The press of Heather & Ivan Morison Publication: Headline: Selected editorial: The British garden not only inspires our nation's greatest art, says Jenny Uglow. It is an art form in itself An avenue of trees in Rousham, Oxfordshire, a classical garden designed by William Kent, who also helped design Burlington House The British, it is often said, have a peculiar relationship with gardens. We cherish our plots, from spreading acres to window-boxes. Garden-visiting is a prime national pastime, drawing quite as many people, of far more varied backgrounds, as most art galleries. So is garden-making our great national art-form, once an aristocratic pursuit and now open to all? Are our back-gardens the canvas for our dreams? Our national self-image is itself linked to the idea of this 'green and sceptr'd isle' as a moated garden, an enclosed, protected space bounded by the sea. Britain has its 'great tradition' of gardening, of high art and grand designs, obsession and genius, whether it be Charles Hoare at Stourhead, attempting to incarnate Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain in the Wiltshire landscape, or Vita Sackville-West planning the silvery tones of her 'White Garden' at Sissinghurst. The curving moon-ponds of Studley Royal in Yorkshire rival Charles Jencks's award-winning swirling turf and water at the Scottish Museum of Modern Art. 'Capability' Brown's sweeping landscapes suggest an installation artist or a conceptualist, before the terms were coined, working on a vast scale, in time as well as space. British gardens, blending foreign influences and plants, have always been freighted with significance: with classical ideals; with imagery of Eden and the Fall; with Islamic notions of harmony and proportion. The flowers in the little 'paradises' that circled cathedral apses shared the iconography of the gardens of the Virgin in medieval art, while the parallel, secular 'garden enclosed' became a haven of sensual delights. For the Tudors, fine gardens were marked by wit and conceit, by knots and mazes and geometry. The Stuarts preferred the watery art of grottoes and fountains and canals, of elaborate parterres and radiating avenues - vividly shown in bird's-eye views of Knyp, Knyff and Badeslade. Sometimes ideology overtook art: in the new 'Great Britain' after the Act of Union in 1707, great gardens like Stowe became political statements, looking back both to Augustan Rome and to Saxon freedoms. By contrast William Kent, whose green avenues at Rousham in Oxfordshire (right), are still so evocative, was retrospectively hailed as an artist rather than a neo-Palladian ideologue. 'At that moment,' wrote Horace Walpole, 'appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionated enough to dare and to dictate.' The grand line of design flowed forward through the terraces and arboreta of the Victorians, into the Edwardian age (I was intrigued to learn that Monet subscribed to Country Life). But even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain also had a very different tradition. This was the vernacular art of the mixed farm and cottage garden, the specialist art of the florists cultivating their auriculas and pansies in busy towns, the 'size-is-all' competitiveness of the prize leek and gooseberry grower. Gooseberries and apples, in fact, figure just as largely in the early Transactions of the Royal Horticultural Society as new exotics like dahlias and crysanths. It is this kind of gardening - the relationship between ordinary people and their flower-beds, lawns, allotments and sheds - that Tate Britain celebrates in its summer exhibition, 'The Art of the Garden'. (Simultaneously, to coincide with Chelsea, in May the V&A is running 'The Other Flower Show', with ten garden shed installations by designers and artists, including Tracey Emin.) Fittingly in the bicentennial year of the RHS, Tate Britain is showing only work from the last 200 years. Shunning the country-house tradition, the exhibition is far from the illustrative 'history of the garden' one might expect. Nor does it explore the garden as art. Instead the emphasis is firmly on artists, and how they interact with gardens as subject and inspiration. While artists of earlier eras, as described in Roy Strong's influential book The Artist in the Garden, represented gardens in portraits, as attributes of their owner, or in topographical plates, as ciphers of wealth and status, from around 1900 they address the garden - and the gardener - more