A Natural History of English Gardening by Mark Laird (review)

The invitation of Mr. Laird's title is at once misleading and provoking: misleading, in that any history of English gardening that claims to be "natural" would seem to pay homage to the "natural," "picturesque," or Brownian landscape style; provocative, in that the merest glance at its contents will disabuse readers of thinking that they will encounter anything "as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk" (to quote Tristram). Indeed, his narrative method offers a useful analogue for exploring Mr. Laird's territory.

He focuses both on a different history of gardens and landscapes, that between Evelyn in the second half of the seventeenth century and the work and writings of Mary Delany or Gilbert White a century later, and on that route he intends to bypass what he terms "the Walpolean bias" of landscape history; he attends to many ideas that were marginalized during that era and siphoned off into such disciplines as botany, ornithology, entomology, climatology. The book, furthermore, offers to bridge the worlds of rural and urban gardening.

The first of those foci is clear from a perusal of the heavily illustrated book (Yale University Press at its most munificent and glossy); though it does include images of design and layout, what predominates in a plenitude of images (over 400) are hawker dragonflies, fungi, snakes, field mice, cloud studies, tortoises, field crickets, stranded whales, caterpillars, birds, shells, portraits of those involved in this inquiry, pages from herbaria and florilegia, and views of agricultural activity; most of these are drawn from a rich repertoire of drawings by William Curtis, Alexander Marshal, Alexander Cozens, Georg Dionysius Ehret, among others.

One of this volume's delights is that it can be read in at least three different ways, and the convergence of those approaches makes it both demanding and complex. The corpus of images with their descriptive glosses makes for a narrative in itself, and is worth pursuing through them alone. Then there is, obviously, the text itself. But each of seven chapters begins with a sometimes complex synopsis of material explored in the following pages (white letters on black, though not marbled or blank, paper), including cross-references to other studies; these constitute another approach, which the reader, coming to this material for the first time, might find useful. These chapters also start with Mr. Laird's own watercolor reconstructions of garden forms, each dedicated to friends and colleagues. These resonate with another approach that comes from Mr. Laird's attention to his own scholarly progress, his work as a garden restorer and artist: his four pages of acknowledgments mark this trajectory through his materials and collegial contacts, and then the introduction explains A Natural History and how he has, now, come to compose it in the light of his earlier studies (many essays, but particularly The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds 1720–1800 (1999) and Mrs. Delany and Her Circle (2009)). He confesses at one point to something like heavy field work ("as I ploughed on"); but his careful attention to how he has moved justifies both the agrarian metaphor and his steady and fastidious concern with harvesting his material.

Mr. Laird notes that this is not a volume of natural history, "which is a discipline in its own right." Like most garden historians he has to invent his own discipline, which in this case offers "a startling correction of [Walpole's] rhetorical history" of gardening. While his book advances far into eighteenth-century gardening, what is of greater interest to the Scriblerian is the world of Evelyn and the coffee-house culture of London over the years 1680–1715 and 1715–1745, covered in the first three chapters. Evelyn is central, Swift and Pope only hover on the fringes of this study: Pope as a memorial footnote to the destruction of his own groves at Twickenham and in an awkward comparison of his "picturesque" view over the Thames in a caption for Samuel Grimm's depiction of Gilbert...