Pictures+and+words

[|The close-locked garden] [|Picturing 'Arcadia'] [|Naturalism and realism] [|Landscapes of ideas] [|Words] [|Picturing urbanised nature]**
 * [|Picturing paradise]

**Picturing paradise**

The symbol of the garden recurs throughout the cultures of the globe – from the various incarnations of the Garden of Eden in paintings, tapestries and literature across the Judaeo-Christian world, to formal Islamic gardens and their philosophical counterparts in the Far East, whether they be classical Chinese parklands or Zen landscape design. Gardens have also played a talismanic role in British culture, offering fertile imagery for art and literature across the centuries, and acting as a barometer for the country’s changing social and cultural landscape.

In Western iconography the image of the garden has been shaped and defined by the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, the original sinners thrown out of their paradise for tasting the forbidden fruit, and cast into the wilderness.

It is surprising, however, how little description the Book of Genesis gives of the original garden: //'The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, away to the East, and there he put the man whom he had formed. The Lord God made trees spring from the ground, all trees pleasant to look at and good for food; and in the middle of the garden he set the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There was a river flowing from Eden to water the garden'.// This rudimentary outline has given rise to many interpretations of the mythical garden, often depicted in early religious paintings as a rich, verdant orchard, full of flowers and trees. The imagery was enriched by the florid verses of the Song of Solomon, where the dialogue between bride and bridegroom is a contest of compliments using the metaphor of the garden. The bridegroom calls his love “an orchard full of rare fruits”, and uses the now well-known metaphor of his virginal bride as a secret garden: “My sister, my bride, is a garden close-locked, a fountain sealed.”


 * The close-locked garden**

The “close-locked” garden, or //hortus conclusus//, as it became known in the Renaissance, was one of the most infuential early garden images. As metaphor for virginity, as well as a reference to the prelapsarian paradise, it appears in many early religious paintings and tapestries. In works such as //The Garden of Paradise// (c.1415) by the Master of Oberrheinische Kunst, the Virgin Mary sits safely with her companions in a garden with castellated walls; they read, pick fruit and play musical instruments, surrounded by blossoming flowers. The painting is not just a leisure scene, but also an image for religious meditation, dense with Christian symbolism such as the slayed dragon of evil and the fountain, source of spiritual life and salvation. The physical arrangement of the Renaissance garden bore a close resemblance to a stage set, a similarly enclosed and contained area for playing out fantasies and dramas, a space of transformation, dream and fantasy. However, while the early garden emphasised small-scale, enclosed spaces, later ones took inspiration from the open expanse of the Biblical wilderness. The opposition between garden and wilderness reflected man’s complex relationship to nature, where an impulse to shape, tame and control the natural world lived alongside a desire to yield to its wildness and its danger – a duality that has shaped and influenced the way gardens have been visualised, both in life and art.


 * Picturing 'Arcadia'**

Following the example of the classic landscape artists such as Claude Lorrain and Poussin, British painters such as Richard Wilson, Joshua Reynolds and J M W Turner moulded, refined and ordered nature into stylised Arcadian scenes. Here, nature is the backdrop for the dramas of man, artfully tamed and idealised according to the pastoral model of classical literature. Richard Wilson was probably the best known exponent of this genre in Britain, painting many country house landscapes, such as //Wilton House from the South East// (1758–1760). But despite the contrived quality of these landscapes to the modern eye, a new interest in naturalism emerged in the dawn of the Romantic era. “Nature” was the new ideal, symbolic of an innocence and purity free from the vanity and corruption of man – untamed, and therefore untainted.

Taking their cue from painting, eighteenth-century landscape designers drew up ambitious plans for the physical alteration of nature. “Improvers” such as William Kent, Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton (all of whom began their careers as artists) used classical landscape paintings as their templates. The word “landscape” became an interchangeable term for either a painted scene or a sculpted parkland, and the idea of the “prospect”, a bird’s eye view of the garden that derived from picture composition, was introduced into the gardening lexicon. This age of “picturesque” design gave birth to the dramatic parklands of country estates such as Stourhead, Stowe and Blenheim Palace, where grand vistas sweep down to man-made lakes, only to rise up again to classical follies or fountains. And the “wilderness”, an area of wild woodland within a sculpted parkland, became a trademark of fashionable design. This inverted the tradition of the wilderness being a contrast, rather than complement, to the Garden of Eden, and brought it within the enclosed and cultivated garden.