directly. The starting point is the rediscovery of the beauty of the small garden in the early nineteenth century, exemplified by Constable's two extraordinary paintings of 1815, one showing his father hoeing the vegetables in the early morning cool (bottom), and the other his mother's new flower-bed in the slanting evening sun. Constable never offered these for sale, but kept them with him until he died. The note of personal pride continues in Atkinson Grimshaw's 1870 painting of his grander home, Knostrop Hall, but is found equally in Arthur Melville's A Cabbage Garden of 1877. Like Constable, Melville defies period. Both artists feel somehow contemporaneous with the robust appreciation of 'ordinary' gardens in Stanley Spencer's cottage frontages, salvias flaming outside urban terraces, and allotments whose neat bean-pole aesthetic is offset by the clutter of sheds and water butts. This is the people's garden, a British enthusiasm that cuts across all classes. It evokes the mixed anxiety and anticipation that Mr Pooter feels in smoky Holloway in Diary of a Nobody (8 April, he plants mustard and cress; 'April 12: Mustard-and-cress and radishes not come up yet') more than it does the larger concerns of Vita Sackville-West. And the artists' responses are startlingly varied, often oblique. The similarities and shifts are underlined at the Tate by a clever mix of periods and media: John Singer Sargent's Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose joins William Nicholson's Miss Jekyll's Gardening Boots, Richard Wentworth's fence of garden tools, and Ivan and Heather Morison's audio work Recordings from Global Survey 2003. Yet the symbolic power is not forgotten. The potency of the enclosed medieval garden feeds the mystical or erotic secret gardens explored over time by Samuel Palmer and Richard Dadd, Beatrix Potter and Barbara Hepworth, Lucian Freud and Sarah Jones. The close-up, almost surreal focus of old botanical drawings is mirrored in Marc Quinn's interest in genetics and species. The Arcadian love of fragments associated with eighteenth-century garden-makers like William Shenstone resurfaces not only in the lyrical nostalgia of Paul Nash's 1930s photos, but in Ian Hamilton Finlay's 'Little Sparta' Scottish garden (above left), its inscriptions as incisive on paper as on stone, and in Martin Parr's ironic North Circular photographs, with the Three Graces as a concrete birdbath. This is cerebral garden-art. But what of the sensual? Gertrude Jekyll, who trained at Kensington School of Art in the 1860s, was a true gardener/artist. In her youth she knew Ruskin, G.F. Watts, Leighton and Burne-Jones; she learned colour theory from Hercule Brabazon and saw her plants as 'a box of paints', working in drifts of colour, in masses rather than blocks. Jekyll was a leading rebel against the Victorian fashion for beds packed with hot-house-raised annuals of blazing colours, whose effect was described by one iconoclast as 'a disease of the retina'. In reaction, cottage gardens, overflowing borders and wild flowers returned to favour. And although we may dismiss painters who celebrated this mood, like Helen Allingham and Alfred Parsons, as chocolate-box sentimentalists, they gain new interest in the context of colour-ground experiments. Numerous mid-twentieth-century artists enter this horticultural show - from Cedric Morris and the underrated Royal Academician Charles Mahoney, to Patrick Heron in Cornwall and Derek Jarman working his spell on the shifting Dungeness pebbles (below). But thinking in terms of 'art', which is fixed, highlights the ephemeral nature of gardens. A site may have been planted a few years past, or a century ago, yet it is always, inevitably, of the present. Sometimes we prize the effects of time, as in the monstrous topiary at Levens Hall in Cumbria; sometimes the design vanishes completely, and has to be unearthed and recreated - hence our constant, delighted rediscovery of 'lost gardens'. Gardens are always provisional. Yet as the seventeenth-century Puritan writer Ralph Austen wrote, 'The joy of the husbandman is not a flash and so away, but it is a settled and habitual joyÉ for there are many renovations, and a continual progress towards the more beginner.' And if garden-making really is the great British art, it seems that for artists - as for gardeners - it is more alive today than it has ever been, alert to its traditions and open to its future.
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