Gardens, aesthetics of

3. Control

Whatever the relation between a particular garden and its surroundings, one other trait sets gardens apart. Gardens are constantly changing and those who maintain them are engaged in a constant battle for control. If we blend Hunt’s and Miller’s insights and say that gardens are altered places on which a particular design or order has been imposed, we must acknowledge that the garden is never finished. As Miller puts it, a garden has no final form. Garden goings-on are of course keyed to the seasons. Blooms supplant one another as, say, spring bulbs give way to irises, then daisies, lilies, late fall chrysanthemums. Gardens also look different at different times of day, in different sorts of light, as different weather fronts pass by. In addition to these expected rhythms, nature’s forces seem to conspire to undo what the gardener has accomplished. Winds blow, plants grow, stonework crumbles, pests invade. What, Miller encourages us to ask, counts as the garden?

Miller’s question highlights a dilemma about garden identity. Since gardens are constantly altering in response to natural forces, natural processes, natural cycles, we cannot say which of these changing configurations is the garden that the designer intended. We cannot specify fully its constituents, their descriptive properties, nor, therefore, their aesthetic properties which, most philosophers would agree, supervene in some way on the (descriptive or factual) base. How then can we chart proper appreciation? Gardens are more vexing in this regard than singular arts, such as painting and sculpture, than multiple arts, such as printmaking and even than performing arts, such as music and theatre. And this results from the unique admixture in gardens of nature and culture.

In addition to metaphysical riddles about garden identity, gardens pose epistemological problems. What can we know about gardens from the past? Even those that are still in place are not likely to look as their creators intended. And we lack a garden notation that might capture a site’s complex topography, the movement of water, the intended seasonal succession of plants. We can rely, then, only on indirect evidence of gardens of the past: visitors’ descriptions, estate records, painted views. As a further complication, garden improvements are generally carried out by digging up part of an existing garden and redesigning it. Andre LeNotre was constantly expanding and altering the gardens at Versailles. When one gardener redesigns the work of another, the changes are even more radical. Capability Brown’s success in eighteenth-century England came at a certain cost – the destruction of scores of earlier formal gardens. Thus problems arise in individuating gardens. Miller (1993) proposes that spatial location is the unifying principle underlying continual change among gardens. She states that ‘the garden at Stowe today is the same garden at Stowe in 1728 precisely because it is at Stowe’. But this proposal overlooks the succession of designers: we have Charles Bridgeman’s Stowe, supplanted by William Kent’s Stowe, supplanted by Capability Brown’s Stowe. Think how different the arts of poetry or painting would be if artists habitually altered their predecessors’ work in this way.