Garden Where You Are

I had been pronouncing it ‘Gravity’ instead of ‘Grave-Tie’

December 4th, 2022

A simple detail but proper pronunciation of a name goes a long way.

WEST HOATHLY, England – The first time that I encountered William Robinson during my online surfing of ‘things gardening’ left me staring almost bamboozled at the name of his estate in southern England. I toyed with a conundrum of how to pronounce: Gravetye Manor. The pronunciation of the word ‘manor’ easily came to me. But ‘Gravetye’ caused me to scratch my head with indecision.

            After all, Winston Churchill supposedly said the British and Americans were separated by a common language. Miss Em at times will say that one of these days the British will learn to speak English – at times that quip falls into a category of ‘humor’ and sometimes I get a feeling she’s dead serious.

            My indecision fell into a decision of where to divide the syllables of ‘Gravetye’ into a semblance of phonetic correctness. I decided on three syllables: ‘grav-eh-tee’ instead of two: ‘grave-tie.’ Three syllables sounded smoother – to me. Two syllables sounded much harsher as if a speaker was attempting to pound a name of some importance through the air. Of course I was wrong – for many years. Until I heard someone say the name on a British gardening show either on television or on YouTube. It doesn’t matter which but I learned better.

            It is: GRAVE-TYE. I might have SMH or SMS after I heard it being pronounced by a native English speaker. What else could I do other than ‘shake my head’ or ‘shrug my shoulders’ – ‘oh well!’ I shan’t displease the lords of the nearly 425-year-old Elizabethan manor built around 1598 by an iron-master named Richard Infield for his wife. Infield’s family made their money by extracting iron from the same sandstone source used for the buildings. Robinson bought the manor with about 360 acres in 1885. By the time he died in 1935 his holding had expanded to more than 1,100 acres.

Entry driveway from the east to Gravetye Manor.

            Gravetye evolved into a horticultural experiment for Robinson to practice his ideas with a 35-acre garden installed around the manor house and inside a walled kitchen garden. But the focus of his contra-Victorian thought-provoking techniques went into the gardens around the manor house. He wanted to break the Victorian mold of planting in strict formal patterns using bedding plants in mass plantings. He wanted gardens to display plants in a natural setting that mixed plants one in complement to the other that accentuated their inherent qualities.

            Over the remaining acreage he planted trees with more wild gardens sprinkled throughout the property. Through the years he planted more than 10,000 trees including more than three dozen American trees sent to him by Frederick Law Olmsted. Through his foundation after his death he left the diverse collection of trees to the nation that is managed by the Forestry Commission.

East face of Gravetye Manor with entry portico at the left edge of the picture.

            Between 1885 and 1935 his garden evolved with the introduction of new plants from around the world. Gravetye was not a static one-and-done garden to be maintained as it once was and will remain. Robinson spent his last 30 years gardening from a wheelchair to plant his next vision in his creation.

            The manor house has been operated as a luxury hotel for about 60 years under two management groups with the latest private ownership taking over around 2010. Technically it’s not a public display garden as can be found across the country. That meant we normally would not have an easy opportunity to see Gravetye and its gardens short of booking a stay at the luxury hotel or making a reservation to dine at the restaurant. Our tour took advantage of a late lunch in Gravetye’s Michelin Star restaurant followed by a walking tour of the garden.

Many of the fresh ingredients on the menu came from the Walled Kitchen Garden earlier in the day.

            To set the stage for what we were about to see, Head Gardener Tom Coward spoke with our tour group about Robinson and the garden while we finished our dessert of Gooseberry Souffle’. Coward has been head gardener at Gravetye since 2010 leading a team of five gardeners overseeing garden operations.

Gravetye Manor Head Gardener Tom Coward

            “In life he was one of the most famous people in England and one of the most influential gardeners who ever put pen to paper,” Coward said. “He wrote heaps of books… And he was a man way ahead of his time. But nowadays he seems to be better known in America than he is here.”

            Robinson’s reputation that has been recorded in biographies positioned him as a difficult man with an easily-provoked temper who often argued in person and on the pages of his magazines and books with the architects who stood on the principles of the formal Victorian garden. His wrote in his short book “Garden Design and Architect’s Gardens” about gardens “… in which both the design and planting were formal and stupidly formal…” His goal was to change gardening and Gravetye continues on using his principles.

            “Robinson didn’t want you to copy him – he’d probably become angry if you did – but he did want you to use the principles he developed,” Coward said, adding that the gardening ideas developed and put into practice by Robinson influenced “all of us.”

            Coward after training at the Royal Horticulture Society horticultural school at Wisley, as well as under Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, and at other gardens, took on a garden in 2010 that had fallen into disarray.

            “It’s been a renovation process with two emphases: one, to be a display garden for our restaurant, and, two, to further the heritage of William Robinson with a contrast between a formal garden and a wild garden,” he said.

South face of Gravetye Manor

            Robinson left his properties to the nation with the stipulation that they ‘never be used for teaching purposes.’ The Grade II historical site has been managed for the William Robinson Trust by Forest Enterprises for the Forestry Commission for nearly 90 years.