While these gardens were like stage sets, they also had more practical, social functions, offering clear demonstrations of wealth and status. It is not surprising, therefore, that many artists were commissioned to paint these “stages”, often with the proprietor as the central protagonist. One of the earliest examples of this in Britain is John Michael Wright’s //The Family of Sir Robert Vyner// (1673), in which the physical extent of his formal garden can be glimpsed in the background, replete with statuesque putti and grand gateway. It was a clear signal not only of Vyner’s cultivation and taste, but also his wealth, power and status, implied by his ability to subdue nature. This convention has continued until the present day, tracing a line through the landscape backdrop in Thomas Gainsborough’s //Mr and Mrs Andrews// (1748–1749) to the stylised settings of //Hello!// magazine photo shoots.


 * Naturalism and realism**

During the Romantic era, however, the garden became seen as a worthy subject in its own right. Naturalism and realism were combined with the garden’s traditional function as religious or social symbol. In Samuel Palmer’s //In a Shoreham Garden// (left: 1829), a mysterious female figure wanders in the background of a domestic garden. A blousy pink blossom tree crowns a scene abundant with produce and flowers, painted with light, loose brushwork. The painting is a believable image of a real garden and yet, by drawing on traditional depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Palmer imbues the ordinary scene with a sacred atmosphere.

Palmer’s mystical depictions of nature had a profound influence on subsequent artists such as Stanley Spencer, a key figure of the Romantic revival in the first half of the twentieth century.

Like Palmer, Spencer used familiar, domestic subject matter as a vehicle for profound religious or mystical meditation. Gardens often feature in his works, and he set several early Biblical scenes in his home environment at Cookham in Berkshire. In //Zacharias and Elizabeth// (left: 1913–1914) Spencer represents the story of the Archangel Gabriel’s visit to the priest Zacharias to inform him that his wife will conceive a child through God, foreshadowing the Virgin birth. He sets the scene in the context of an afternoon’s gardening in the home counties – with different figures mowing, pruning and clipping around the protagonists. A strange, gleaming white wall in the foreground enfolds the figures into a modern-day //hortus conclusus//, drawing conspicuously on the traditional symbolism of the virginal close-locked garden.


 * Landscapes of ideas**

A few decades later, Paul Nash also adopted the garden as a talismanic symbol in his work. For Nash, the garden represented a place where man and nature meet, a subject which fascinated him throughout his career. At the time when he painted //Landscape at Iden// (1929), he was experimenting with the avant-garde styles of abstraction and Surrealism. The conflict between geometric order and uninhibited dream imagery collides in this picture, which seems to meditate on the traditional opposition between wild nature and the ordered garden. An orchard of regimented, closely pruned trees fills the background, and in the foreground various enigmatic fence structures enclose a pile of chopped wood and a basket holding logs. But although the title makes a pun on Iden/Eden (there’s even a snake in Nash’s picture), it is clearly no paradise. The felled, chopped and pruned trees in //Landscape at Iden// present an image of nature that Nash felt had become denatured – a powerful and disillusioned postscript to his First World War canvases of desolate, broken tree stumps, metaphors for fallen soldiers on the battlefield. For Nash, the garden was an emotional space which had profound personal resonance.

From the Middle Ages, pictures have been an important means of revealing the uses of gardens and the ideas that motivate humans to create them. According to Dixon Hunt:
 * Pictures help us understand place-making as a spatial art (e.g.bird's-eye views).
 * Pictures document the difference between gardens and adjacent zones of human manipulation of nature (e.g. three natures idea)
 * Pictures capture and celebrate formal effects whether natural or artificial (e.g. interplay of flat lawns, broad gravel paths and wide terrace)
 * Pictures reveal interplay of the arts of maintenance and design (e.g. workers in the garden, ruined and lost gardens).
 * Pictures show how gardens have functioned as theatres and sites of role-playing (e.g. promenades, assignations, entertainments)
 * Pictures highlight the blurring of private and public worlds (e.g. public and no-go areas).
 * Pictures register magical or sacred meanings (e.g. presence of dieties, lovers, animals).
 * Pictures present the bounty of nature (e.g. anything panoramic and expansive that shows off a garden's botanical and social resources).

