of Whately, and his Garden Notes, recording his garden tour in England, in the company of John Adams, begins:
Memorandums made on a tour to some of the gardens in England described by Whateley in his book on gardening. While his descriptions in point of style are models of perfect elegance and classical correctness, they are as remarkeable for their exactness. I always walked over the gardens with his book in my hand, examined with attention the particular spots he described, found them so justly characterised by him as to be easily recognised, and saw with wonder, that his fine imagination had never been able to seduce him from the truth.
The first gardening book written by a woman was A curious herbal: containing five hundred cuts, of the most useful plants, which are now used in the practice of physick, by Elizabeth Blackwell. Though she is credited as the sole author, she was an illustrator, and her husband Alexander probably did much of the text, from debtor's prison. The book was successful enough to repay his debts and get him out, but he went to Sweden in 1742, where he was executed in 1747 for a mysterious plot against the crown, of which he was probably innocent. As a herbal, the book marked "the last of a genre", although later editions of the most famous, The English Physitian, by the doctor Nicholas Culpeper later entitled The Complete Herbal or Culpepper's Herbal, continued to be printed for centuries after.
Horace Walpole's short Essay on Modern Gardening was highly polemical, and gave an account of the development of the English landscape style that saw William Kent as its essential creator, and played down Capability Brown and other gardeners of the mid-century. This was very influential but is now rejected by modern garden historians. Humphrey Repton, Brown's successor as the leading English garden designer, published three main books on gardening: Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, and Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. He defended the designs of Brown and himself against criticism from Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price and others, in the lively contemporary controversies over the concept of the picturesque.