Since my last post (ages ago I know, sloppy blogging), I've been having a good think about garden history and how we approach it. Brent Elliott's wonderful article mentioned below highlighted our current approaches and suggested, if not explicitly, that we Must Try Harder. I agree wholeheartedly that we must, but how? And I know many people will be asking, why should we bother?
We impose our own appreciation structures on gardens in the past to make sense of their whats, hows and styles. We try to catalogue them in a way that makes sense to us and have a nasty habit of squeezing them into categorisation boxes like 'William and Mary', 'Baroque' or 'Italianate', which when unpicked, don't really bear scrutiny. This makes our understanding of gardens confused, dry and one dimensional. And here's the thing:
The appreciation structure we impose on gardens in the past directly influences how we appreciate gardens in the present.
All sorts of issues abound surrounding how we should appreciate gardens in the present. You don't have to go far within horticultural journalism to find disagreements on garden evaluation. How we should decide if they are a success or not, how we should grade creations at flower shows, how do we publicly deal with a contemporary garden style which is loved by some and hated by others? Do we need to do it at all?
Lack of an appreciation structure means a lack of a critical structure. If we're not held to account for our creations we get sloppy. This means a general stagnation within much of our industry and a poor view from the outside in, leading to many of the problems we are seeing within horticulture today. I'm not suggesting that a more analytical look at Chatsworth will transform the industry, but it would help us to be more self aware, know in which direction we were going and why and represent ourselves to our full potential within society. Other creative fields like fine art, food and theatre have it off to a tee and are therefore thriving in an increasingly demanding economy.
David Cooper (A Philosophy of Gardens - a must read) suggests that gardens should not be appreciated as either art or nature, that they are, in fact, something else entirely and require an appreciation structure of their own. A 'garden' is the product of all sorts of influences, art and nature yes, but also design, problem solving, science, subsistence, fashion, education, plants and growing skills and finance. We try to squeeze them all under one roof and end up being confused. This applies to the past and the present.
Approaches to the past have changed significantly in the past few decades from a Culture Historical approach (collect stuff and facts and that's about it), to a processual approach (scientific analysis of data will tell you everything eventually) and finally to a post-processual approach (a much more nebulous school of thought which is interpretive but emphasises the problem of subjectivity). As garden historians we are still a bit stuck in the processual and need to learn to be far more analytical and interpretive, however, still aware of our limitations in such an ephemeral field.
After all this pontificating I'm not going to pretend I have the answer, but I am certain that it's something we Must Do Better at. A look at gardens in the past requires that we are self aware. That we understand that gardens did not exist in an 'avenues and politics' bubble. Neither were gardens and plants preserves of large country gardens, they were big in towns, as subsistence and social endeavour and were collected like any other curiosities as objects of fascination. The same persists to this day. To fully understand gardens we should take a more holistic approach to our leafy spaces and objects and to appreciate that a wide and fluid array of motives were in evidence.
It may well get worse before it gets better, but we can bring garden history up to date. I would appreciate your thoughts.
