Book Review

Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century

Martin Calder, editor

Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, 251 pp., 42 illus., £38.60
ISBN: 978-3-03910-291-4, USISBN: 97800-8204-6985-0

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Drawn from a one-day conference of the same title, the papers in this volume bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives on the garden in the eighteenth century, including garden history, art history, architecture, and French language and literature. The papers present a rich sense of the era, making insightful analytical connections between the nature of gardens and parallel developments in philosophy, psychology and visual theory. Four themes develop throughout the volume: visual theory; the power of word vs. image; the role of time; and the theatrical dimensions of experiencing the landscape.

The dominant thread is visual theory, and the contextualizing of theory with practice provides some valuable insights. For example, Katherine Myers’s characterization of Descartes as the horizontal plane and Berkeley as the vertical – what Gombrich called the "map" and the "mirror" as conceptualizations of space – provides a powerful frame for analyzing the nature of garden design and landscape understanding at the time. One of the fascinating dimensions of the discussion of visual theory is in the condition of blindness. Myers conveys the eighteenth-century theorists’ interest in how perception is achieved without sight, as in Descartes’ hypothesis of a blind man navigating by means of using two sticks as a kind of surrogate for vision.

One of the prominent criticisms of eighteenth-century picturesque theory, and its subsequent all-pervasive grip on landscape architecture through to the present day, is its elevation of the visual at the expense of all other sensory experience. It is therefore refreshing to find glimmers of some counterviews, indicating some of the ways in which other sensory phenomena persisted amidst the extreme pursuit of visual theory. Martin Calder’s exploration of the work of Girardin illustrates how the sense of touch was identified as the perceptive tool of near space, while it was the anticipation of touch which was aroused by looking into distant space. Calder describes the experience of a garden in this way as a "bitter-sweet interplay," where the roving eye constantly stimulates the sense of the tactile, but does not fulfil it due to the detachment of distance. Other senses were evoked in spaces such as Girardin’s Grotto in his garden at Ermenonville, which is a dark and damp space, suppressing the visual realm and allowing the senses of smell and hearing to become more significant.

Word and image become intertwined in the writing and making of gardens in the eighteenth century. The contingency of one upon the other perplexed some theorists, and as Katja Grillner explains, Thomas Whately attempted to circumvent the way in which an image can overtake the imagination by providing only written descriptions in his Observations on Modern Gardening. This would, he believed, avoid the images themselves becoming slavishly copied, and encourage readers to apply the principles of what he was describing, rather than the particular execution that an image would show. As Grillner puts it, "Whately trusts the word more than the image." Words also gravitated into the gardens themselves, as in David Maskill’s discussion of the Laborde and Cook monuments and their in situ texts, or Jean-Marcel Humbert’s reference to Princess Helena Radziwill having the Et in Arcadia Ego phrase inscribed on a replica of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tomb in her garden, "Arkadia," in Poland.

Time is the dimension which most distinguishes garden design from other art, and a number of papers in this volume touch on this, in particular through the tradition of Et in Arcadia Ego –the trope of "death in paradise." Michel Baridon’s comparision between Versailles and Castle Howard very effectively conveys the shift between Le Nôtre’s static and seemingly timeless garden, towards the explicit expression of time and memory in Vanburgh’s landscape through such devices as statuary and the Mausoleum. Time is also experienced in moving through a garden, and Katja Grillner’s observation of Joseph Heely’s description of Envil as being remarkably "filmic" brings to mind Timothy Brownlow’s comment that picturesque theorist William Gilpin "used his eye like a cine-camera."*

Like the cinematic analogy, landscape as theater also gained traction during the eighteenth century, and terms such as "scenery" reinforce the legacy of the conflation of landscape and theater. Renata Tyszczuk’s paper on Stanislas’s Chartreuses is an entertaining glimpse of the aristocracy’s garden theatrics, of their "gaming" and "playgrounds."

Given the strong French bias in the papers, and the announced concern with the experiential, the absence of phenomenology is noticeable. The most influential phenomenological theorists come from France, including Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry. The discussions on visual theory and blindness (Katherine Myers), and the way in which imagination forms in the mind’s eye (Katja Grillner), to name just two, could be greatly enhanced through a phenomenological perspective.

A volume of papers by different authors always brings challenges. Ideally the papers should all be autonomous, while also contributing to the whole being more than the sum of the parts. Experiencing the Garden includes a range of interesting papers, but as a whole it does not achieve this meta-level of coherence, and instead there is some repetition of points between papers which skillful editing would have eliminated. Added to this is the production of the book itself, which is uninviting in its design. The illustrations are all black and white, which in itself is not problematic, but many lack contrast and some are of poor resolution.

Jacky Bowring
Lincoln University (New Zealand)

*Timothy Brownlow, John Clare and Picturesque Landscape (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 12.