These statements define a mixture of concepts, some of which have practical value but most are connected with human status and its display. Dominance over nature is the theme they have in common. Peter Timms, in his book ‘Making Nature’ tells the story of Anne Whiston Spirn, a lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, who, at the beginning of each of her courses, asks her students to write a short essay defining nature. At the end of the course, she repeats the exercise to see what they have learnt. Almost invariably she finds that, although their final essays are more articulate and reflective than those they wrote the first time, the students’ ideas have hardly changed. From this she concludes ‘that ideas of nature are deeply held beliefs, closely tied to religious values, even for those people who do not consider themselves ‘religious’. By the age of twenty-five, most students’ ideas of nature seem set or at least not modified greatly by a single course on the subject. This is an interesting position from which to approach place-making as social behaviour by which people insert themselves into a highly personalised natural world in order to display their individuality. They do this according to their attitude towards their particular view of the balance between nature and culture; their position on the spectrum between wilderness and artifice.

As personality markers no two gardens are the same. For neighbours starting out with virtually identical environmental conditions, their gardens will quickly diverge to become expressions of idiosyncratic choice of style and the appications of purchasing power. Human garden-makers are essentially social creatures and the kinds of personality traits they exhibit through their gardens can be seen to derive from the social world which they inhibit. Even individuality itself is argued to be a product of a certain kind of personal identity.

Roger Fry, a member of the Bloomsbury group of British artists and writers observes that “nearly all our ‘art’ is made, bought, and sold merely for its value as an indication of social status”. If the maker of garden-as-art can somehow break free from the herd, there is still the barrier of authority that limits his choices as a buyer.

These constraints in garden-making also apply to the making of paintings about gardens.

Paintings often invite us to view a garden as a magical or sacred place; the home of mythological or Christian dieties acting out fantasies.

The painting on the left is one of a series of garden dieties in the 'Groves of Versailles' done by Jean Cotelle 1693). The painter represented the bosquets as so many settings where the gods of Olympus and the protagonists of Ovid’s Metamorphoses make their appearances. He thus illustrated the imaginary world governed by supernatural beings, at once poetic and political, guiding the myth of the Sun King, Louis XIV.

In the King’s absence, the bosquets were visited, after viewing the west and south parterres, according to an itinerary that he himself had dictated and placed in a sequence that depended also on the fairly rare flow of water in the fountains. This royal guided tour was part of the agenda for the court to dominate aristocratic society.

The most consistently pictured idea of a garden's special magical powers involves the meeting of amorous lovers in an erotic playground. On the left is an anonymous painting of a rendez-vous in a Persian garden of the Isfahan School of miniature painting c 1600.

What are we to make of the three naked women in an elaborate fountain and pergola garden presented as a woodcut in Hypernerotomachia Poliphili, published 1499 in Venice? This was not an expression of the expected response of women visitors to the garden, but it was an arcadian theme that cropped up repeatedly, eventually culminating in the art of Cezanne and Matisse.

The //Story of the Rose// is an allegorical poem of chivalric love composed in France at the height of the age of chivalry and courtly love by Guillaume de Lorris. The author’s declared intention was to expound the “whole art of love”. He began writing in the late 1230s, but left the work unfinished when he died around 1278. The very long poem was completed, some 40 years later, by Jean de Meun.

It was written and illuminated by the artist known as The Master of the Prayer Books of c.1500. He illustrated the story with 92 brilliant miniatures, of which four are half-page paintings with decorative borders. Enchanting settings, rich pageantry and elaborate costumes conjure up the lavish and cultivated life-style of the royal court of Burgundy in the late 15th century.

The earlier part of the poem tells of the Lover’s quest for the Rose, which symbolises his lady’s love. Guillaume relates the story as if it were a dream, speaking through the voice of the Lover. Rising one May morning the he strolls along a riverbank, enjoying the sights and sounds of a new spring. The Lover’s footsteps take him to a lush orchard enclosed by a high wall.

