Garden design can reveal more than you think about the past

THERE is a well-known saying about history that goes something like “you have to know where you’ve been to know where you are going”. This is as true of garden design as it is of any other branch of history.

Ten years ago, seven gardens were created here at Harlow Carr to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the society in 2004. Gardens Through Time charts the development of garden style over the two centuries, taking the visitor on a horticultural journey through designed garden spaces that display key features of each period.

In those ten years, since 2004, the gardens have been a hugely popular visitor attraction, whatever time of year there is always something of interest. Listening to the comments of visitors, the four most popular gardens are probably the ones that span the last hundred years, showing modern garden design of the 20th Century from Edwardian to early 21st Century.

The first of the four gardens shows the typical style of a garden design dream team; architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and the plantswoman and artist Gertrude Jekyll.

Lutyens was an expert at creating crisp formal garden spaces with steps, sunken areas, formal vistas and often included water features.

In our Edwardian garden, the sunken pond terrace is linked by steps to the formal pathway past skilful herbaceous borders to a wildflower meadow on one side and a nut walk on the other. The plantings soften the built features giving the idea of the garden merging with nature beyond.

Most visitors leave this garden with the comment “well I must be an Edwardian gardener then”.

The next garden is the 1950s Festival of Britain Garden and is the one that confuses most people.

Firstly, because of the 50-year gap and then because of the minimalist style of the garden. Most remember 1950s gardens as crazy paving, lots of roses and colourful summer bedding. The answer is that the garden takes its cue from the 1951 Festival of Britain site at the South Bank of the Thames in London, where the modern concrete and glass architecture of the Festival Hall was the backdrop. This continental European international style was used to give an optimistic lift to the spirits after the end of the Second World War.

Our garden is based on the design used by Christopher Tunnard for the garden at Bentley Wood, the home of the modern architect Serge Chermayeff. The design is minimal and pared back, has modern sculpture on display and also frames nature in the birch copse beyond. Innovative wire supports are used for climbing plants highlighting the technological spirit of the age.

The 70s Garden is where it all begins to get really familiar. The garden is loosely based on the garden design style promoted by the garden designer John Brookes in his ground-breaking 1969 book, The Room Outside. Out goes the high maintenance lawn, in comes patio gardening with water features, low maintenance ground cover plantings and a modern garden style with plants that remind you of those Mediterranean package holidays; a garden to relax and entertain in with minimal gardening effort.

Finally, this brings us to the last of the four gardens, The Contemporary Garden.

Technically, this is a 21st Century garden, but the design by the Irish designer Diarmuid Gavin in 2004 is typical of his late 20th Century work.

His brief was to show what could be done in an average-sized suburban garden. Well, this is Diarmuid showing you can have it all in a small space.

The lawn is back cut by a robotic mower.

Crossing a small courtyard you enter a cedar and steel elliptical secret garden with lush plantings leading to a sunken steel and glass garden room under the canopy of a golden Indian bean tree, all set off with a bold use of colour on the outside walls, just for the fun of it!

Where next?