The London Town Garden, 1700-1840 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) Book

Londoners love their gardens, those pocket-sized patches of countryside that make the city bearable. The London Town Garden traces that love affair from the formal squares and private gardens of Georgian London, which for the first time brought the countryside into town. It concludes in the 1840s, as an explosion of house building doubled the size of the city, but with every suburban villa still having its little patch of green. Look at the book's aerial plans of the city, such as John Strype's 1720 plan of Westminster, and the striking thing is not so much the buildings as the spaces behind them. Every house has its garden tucked away. And it's these secret gardens that fascinate Longstaffe-Gowan. We can all walk in Soho Square or St James's Park, but what treasures, follies and exotic plants lurk in those hidden gardens? Most of the gardens reflect the formality we now only see in the preserved Georgian grounds of stately homes--with a love of order and geometric shapes totally alien to our modern notions of mixed meadows, fruit and vegetables, and wild flowers. The rule was "hierarchy, symmetry and regularity", as the Georgians were subjugating nature rather than letting it grow free. But there were fertile kitchen gardens too--in the early 1800s fruit and vegetable gardens "abounded in Marylebone, Bloomsbury, Piccadilly and Hoxton". And William Bentham was growing "the finest looking and most delicious nectarines" in his Gower Street garden. There were armies of professional gardeners drawing up plans for new homeowners, and their schedules and invoices make fascinating reading. Richard Twiss's estimate for planting out a garden in Gower Street in 1791 showed it wasn't a cheap business either, with a bill of £12, 7s, 6d for flowers, including "two or three guineas on bulbs, such as hyacinths, tulips, iris, peony, crocus and snowdrop". Just as we do today, the Georgians and Victorians were making their gardens "an extension of indoor space and the domestic topography"--another room of the house, in fact. The London Town Garden offers a fascinating glimpse into those secret rooms. --John RennieRead More