The walled garden belongs to a nobleman called Déduit – the Old French word for pleasure. It is here the Lover must seek his elusive Rose. In the quest, he is tutored in the art of courtship by the winged God of Love and encounters a series of allegorical characters. Each is an expression of the object of his affections. Together they provide a charming commentary on the psychology of romantic love.

In the picture on the left there are lutenists and singers in a garden; the lover being shown the entrance to the garden by Lady Idleness.

In contrast, small suburban and cottage gardens feature prominently in the work of Stanley Spencer, particularly in his 'Domestic Scenes' series of 1935-1936 which concentrated on two influential periods of his life, first his childhood, then his marriage to Hilda. The first excursions into these memories was in Chatto & Windus Almanack for 1927. The first illustration to April is //Cutting the Hedge.// Spencer returned to the subject a decade later.

The 'Domestic Scenes' formed part of the 'Marriage at Cana' section for his projected Church House. In this case, the composition is based on a childhood memory of his elder sister Annie in the garden of 'Fernlea' exchanging gifts over the hedge with her husband next door. The arms of the girls are echoed by the branches of the trees, a form of repetitive pattern in which Spencer delighted. He later wrote that he intended to convey 'the different feelings evoked by the two gardens' of Fernlea and Belmont. The artist commented on this picture for his dealer Dudley Tooth:

//'The garden as it was years ago at Fernlea, Cookham, now all changed and altered... It shows the privet hedge which divided out hedge from the cousins next door. Beyond the wall is an orchard. I do not remember much in the way of flowers in the garden but there were plenty in the next door garden, the family being a family of girls. The girl ... is handing some tulips over the hedge to the girl ... who is standing near a dog kennel where the branches of an apple tree reach over the hedge. The spectator is supposed to be looking from above the hedge into both gardens. The dark thin branches on the right belong to the yew tree...'//

Stanley Spencer's figurative paintings are loaded with private mythologies in which spaces with plants are dominant. To the left is part of a painting of cottages at Burghclere (1929) where he lived in the early days of his marriage to Hilda and worked on his murals for the Burghclere memorial chapel. The composition uses gardens to emphasise the closed spaces of domestic isolation.

In the contemporary art world, for more than 20 years, Anthony Green has continued to paint stories from his personal life. His memories, dreams, and actual events are all included in his work. He said,

//"My concerns are universal, sometimes tasteless, frequently artless, but never dulling. I wanted to paint adolescence, bicycles, carpets, dog, Eric, failure, Greens, hair, irritation, Joscelyne [his step-father], kisses, Mary [his wife], nasturtiums, optimism, .... quiet, roses, sexuality, tenderness, undies, vice, walls, x-shapes, Yvonne [his aunt], and much, much more."//

The picture on the left is entitled 'The Enchanted Garden', 20th Wedding Anniversary'. The scene is set in his Cambridgeshire garden, which he has painted well over twenty times. The composition suggests the rich and complex explorations and experiences of a closed space with plants including magical, spiritual and sexual associations.


 * Words**

Writing about gardens is more effective than picturing in exploring, explaining and sharing the associations, feelings and ideas that space-making promotes

In this 13th century image, by the Chinese painter/caligrapher Ch'ien Husuan, of the poet Wang Hsi-chih (303-361) watching geese on a lake, we see that the artist has brought together 'painting places', 'place-making' and 'writing about such places' in one holistic concept. Not only that, but we are left wandering what the poet is actually seeing in his view across the lake and how he will turn it into a philosophical statement about the place of humankind in nature.

//Looking up: blue sky's end. Looking down: green water's brim. Deep solitude: rimless view. Before the eyes, A pattern displays itself. Immense, Transformation! A million differences, none out of tune!//

Wang Hsi-chih's poem, written nearly two millennia ago, encapsulates the idea of the world being an environmental whole, with all its parts in harmony. Making a place with plants is a physical expression of this idea. It is one person's view of a relationship with the physical world in its fullest complexity.

The poem reminds us that it is through writing that we gain insight into the 'how' and 'why' of our efforts to turn 'space' into 'place'. Writing about the Villa d'Este, Anthony Hecht condenses the essence of gardening to the futility of trying to control the uncontrollable.

