Wanderlust: A History of Walking (14 page)

A revolution was under way, however, in gardens. The medieval garden had been surrounded by high walls, in part for security in unstable times. In pictures of these gardens, the occupants most often sit or recline, listening to music or conversing (the enclosed garden had been, since the Song of Songs, a metaphor for the female body, and at least since the rise of the courtly love tradition, the site of much courtship and flirtation). Flowers, herbs, fruit-bearing trees, fountains, and musical instruments made them places that speak to all the senses, and the world outside this voluptuous sanctum seemed to provide more than enough exercise, since medieval nobles were still bodily involved in military and household matters. As the world became safer and the aristocratic residence became more a palace than a fortress, the gardens of Europe began to expand. Flowers and fruit were disappearing from the gardens; it was the eye to which these expanded realms appealed. The Renaissance garden was a place in which one could take a walk as well as sit, and the Baroque garden grew vast. Just as walking was exercise for those who need no longer work, so these vast gardens were cultivated landscapes that need no longer produce anything more than mental, physical, and social stimulation for walkers.

Were the Baroque garden not so ostentatious a display of wealth and power, its abstractness could be called austere. Trees and hedges were forced into squares and cones; paths, avenues, and walks were laid out as straight lines; water was pumped into fountains or poured into geometrical pools. A platonic order, a superimposition of the ideal on the messy material of the real, triumphed. Such gardens extended the geometry and symmetry of architecture into the organic world. But they still provided opportunities for informal and private behavior: throughout their history, one of the major functions of aristocratic gardens was to give people a place to retreat from the household into contemplation or private conversation. In England, William and Mary added new gardens to Hampton Court in 1699, gardens in which one could walk for a mile before reaching the wall. Walks, or paths, were becoming increasingly important parts of gardens, and they are indirect evidence of the increasing popularity of walking (in this context, “a walk” meant a path broad enough for two to walk abreast; it could
be called a conversational route). English traveler and chronicler Celia Fiennes wrote of a garden she visited near the beginning of the eighteenth century, “There is gravel walks and grass and close walks, there is one walk all the length of the Garden called the Crooked Walke, of grass well cut and rowled, it is indented in and out in corners and so is the wall, which makes you thinke you are at the end of the walke several times before you are.” But the walls of the garden were disappearing, and the distinction between it and the landscape beyond became harder and harder to find. Renaissance Italian gardens had been built by preference upon slopes that gave views of the countryside beyond, connecting the garden to the world, but French and English gardens seldom had such settings. The line of sight only extended to the garden wall, then eventually through a variety of openings in the garden wall.

When the ha-ha came into being in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the walls came down in Britain. A ditch relatively invisible from any distance, the ha-ha—so named because strollers were said to exclaim “Ha ha!” in surprise when they came upon it—provided an invisible barrier that allowed the garden's inhabitants to gaze into the distance uninterrupted. Where the eye went, the walker would soon follow. Most English estates consisted of a series of increasingly controlled spaces: the park, the garden, and the house. Originally hunting preserves, parks remained as a kind of buffer zone between the leisure classes and the agricultural land and workers around them and often provided timber and grazing space. The garden was typically a much smaller space surrounding the house. Susan Lasdun, in her history of these parks, writes of the straight avenues of trees planted in parks and gardens in the seventeenth century: “These avenues provided the shade and shelter for walks which, having been made fashionable by Charles II, were now becoming de rigueur in parks. . . . Certainly the liking for air and exercise was already considered an ‘English' taste. Walks were now laid out by private owners in their country parks, and walking became as much a part of the pleasure of a park as hunting, driving and riding. The walks themselves were made increasingly interesting, with aesthetic considerations developing from the simple static vista from a window or terrace, to something that took account of a more mobile point of view. . . . The walker in fact made a circuit, and in the eighteenth century this was to become the standard manner for viewing gardens and parks. The days when it was only safe to walk on the castle terrace—the allure—had long since passed.”

