Review from Diana Jones

Special Interest Day

From Monochrome to Polychrome

How Colour Transformed the Art of Garden Design

(A History of the Art and Colours of Garden Design)

On Friday 6th June this SID looked at the use of colour and art in garden design and considered the proposition that garden borders and fine art have evolved along parallel lines.

We were in the capable hands of Timothy Walker, currently Tutor in Botany at Somerville College, Oxford but previously Director of the Oxford Botanic Garden for 26 years. This experience was the lens through which he looked at the changes in garden design over the last 400 years.

Horticulture developed from agriculture in the16th Century and the first lecture referenced both gardeners and writers on gardens who were perhaps all, within the context of their time, trying to recreate the Garden of Eden. Until the 18th Century this was entirely based on a green palette, everywhere in the world and most especially in China where garden design followed strict rules, but always green and containing the revered bamboo.

Botany developed in the 17th century in England and the Oxford Botanic Garden was established for the use of students researching medicinal plants, funded by a ‘wealthy hypochondriac’, Sir William Danvers. Though just one yew tree remains from that time, the importance of the yew in cancer medicines continues to the present day. Of the OBG’s 18 directors, many are still known for their achievements, the plant collector John Tradescant (1637), Jacob Bobart (17th century) who set up the first seed exchange and bred the London plane tree and John Bartram (18th century) an entrepreneurial American who introduced many American species to Europe.

Research suggests that the first informal flower garden was conceived in 1771 by the Earl of Harcourt at nearby Nuneham Park and subsequently the OBG became very closely linked with the Nuneham Estate when its arboretum was sold in lieu of death duties and bought by the University. Over the past two centuries the OBG has enormously extended and developed there.

The second lecture, ‘Seeing the Light’ looked at how writers have sought to describe colour, from Aristotle onwards, generally using a chromatic scale. In 1692 an A.Boogaert developed a watercolour chart of 5000 colours, 271 years before the Pantone colour notation system.

Although modern garden designers have reduced that colour palette to little more than single figures, the key is how the colours are put together. Nobody was more influential in this than Gertrude Jekyll (1843 -1932), writing that harmony was everything in garden design with contrast being used only with great care.

The impact of each colour was considered in this lecture, with many comparisons to works of art. Yellow is the brightest colour and useful for emphasis so perhaps at the end of a garden. Our lecturer had even changed his sweater to make the point!  Green is the colour with most shades and many gardens still rely on that. It is used to calibrate other colours as flower arrangers will attest. White is the linking colour, making others look more saturated.

But most importantly our experience of colour is affected by the context in which we see it - its location, the light at the time and our emotions. A border photographed every two hours illustrated the effect brilliantly and a border in front of a dark brick wall was transformed in front of a red wall - lots of food for thought for the gardeners in the audience.

 The final session considered the gardens of the 21st century with the emphasis now on sustainability and conservation over the artificial creation of paradise. Harmony is still maintained but in a less rigid way with the avoidance of straight lines, colours being allowed to bleed into one another and native hedges replacing brick walls. 

Nuneham Courtenay is a major part of the OBG, allowing it to grow on a different type of soil (acid) and it has more recently developed 12 acres of wildflowers and bluebells on very poor soil - a new kind of Garden of Eden.

Parallels were drawn with the works of Jackson Pollock and his splattering of paint, not unlike the very controlled scattering of seeds in so-called ‘wild’ flower meadows. Piet Oudolf’s popular ‘European’ style was inspired by roadside verges, similarly ca ptured by David Hockney in his East Yorkshire series ‘A Bigger Picture’.

The lectures were interlaced with a great deal of humour and inspirational photographs. We were encouraged to be brave in our gardens, embrace change so that every garden can be viewed as an individual work of art.

This three-hour study day looks at the use of colour in gardening and fine art, and proposes that garden borders and contemporary paintings have evolved along parallel lines in the past 150 years.  Along the way these talks look at the relationship between fine art and gardening and science.