//For thus it was designed: Controlled disorder at the heart Of everything, the paradox, the old Oxymoronic itch to set the formal structures Within a natural context, where the tension lectures Us on our mortal state, and by controlled Disorder, labours to keep art From being too refined.//

The literary power of oxymorons such as 'beautiful tyrant' or 'angelical fiend' really do sum up the battle of the gardener with soil, climate and topography to achieve a plantsperson's victory. This battleground is defined differently for different places because of variations in soil and climate. These are the major management factors that have to be controlled to make the gardener's outcome match his plan. It has been argued by Dixon Hunt that this is the 'noise' which prevents us seeing a fundamental idea behind place-making with plants, which he calls the 'tune' of the garden.

Until recent times European gardens were composed to sacred tunes. In ancient Greece, gardens were part of a living religion and mainly coincide with sacred spaces and with groves dedicated to particular gods. They are known to us mainly through poetical texts. In a paradoxical way, the meadow with its flowers, which generally represents the center of these sanctuaries, is associated with either the power of Eros protected by Aphrodite, or death under the jurisdiction of Hades and his spouse Persephone. The garden-groves of ancient Greece can be understood as ritual spaces, provoking an important poetical activity. These poetical acts, as ritual performances involve themes of love or death controlled by the divinities.

From the "Homeric Hymn to Demeter" to the golden lamellae found on the corpses buried in different graves all over Greece, texts give instructions to access the privileged domain of the Isle of the Blessed with its meadow consecrated to Persephone. Performers were generally women and men initiated in the mysteries of Dionysos. On the other hand, a poem by Sappho provokes the epiphany of Aphrodite herself in the garden and grove where a chorus of girls lead by the poetess is singing and dancing. The comparison with other erotic poems of the same period leads to the sanctuary of Aphrodite "in the gardens" on the northern slope of the Acropolis in Athens or, much later, to the garden of Philetas imagined by Longus in its erotic romance. If the first is the site of a ritual of initiation relevant for the change of status of young Athenian girls, the second has an initiatory function which is purely narrative and literary, anticipating in some way the landscapes reshaped by Rousseau.


 * Picturing urbanised nature**

Many contemporary artists have since focused on the subject of the garden obliquely, seeking out the marginal or incidental manifestations of nature, such as roadside weeds, overgrown back gardens or flowers sprouting unexpectedly from concrete. In Michael Landy’s recent etchings of common city weeds, each arbitrary and transient sprout is lovingly rendered with filigree delicacy and care, but they are presented as themselves, with no context. Where gardens are represented directly, artists often focus on formlessness rather than structure. Lucian Freud’s magnificent, almost photographic paintings of London back gardens present the same bleak candour about the appearance of nature in the modern world as his depictions of the naked human body. Although Freud’s use of indoor plants in portraits seems to symbolise the wild within the domestic, in //Wasteground with Houses, Paddington// (1970–1972) the garden is neither cultivated, nor run wild, neither formal enclosed space, nor wilderness. The tangled overgrown plants merge and marry the twisted metal and refuse, creating a mongrel scene of ugliness and neglect, a sharp contrast to the organised brick and paintwork of the elegant townhouses behind. Freud’s gardens, like his bodies, are //memento mori//, reminders of what once was, or what could have been.

Art of the garden today has lost the traditional religious symbolism and social agenda that informed the imagery of the past. However, gardens and parks remain the primary point of contact with nature for many people, and therefore still offer fertile subject matter for the ongoing debates about man’s relationship with the natural world. ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, the title of the exhibition at Tate Britain by Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas (until 31 May), is a verbal corruption of “in the garden of Eden”, and the show includes several works that muse on the idea of a lost paradise. In Hirst’s latest diorama //The Collector// (2003–2004), an animatronic figure of a botanist/collector examines butterfly wings under a microscope, while flowers bloom and butterflies flutter about him. Hirst demonstrates, once again, that imprisoning, controlling and destroying are unavoidable aspects of human contact with nature.

Perhaps Wolfgang Tillmans’s evocative //Lily & oak// (1999) remains the best example of today’s garden; a modern-day //hortus conclusus// which shows the persistence of wild nature within the confined, inhospitable space of a typical urban window box. This incidental Eden makes no grand religious or social claims, but offers instead a simple image of hope and beauty.