            Well worth making the time for a visit even if it does take special arrangements.

            (606 20221204)

            ©2022 James W. Humphreys. All rights reserved.
Which Latin phrase is it? ‘Non sequitur’ or ‘sine qua non’

December 2nd, 2022

Other folks probably knew long ago what I recently discovered, but it’s still neat to learn something that’s new to me!

A personal pet peeve: Someone who acts as if he or she newly found something. Then with further examination this new discovery turns out to be of linear origin with roots going back decades or centuries. Miss Em and I toured south England going from garden to garden based on a premise that seemed to lean toward a ‘modernistic’ theme based on natural plantings and that were produced over the past 30 years.

            I felt as if I was left to discover the links to prove or disprove this perspective. After a few months of adding books to my library and wearing my eyes out looking at online references, I believe that I found a pivot point. I don’t believe that I found an error in logic that produces an absurd outcome – a non sequitur which amounts to ‘a conclusion that does not logically follow.’ I believe I validated a ‘without which, not’ train of thought defined by the phrase sine qua non. I found the term ‘modern’ to be relative.

            Without going through a litany of names of garden designers from the past century, I will take a stance that one person can be called the linchpin: William Robinson. He was born in Ireland in 1838 and lived to be 96-years old dying at Gravetye Manor, his estate near East Grinstead, England, in 1935. He wrote books and published magazines about gardening which supported his position about naturalistic planting. In his writings he didn’t hold back his dislike for formal garden design that ran counter to the norms of Victorian formal garden design.

            He developed his point of view by taking what he learned in Ireland, adding to it at Regents Park, London, seeing how the French gardened during a stay in Paris, and finally touring the alps of France, Switzerland, and Italy where he concluded that alpine plants could be grown in England. He brought it all together after he returned to England and began editing first The Garden magazine followed by another magazine: Gardening Illustrated. He also travelled across the United States and to northern Africa which added to his perspectives.

            Maybe 10-years ago while I enjoyed surfing through the index of Project Gutenberg digital books looking for free books to expand my knowledge of gardening, I discovered a booklet of 39 pages written by William Robinson in 1892. When I found Garden Design and Architect’s Gardens, I’d never heard of William Robinson but I downloaded it anyway. I later learned that Robinson was 54-years old when he wrote this booklet in reaction to the formal garden designs usually associated with Victorian gardens. His words didn’t pull any punches – at one point he called formal garden design ‘stupid.’

            It wasn’t his first book and would not be his last. Arguably his best known book published in 1870 is The Wild Garden which focused on naturalistic plantings; Rick Darke, an American garden design consultant and photographer, added chapters with photographs to expand the 5^th edition of 1895 into The Wild Garden: Expanded Edition published by Timber Press in 2009. Another of his books The English Flower Garden was published in 1883 with a reissue in 1984 of the 15^th edition dating from 1933.

            I found on my favorite online used book vendor a print-on-demand copy of Gravetye Manor: or Twenty years work in an old manor house, being an abstract from the Tree and Garden Book of Gravetye Manor, Sussex/kept by the owner William Robinson published by William Robinson in 1911. I thought I could download a free copy of the 150-plus pages from this book but that didn’t work out. I also found a copy of Mea Allan’s biography of Robinson: William Robinson (1838-1935): Father of the English Flower Garden (1982). I ordered both books and with the other books that I already have, perhaps I can put together a clearer picture in my mind of who Robinson was with the additional information from these two books.

            Before Robinson bought Gravetye Manor in 1885, formal garden designers derisively called him an ‘armchair gardener.’ Over time as he put into practice the concepts about naturalistic plantings on the 1,000 acre estate, his influence grew. By the time of his death and beyond, his design principles could be found in the gardens of Gertrude Jekyl at Munstead Wood, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson at Sissinghurst Castle, Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter, and Lawrence Johnson at Hidcote Manor among others.

            Robinson’s design principles centered on working with the lay of the land instead of imposing man-made features on a location. He disagreed with leveling the landscape around a house for the installation of planting beds to be planted with one kind of flowering plant in ‘bedding’ or ‘carpet’ gardens which was the norm during the Victorian era. Instead he wanted to see a blend of plants combined to make a natural look.

            He considered any design to be good that worked with a site, its soil, and climate. He didn’t like plants that needed to be grown in a greenhouse and then planted in a bed. He preferred plants to be ‘hardy’ and able to thrive and survive on their own without a heavy investment of labor to maintain the garden. Essentially this perspective defined the terms of a ‘wild’ garden and ‘naturalistic’ planting. Perhaps his outlook as an adult started when as a child he had to carry water for plants growing in a greenhouse on the Irish estate where he lived.

            After reading the books that I have on hand over the past few weeks, my appreciation of Robinson deepened. I still do not know as much as I would like about him but I reached one conclusion: He is the sine qua non of garden design for the past 180 years. Without him we might still be mired in a miasma of formal garden design.

©2022 James W. Humphreys. All rights reserved.
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December 1st, 2022

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I had been pronouncing it ‘Gravity’ instead of ‘Grave-Tie’

Which Latin phrase is it? ‘Non sequitur’ or ‘sine qua non’

Hello World!