Cottage-inspired+gardens

//The Victorian Period and The Arts and Crafts Movement// With the idea of gardens as nature being regarded as a mistake of past generations, garden architects once again sought relics and ornaments from the Renaissance period. Victorian 'Italianate' designs were a mixture of Italian, French and Dutch Renaissance fashions. The Industrial Revolution had made materials available to the minorities - metals for making quality tools and non-taxed glass enabled the creation of many glasshouses affordable - and in the eyes of the English middleclass, essential. Working on the theory of showing a garden as art, 'bedding schemes' were introduced - non-native (and therefore, in the Victorian mind, 'unnatural') plants were closely grouped together. By the 1860's, the flower bed designs had become so much larger, gaudy and garish that the idea of 'carpet bedding' evolved - rather than flowers, shrubs and succulent plants with coloured foliage were massed together and clipped into elaborate patterns, and the whole design system seemed to get totally out of hand! Finally, by the close of the 19th Century, the impression that the garden could either be designed along formal lines by the architect or be informal and made by the gardener was established. However, this was all to change as the 20th Century dawned.

With the arrival of the Arts and Crafts design period, the theory of formal design and informal planting converged, mainly due to the ideals of Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens. Garden design was no longer for architect or gardener - it had developed into a subject for architect and gardener. Jekyll, a gardener, and Lutyens, an architect, met in 1889 and formed a close partnership, which designed and created over 100 commissions. Working together they created a new style of English garden, the most well known being Jekyll's home at Munstead House, Folly Farm, and Marsh Court. Jekyll blurred the distinction between formal and informal approaches to gardening, and Lutyens designed the 'hard landscape'. Their influence on English gardens was profound. They created areas that were inventively geometrical using planting that was simultaneously disciplined and profuse.

//Modern Gardens and Garden Design// The modern British garden was developed after the Second World War. A very influential Californian designer, Thomas Church, was the first person to suggest that //'Gardens are for people rather than a location in which to only cultivate plants'//. It is Church who created the modern design approach using four key principles: unity, function, simplicity and scale, and developed a whole new garden form, which made gardens detailed but practical and simple with little emphasis on planting.

//"Garden making, like many other art forms, draws on the past as it looks to the future. Tradition and innovation are the warp and weft of its history. A garden design is a visual statement of the relationship among human beings, their natural environment and prevailing cultural values. There will always be a handful of eccentrics with the means to turn their 'dream gardens' into reality, and there will always be those so imbued with material success they cannot resist turning their 'turf' into a status symbol. But small-scale gardeners, whether they live in urban, suburban or rural parts of the world, share a common goal: to create a retreat, however limited in space or charm, that offers sanctuary from the tensions of modern life, a place where people can once again relate to nature and feel the pulse of our living, growing planet'//.