Ingardening,agarden roomis a secluded and partly enclosed space within a garden that creates a room-like effect.[1]Such spaces have been part ofgarden designfor centuries. Generally they are regarded as different from terraces and patios just outside a building, although in practice these are often the parts of a garden that are most used as a room, with tables and chairs. Walls andhedgesmay form part of the boundaries of a garden room, but plants, usually at least a few feet tall, will do as well.[2]Apart from the entrances to the room, these should normally enclose the space. There may be furniture, especially for sitting down, but this is not essential.
In architecture, the term "garden room" may be used for asunroom,conservatory,or any room with a good view of a garden, or even one decorated with a garden theme.[3]A small single-roomed building for leisure in a garden is usually called asummer house,gazebo,or garden house.
Below a certain size a very small garden can hardly help being room-like, and the term is mostly used for larger gardens, where distinct areas are possible. Garden rooms can introduce variety and structure to a garden, and be suitable spaces for displays that are especially seasonable.[4]In cold or windy areas, the garden room may offer necessary shelter to the plants inside, a factor in their use atHidcote Manor Garden.[5]
The term is not liked by some gardeners, and others consider it to be "overused".[6]
History
editAncient and medieval
edit
Jenny Uglowtalks of the "garden rooms" described byPliny the Youngerin his letters giving long, but difficult to interpret, accounts of his two very large country villa gardens. These were by the sea and in theTuscan hills,the latter with many terraces, and Pliny stresses the views to outside the garden.[7]
Enclosure was "the prime characteristic of all medieval gardens and parks" according toJohn Dixon Hunt,[8]and contemporary illustrations and literary accounts of gardens place great emphasis on the controlled entries to what were very oftenwalled gardens,with further sub-divisions within. Thehortus conclusus,a setting for theVirgin Mary,is the most famous type of these, but the secular "garden of love" type is no less enclosed, and often little larger.[9]
Early Modern
editItalian Renaissance gardens,often on hilly sites with many terraces, called a smallish secluded garden area agiardino segreto( "secret garden" ), a term often found in other languages. In steep Italian gardens they often included theborrowed sceneryof a view over the surrounding landscape.[10]
In theFrench formal gardenof the 17th and 18th centuries, when the garden aspired to reach into the surrounding landscape,[11]much of the space of the further garden away from the house was occupied withbosquets,dense artificial woodland divided into geometric compartments surrounded by high hedges, in large gardens like theGardens of Versailles,as much as 20 feet high. Between and within these compartments paths took the visitor tocabinetsor garden rooms, the word "cabinet"then meaning a room in both French and English, roughly equivalent to the modern"study"or" home office ". Other names weresalles vertesandsalles de verdure( "green rooms" or "rooms of greenery" ). Thesecabinetsusually centred on some feature of interest, such as a statue, fountain, tree or piece oftopiary.The English equivalent, thewilderness,had similar features.[12]
In the gardens of Versailles, designed to be unsurpassable, the bosquet areas centred on a large garden room containing either a large sculptural fountain or some other feature such as a cascade, garden amphitheatre, or colonnade. The bosquets arenamed after these features.The leading French textbook of the period,La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage,byDezallier d'Argenville(1709) illustrates plans for more modest but still complicated "Cabinets et Salons pour des bosquets" with benches and central features of fountains, small trees, or topiary, and between one and four ways in. d'Argenville shows all the entries as straight walks, but the English gardens illustrated byJan Kiparound 1705–1720 often show curving paths leading to the rooms inside the "quarters" of a wilderness, which would make the occupants invisible until a new person was very close; an example isCastle Howard.[13]
In English Baroque gardens, as well as garden rooms in wildernesses, there was a fashion for shelteredflower gardensin a style that was believed (rightly or wrongly) to beDutch.[14]
20th century
editIn the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was an increase in the use of garden rooms, part of a reaction to grand flowing Victorian styles, and an interest in traditional Englishcottage gardenstyle.[15]AfterWorld War I,influential new English gardens laid out as a series of compartments includedSissinghurst Castle Garden,Hidcote,[16]andTintinhull(from 1933, byPhyllis Reiss).[17]Sissinghurst was mostly planted in the 1930s, except for what is perhaps the most famous of the "rooms", the White Garden, planted in 1949–50, though planned beforeWorld War II.Much of the area of the garden had been a larger country house that was mostly demolished, and some walls remained at a height useful for garden divisions.Vita Sackville-West,with her husbandHarold Nicolsonthe designer of her garden, described the spaces as "a series of privacies...all a series of escapes from the world, giving the impression of cumulative escape".[18]
Dumbarton Oaksin Washington DC, designed byBeatrix Farrandfrom 1922 onwards, is a larger garden (27 acres) laid out "as a series of outdoor rooms".[19]Like Sissinghurst, thegarden of NinfainCentral Italypartly uses ruins to structure garden spaces, in this case those of an entire village.[20]
Notes
edit- ^Kerr Forsyth, 360; Lexico, 3
- ^Lexico, 3
- ^Lexico, 1
- ^Kerr Forsyth, 360
- ^Uglow, 251
- ^Kerr Forsyth, 360
- ^Uglow, 10–11; "Pliny the Younger's villas and garden letters", with text and commentary fromHistory of Garden Art,byMarie-Luise Gothein,1913 (in German, 1928 in English); Hobhouse, 29–30, 39
- ^Leslie, 19, Hunt's chapter
- ^Leslie, 28–29
- ^The Oxford Companion to Gardens,eds.Geoffrey Jellicoe,Susan Jellicoe,Patrick Goode and Michael Lancaster, 226, 284, 1986, OUP, ISBN 0192861387
- ^Uglow, 115-117; Hobhouse, 46
- ^Jacques, 100–102, 156–157; Hobhouse, 176–179
- ^As illustrated in the third volume ofVitruvius Britannicusin 1725– this is not by Kip;Image.Hobhouse, 177
- ^The Dutchness of these is now a matter of controversy among garden historians, but the term was used at the time. Uglow, 120–122
- ^Uglow, 220–228
- ^Uglow, 251–254; Williams and Drew, 43; Hobhouse, 294–296 (Hidcote)
- ^Penn, 62-66
- ^Uglow, 251–254, quote 253; Penn, 62
- ^Hobhouse, 312–313, 312 quoted
- ^Hobhouse, 314–315
References
edit- Kerr Forsyth, Holly (ed),The Constant Gardener,2007, Melbourne University Publishing,google books
- Hobhouse, Penelope,Plants in Garden History,2004, Pavilion Books,ISBN1862056609
- Jacques, David,Gardens of Court and Country: English Design 1630-1730,2017, Yale University Press, ISBN 9780300222012
- Leslie, Michael (ed.),A Cultural History of Gardens: Vol 2, In the Medieval Age,2016, Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN 9781350009905
- Lexico,"Garden room" definition
- Penn, Helen,An Englishwoman's Garden,1993, BBC Books, ISBN 0563364300
- Uglow, Jenny,A Little History of British Gardening,2004, Chatto & Windus,ISBN0701169281
- Williams, Bunny and Drew, Nancy,On Garden Style,1998 (1st edn), Simon & Schuster, ISBN 9780684826059,google books
