Portrait or landscape?

One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a border (or equally considered clashes) and long, swooping vistas. It evokes soft sfumato smudges of pink and green, much as I imagine the interior of the late Queen Mother’s wardrobe must have looked. But it’s also misleading. Among minor inconsistencies of British culture is that, despite the national obsession with gardening and an attachment to landscape painting, the two have failed to find one another. We still have no more than a fitful tradition of garden painting.

Granted there have been moments. Under the later Stuarts, a gaggle of Netherlandish artists produced paintings and engravings that offered the viewer aerial panoramas of country houses within their garden and landscape settings. Jan Kip, the brothers Leonard and Jacob Knyff and Jan Siberechts all created images that, like contemporary formal gardening, straitjacketed their subjects into tight geometric patterns. At their busiest such pictures read like diagrams of particularly complex electric circuits, as in Leonard Knyff’s ‘Clandon Park’ of 1708, with its lifeless rows of lollipop trees. Wholly absent is any suggestion of the garden as a region of pleasure or, perish the thought, nurture.

At the other end of the spectrum is the only home-grown school of English gardening painting, led by a trio of gifted 19th-century watercolourists: Beatrice Parsons, George Samuel Elgood and Ernest Arthur Rowe. Theirs is the art of the herbaceous border, exotic shrubbery and occasionally the cottage garden, and diametrically opposed to the earlier tradition. Where the Dutchmen focused on line and plan, the Victorians went for colour. As vivid as Berlin woolwork, crackling with the same synthetic vibrancy as the century’s new aniline dyes, the paintings of Parsons, Elgood and Rowe celebrated in Technicolor a plethora of new introductions at a time when plant-hunters knew their business and cheap garden wages facilitated planting schemes of dazzling profusion.