Garden Design and Architects' Gardens Two reviews, illustrated, to show, by actual examples from British gardens, that clipping and aligning trees to make them — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Architect's Garden vs. the Landscape Tradition

Robinson frames the debate as a clash between two irreconcilable approaches. The architects, he claims, assume that 'there can be no design in anything but in lines of stone, and clipped trees to harmonise with the stone.' He contrasts this with the English landscape tradition exemplified by places like Longleat, Highclere, and the Little Trianon, which he says 'can show no design' only if one accepts the architects' narrow definition. The excerpts reveal that Robinson sees the formalists' emphasis on 'order' and 'balance' as a cover for what he considers a lack of true artistic vision. He is particularly scornful of the idea that a garden laid out in 'rectangular plots' is somehow more logical or principled, calling it 'the kitchen gardener's view' and comparing it to a chessboard.

Clipped Trees and Mutilated Forms

A recurring target is the practice of clipping trees into artificial shapes. Robinson cites Levens Hall in Westmoreland as an example where 'the ugliness of the clipped forms takes away from the beauty of the house.' He argues that even in sketches of otherwise fine gardens like Montacute and Brympton, the formalist illustrations 'show the evil, not the good, of the system advocated.' The excerpts include a pointed remark about 'birds and ships perched on wooden trellises' in old engravings, suggesting that the architects' revival of historical patterns is out of touch with modern needs. Robinson's own illustrations are meant to demonstrate that trees allowed to grow naturally create a more harmonious relationship with architecture than those forced into geometric obedience.

Grass as an Artistic Quantity

One of the most specific disputes in the excerpts concerns the role of grass. Robinson quotes Blomfield's claim that 'grass-work as an artistic quantity can hardly be said to exist in landscape gardening' and then flatly contradicts it: 'The opposite of this is the fact.' He points to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris versus the Parc Monceau to argue that the formal style often lacks grass altogether, whereas the English landscape tradition treats grass as a central artistic element. This exchange reveals a deeper disagreement about what constitutes 'design'—whether it is imposed from above through hard lines and clipped forms, or emerges from the natural qualities of the site and its vegetation. Robinson's defense of grass is also a defense of the picturesque against the geometric.

Readers should note that Robinson's book is not a neutral survey but a pointed intervention in a late-Victorian debate about garden style. The excerpts give only partial access to his arguments; the full text likely contains more detailed critiques of specific gardens and designers. To follow the controversy, it helps to read Blomfield's and Sedding's books alongside Robinson's. His combative tone and reliance on concrete examples make the work a vivid document of aesthetic warfare, even if one disagrees with his conclusions.

Robinson argued fiercely for letting trees keep their own wild shapes, against those who would clip them into marble form. There's a quiet kinship between his plea and the gentler truth in Thomas Nast's Christmas drawings for the human race — Story, Setting & Ideas, where warmth curls around the hearth, untouched by rigid hands. Both remember that living things, left to themselves, hold their own deep order.