The formal garden, with its patterns made of clipped hedges, geometric pools, and trees in orderly ranks, had suggested that nature was a chaos on which men imposed order (though starting in Italy in the Renaissance, paintings of unaltered landscapes, if not the unaltered land itself, were appreciated). In England the garden would become less and less formal as the eighteenth century progressed, and this idea of naturalistic landscaping that would be called the
jardin anglais,
the English garden, or the landscape garden is one of the great English contributions to Western culture. As the visual barrier that separated it from its surroundings vanished, the design of the garden became less distinctly separate too. In 1709 Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, had effused, “O glorious Nature! Supremely Fair, and sovereignly Good! . . . I shall no longer resist the Passion growing in me for Things of a natural kind where neither Art nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoiled their genuine Order, by breaking in upon that primitive State. Even the rude Rocks, the mossy Caverns, the irregular unwrought Grottos and broken Falls of waters, with all the horrid Graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be the more engaging, and appear with a Magnificence beyond the formal Mockery of Princely Gardens.” Rhetoric raced ahead of practice. It would be many more decades before princely gardens gave way to wilderness. But Shaftesbury's optimistic view of nature as inherently good joined with the optimism that men could appropriate, improve upon, or invent nature in their gardens.

“Poetry, Painting, and Gardening, or the science of Landscape, will forever by men of Taste be deemed Three Sisters, or the Three New Graces who dress and adorn nature,” famously declared Horace Walpole, the wealthy aesthete who did much to inculcate romantic tastes in his peers. One of the premises of this declaration is that gardening is as much an art as the more traditionally respected practices of poets and painters, and the period was a sort of golden age for attention to gardens—or a kind of age of incubation, in which the taste for nature was hatched out of those gardens, poems, and paintings. Another premise is that nature needs to be dressed and adorned, at least in the garden, and paintings suggested some of the ways in which this could be done. Among the influences on the emerging English landscape garden were the seventeenth-century Italian landscapes of Claude Lorrain, Nicholas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa, with their rolling ground stretching toward far horizons, their clumps of feathery trees framing the distance, their serene bodies of water and their classical buildings
and ruins (and, in Rosa's case, the cliffs, torrents, and bandits that made him the most gothic of the three). Pillared temples and Palladian bridges were added to make English gardens resemble the Italian campagna of these paintings and to suggest that England was heir to Rome's virtues and beauties. “All gardening is landscape painting,” said Alexander Pope, and people were learning to look at landscape in gardens as they had learned to look at landscape in paintings.

And though architectural items—ruins, temples, bridges, obelisks—continued to be sprinkled over gardens for many decades, the subject of gardens was becoming nature itself—but a very specific version of nature, nature as a visual spectacle of plants and water and space, a serene thing to be contemplated serenely. Unlike the formal garden and the painting, which had a single ideal point of view from which they could be regarded, the English landscape garden “asked to be explored, its surprises and unsuspected corners to be discovered on foot,” writes garden historian John Dixon Hunt. Carolyn Bermingham adds, in her history of the relations between class and landscape, “Whereas the French formal garden was based on a single axial view from the house, the English garden was a series of multiple oblique views that were meant to be experienced while one walked through it.” To use anachronistic terms, the garden was becoming more cinematic than pictorial; it was designed to be experienced in motion as a series of compositions dissolving into each other rather than as a static picture. It was now designed aesthetically as well as practically for walkers, and walking and looking were beginning to become linked pleasures.

