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Books - William Robinson- The Wild Gardener
Book Price: £30.00
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William Robinson (1838-1935) began his horticultural career as a garden boy in Ireland and ended it as the owner of over a thousand acres in Sussex. As a young man he travelled throughout Britain, then to Paris and later to the Alps, to North Africa and across North America. These experiences, coupled with a long and extraordinarily productive life, led to a constant stream of opinionated publications on subjects ranging from asparagus cultivation to cremation, from the advantages of wood fires to the evils of the bedding-out system. His hugely successful journals, and later his home at Gravetye Manor, provided a platform and focus for other great horticultural names such as Gertrude Jekyll, Samuel Reynolds Hole, Frank Crisp, Ellen Willmott and E.A. Bowles, while he advanced the merits of hardy plants and launched attacks on his enemies: architects especially, then botanists, bedders-out and industrial society in general.
Robinson is best known for his fervent endorsement of wild gardening, including the naturalising of bulbs (The Wild Garden was published in 1870), and for his all-encompassing English Flower Garden (fifteen editions from 1883 to 1933). His discovery of Alfred Parsons as the ideal artist to illustrate his ideas helped to foster a new era of the plantsman's picturesque and thus to launch the ideal of the English cottage garden, apparent in such gardens as Hidcote Manor and Sissinghurst, which has resonated around the world ever since.
However, his interests and passions ranged far beyond the garden. Inspired by great social reformers such as John Ruskin in England and Frederic Law Olmsted in America, Robinson urged the gardeners of Britain to improve the lot of the poor by producing cheaper and better food and by creating health-giving green spaces. His views on a sustainable approach to live have important lessons for the twenty-first century.
Curiously, despite his enormous literary output and his position at the centre of an international circle of distinguished horticulturists, William Robinson remains a surprisingly enigmatic figure. He was generous to friends and retainers but ferocious in his attacks on opponents, a populariser rather than a pioneer, but undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century gardening.
Richard Bisgrove is course director for Landscape Management at the University of Reading. With degrees in Horticultural Science (from Reading) and Landscape Architecture (University of Michigan) he has a longstanding interest in the relationship between design and plantsmanship and in the social and therapeutic value of plants and green spaces. He has written six books on aspects of garden design and garden history including The English Garden (National Trust, 1990) and The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (Frances Lincoln, 1992; University of California Press, 2002) and he has advised on the design and management of gardens in Britain, Europe and America. In 2004 he was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society for ‘outstanding contribution to horticultural education, garden design and plant research'. |
