The European Modern Garden
A Break with the Past
In contrast to the perceived glamour of the pre-First World War years, the inter-war years are often looked on as an inglorious period of British history, of Hunger Marches, and the Great Depression - but there was a positive side. New industries such as the electricity supply industry, motor car manufacture and the chemical industry expanded, but the biggest boom was in housing, with over 4.5 million new homes built between the wars. As well as sweeping socio-economic change, there were highly significant scientific developments. There was an increase in Man's knowledge about the universe and changes in the way that the world was viewed: Rutherford foresaw the splitting of the atom, Einstein's theories shattered Newtonian principles, and Freud shook the rational frame of men’s' minds. This excitement and change extended to the arts, the most earth shattering upheaval being Modernism and its abrupt break with tradition. With its roots in the Art Deco and Arts & Crafts Movements, Modernism spread from Europe, where painters such as Picasso, and architects such as Le Corbusier, and at the Bauhaus School, Gropius were breaking new ground. Gabriel Guevrékian at Villa Noailles in France created a particularly good Modern garden. In Britain Henry Moore redefined sculpture, but Modernism was not restricted to visual arts as authors such as Henry James poets such as Eliot, and dramatists such as Pirandello amply demonstrated.
A Swan Song
However, Britain was temperamentally unsuited to make the breaks with the past that were made on the Continent. This was particularly so in the garden, and there was only one attempt to create a Modern British garden before the Second World War, and this was publicly rejected. The idealist was Christopher Tunnard who, in 1938 published Gardens in the Modern Landscape. He saw the Modern garden as a fusion between Functionalism – seats, views, lawns, flowering shrubs; the influence of Oriental asymmetry; and Modern art, particularly the inherent beauty of plants. While his was a cry in the wilderness, the seed had been sown.
The Modern British Garden
The Modern British garden sneaked in through the back door after the Second World War. Its genesis was seen at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Here, the display gardens such as the Moat Garden and the Regatta Restaurant displayed a new free form of harmonious garden in which formality was at a minimum. The key elements were the irregular use of rock (a building material that was not rationed), plantings of sculptural specimens and ground cover, and soft-edged water feature surrounded by planting. The result found popular favour because it was inexpensive to achieve, it was an effect that was easily attainable, it was an approach that worked well in a small space, and it required little maintenance.
But, while this particular form of Modernism owed much to Tunnard, it also owed much to new ideas that had been expressed in the Americas in the 1930s when the British had still been obsessed with Gertrude Jekyll, the Edwardian garden, and the herbaceous border.