The “Wild Garden” and the “Nature Garden”—aspects of the garden ideology of William Robinson and Willy Lange

Abstract

The Irish garden writer William Robinson (1838–1935)1 published his ideas about the design and meaning of gardens in numerous articles and books from about 1869; the German garden architect Willy Lange (1864–1941)2 started his literary activities about three decades later. It is not the concern of this article to consider their entire opus; rather, I want to look at some interesting aspects of their ideologies of gardens. Specifically, I focus on similarities between the idea of the wild garden and the English flower garden, as Robinson called it, and Lange's idea of the nature garden (see figures 1 and 2) . Other English and German garden authors who also contributed to these themes cannot be considered here in an adequate way: namely Reginald Blomfield's book The Formal Garden in England (1892), which is a counter-statement to Robinson's ideas about gardens, and the numerous publications of Gertrude Jekyll which had great influence on Robinson.