The
Arts and Crafts garden was very much a retaliation against corporations and
mass production. The movement emphasized the artisan and their skills, which
could not be replicated by any machine. It was such a purely human, creative
garden that only skilled designers could create one. The emphasis of these
skills was epitomized by the collaboration of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin
Lutyens. The combination of gardening and architecture had the perfect artistic
qualities to lead the Arts and Crafts movement away from the consumerist garden
production.
The
reason that the Arts and Crafts movement opposed large corporate production of gardens
is that it required a humanly artistic inspiration to configure this type of
garden. Features such as painterly flower gardens needed the artistry that can
only come from a designer working on an individual landscape. Painterly flower
gardens take the plants and flowers themselves and use them as colors on a
canvas. The flowers add color to the landscape and can transform the flowerbed
into a work of art. The Arts and Crafts gardens are highly individualized,
making them much more suited to the owner as well as the land it is designed
for.
An even
more skillful technique in the Arts and Crafts garden is not just the layout of
the flowers in a painterly fashion, but the actual flowers themselves. The
designer would have to work tirelessly on the individual garden to plan and
make sure that everything worked well together. So many factors were put into
the planting of an Arts and Crafts garden. Sun, spacing, size, maintenance,
weather, shape, blooms and much more go into the design and implementation of a
garden, and with so many flowers to be planned for in the Arts and Crafts
garden, the planning was painstaking. It falls back onto the “Genius of the
Place” and how each plot of land has a different character to it, and should be
gardened differently. There are limitless elements that go into planning a
garden, and a handful are detailed here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7k6b0VsJWI).
Other
particular features of the Arts and Crafts garden were the geometric nature and
lack of symmetry. Designers like Jekyll and Lutyens would create gardens like Munstead
Wood with distinct geometrical shapes of features like ponds, rills, and
arches, but would leave out any form of symmetry or main axis. This would
organize the garden too similarly to the gardens of the past, and create a more
industrialized style. Munstead Wood also displayed a particular lushness to the
flower beds. The flowers bloomed fully during their peak season and would bring
a new life to the garden, filling the viewer’s eyes with color. The colors and
flowers would blend so well that the garden would look just right, a feeling
that could only come from an artisan’s garden design.
The
Arts and Crafts garden is an interesting protest to the industrialization of
the gardens across Europe. It emphasizes the careful planning and humanistic
touch of creativity that only designers can imagine. Designers like Jekyll and
Lutyens worked on making gardens that focused on the specific landscape and
owner themselves, creating a truly individual garden that only an artist could
formulate. The lush flowers and painterly layouts were intended to evoke a
feeling of beauty in the viewer and make the garden feel as if there are no
other ones just like it in the entire world.
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