Country Life
The grand mannner
Peter Quince
For one reason and another, I have been thinking about landscape gardening in these leisurely days of high summer, Almost every inch of the English landscape is an artefact, of course, although it is often hard to remember that it is so. There is a sharp distinction, however, between the man-made landscape of agricultural England, where utility has always guided the maker's hand, and the landscape garden, which belongs to the realm of art as surely as a painting or a piece of music.
I suspect the latter ought to rank as high among this country's artistic attainments over the centuries as any of the more conventionally-applauded genres. If you attend, say, one of the National Trust's famous country houses on a fine day, you could well suppose, judging by the crowds which throng the faithfully-tended grounds, that this branch of art does indeed enjoy such status. Yet this would be an illusion, even though the English liking for a fine garden seems to be one of the few constants in a changing world.
Perhaps the reluctance to equate great gardening with high art stems from the relative decline in its practice. The very term "landscape gardening" is now generally taken to mean nothing more than the camouflaging of a motorway with banks of trees, or the merciful concealment of some slab of commercial architecture by welcome masses of foliage. It was not so when whole tracts of 'countryside were available to the
artist-gardener to serve as his canvas. The metaphor is exact. the great practitioners, Launcelol Brown, Humphrey Renton and se, on, saw themselves as painters oT pictures no less than Claude D
in P
We in these more pinched and restricted times can only envY them the scale and self-assurance with which they went about their work. When I revisited recently one of Brown's finest surviving landscapes, the park at Audley End in Essex, I wondered if anY' one alive today, in the " d,e; veloped " world at least, Couto ever hope to handle a landscaee of such dimensions. All the accus. tomed character is there — tl noble stretch of water, the hills and valleys half-clothed in trees and half-revealed, the carefully'. placed architectural features; but more striking than these is -the sense of a complete miniature world with the eye travelling over long vistas and seeing alWaYs what was meant to be there to form part of the total picture. Such a luxury of space is rapid' ly passing out of the world we .know. No one would expect to make a picture out of a wide stretch of countryside today; where such landscape-pictures still survive they are under Per; petual threat of encroachment, have a friend with a taste for thls sort of thing, and he is LUCKY enough to have a patch of ground, extravagantly large by modern standards, which he has planted and tended with much ellj penditure of time and energY. covet it whenever I see it, an visitors are unfailingly impressed by Its handsomeness and style; yet to Capability Brown it would have seemed a trifle, a pleasing incident on the way to grander things, a quick sketch rather than a fin' ished work. It is futile to regret this decline. The chapter is closed, and We have to live in a country where space is the most precious of coin. ' modities, and where it must inevitably grow more scarce and thus more precious. All the salve' I fancy that within many a count" ry gardener, scratching away meticulously at the modest Pia' which is all these stringent titres, allow, there lurks a dream °I grandeur, in which rivers, forests, lakes and hills are all made td serve the master-artist's will, corn' posed with unfaltering judgement to make up one picture stretchlrl all the way from horizon to hot" zon. Then we come down to earth, and clip the three-foot hedge, which marks the farthest extern of our private landscape. But if the art is now dead, need we be such barbarians as to per mit the spoliation of such rare ex" amples of it as have miraculous survived from the days when lt lived? At Audley End, so I learn' with as near to incredulity as one can get nowadays in such ters, the local authority means !" take over several acres of Caeabllity Brown's noble parkland t° build ... a sewage works. It is as though the oafish inheritor of a_ collection of paintings were to use, a Rembrandt to patch the roof,o'
adog Poor us. Poor CapabiY lit Brown.
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