There were other factors in the increasing naturalization of the garden. Perhaps the most important was the equation of the landscape garden with English liberty. The English aristocrats cultivating a taste for nature were, in a sense, politically positioning themselves and their social order as natural, in contrast to French artifice. Thus their pursuit of country pastimes, their penchant for portraits of themselves in the landscape, their creation of naturalistic gardens, their cultivation of a taste for landscape, all had a political subtext, as Bermingham has so brilliantly pointed out. Yet other influences include reports of Chinese gardens, in which the paths and waterways were sinuous and winding, the overall effect celebrating rather than subduing natural complexity. Neither the early chinoiseries nor the imitations of nature bore much resemblance to their originals, but the intent was there, and evolving. Finally, this changing taste manifests an extraordinary confidence. The formal, enclosed garden and the castle are
corollaries to a dangerous world from which one needs to be protected literally and aesthetically. As the walls come down, the garden proposes that there is already an order in nature and that it is in harmony with the “natural” society enjoying such gardens. The growing taste for ruins, mountains, torrents, for situations provoking fear and melancholy, and for artwork about all these things suggests that life had become so placidly pleasant for England's privileged that they could bring back as entertainment the terrors people had once strived so hard to banish. Too, private experience and informal art were blooming elsewhere, notably in the rise of the novel.

The exemplary garden for this evolution is Stowe in Buckingham. Stowe itself went through most of the phases of the English garden in the eighteenth century and stands now as a kind of lexicon of eighteenth-century gardening, from its temples, grotto, hermitage, and bridges to its lake and landscaping. It had some of the earliest chinoiserie and Gothic-revival architecture in England. Its owner, Viscount Cobham, had replaced the formal “parlour garden” made in 1680 with a far larger formal garden that he slowly revised and erased as the new century advanced. First the Elysian Fields, with their Temples of British Worthies and of Ancient and Modern Virtue, mentioned in the preceding chapter, were transformed into something with softer, more undulating lines, and the rest of the garden eventually followed. Straight walks became serpentine, and their walkers no longer promenaded but wandered. Christopher Hussey describes Stowe, the political capital of the Whigs, as transforming politics into garden architecture, loosening the formal landscape design “into harmony with the age's humanism, its faith in disciplined freedom, its respect for natural qualities, its belief in the individual, whether man or tree, and its hatred of tyranny whether in politics or plantations.” Most of the great landscape architects of the age worked for Cobham, and many of the great poets and writers were among his guests. And the gardens continually expanded, annexing dozens of acres at a time. “Within thirty years,” summarizes one of the garden's historians, “his taste had moved from a preoccupation with regular arrangements of terraced lawns, statues and straight paths . . . to an essay in three-dimensional landscape painting, the creation of an ideal landscape.”

Celebrated in many poems, pictures, and journals, Stowe was a central site in the cultural foment of the era, both as a subject and a retreat. “O lead me to the wide-extended walks / The fair majestic paradise of Stowe . . . While there with
th' enchanted round I walk / The regulated wild,” wrote James Thomson, a guest during most of 1734 and 1735, in the “Autumn” section of his poem
The Seasons.
This enormously successful poem with its blank verse describing the changing year and minor dramas in the landscape probably did more than any other literary work to inculcate a taste for scenery; in the nineteenth century J.M. W. Turner was still appending big chunks of the poem to his paintings. Pope wrote at length of Stowe's glories too, and in a letter described a typical day at Stowe in the 1730s: “Everyone takes a different way, and wanders about till we meet at noon.” Walpole visited Cobham's heir at Stowe in 1770. After breakfast, the party spent the day walking in the gardens “or drove about it in cabriolets, till it was time to dress” for dinner. It had become enormous, a place it takes a whole day to explore on foot, and no clear boundary but a ha-ha separates it from the surrounding countryside.

That year, the Gothic architect Sanderson Miller walked there with various people, including Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the landscape architect who was to complete the revolution in garden design with his unadorned expanses of water, trees, and grass. Brown created the Grecian Valley in Stowe, the largest and plainest stretch of the garden (and though it looks wholly natural, the valley itself was dug by hand by many laborers, whose views of landscape gardening do not survive). The Brownian garden, having largely banished sculpture and architecture, no longer commemorated human history and politics. Nature was no longer a setting, but the subject. And the walkers in such a garden were no longer being steered toward ready-made reflections on virtue or Virgil; they were free to think their own thoughts as they followed the meandering paths (though those thoughts might well be about nature, or rather Nature, as taught by myriad texts). From being an authoritarian, public, and essentially architectural space, the garden was becoming a private and solitary wilderness.