THE "OLD ENGLISH GARDEN" AND THE SEARCH FOR A NEW STYLE IN THEORETICAL TREATISES OF THE LATE 19TH - EARLY 20TH CENTURIES

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, landscape architects in England began a discussion about the revival of the "old English garden". Each of them offered their own image of the olden times and their own way of the new realisation. Three options stand out among them. Reginald Blomfield advocated the "formal garden" and created forms in which the plant world was enclosed among laconic rectangular walls, pools and parterres. His opponent William Robinson put forward the idea of a "wild garden" in which regular parterres were replaced by sods of wild herbs. Harold Pito substantiated the type of a small regular garden in the frame of Italian architectural forms. The creative collaboration of architect Edwin Lutyens and florist Gertrude Jekyll provided examples of "rural" architecture using natural stone; there were rich combinations of shapes, textures and colours of flowering plants. All these searches took place at a turning point. Using the nostalgic pathos of the Arts and Crafts movement as a starting point, the architects set the stage for 20th-century landscape solutions, including the “herb garden” by contemporary Dutch designer Piet Oudolf.