Garden Design: Venus & Mars

At the end of the 19th century the future of the English garden was hotly debated as the style left Victorian ideas behind and embraced the arts and crafts movement.

It was also the time of a rising middle class and suburban family life. In the midst of the chaos rose a famous partnership that would resolve the conflict and give birth to a vibrantly unique style. It would take the emphasis off the garden as something to be viewed and transform it into something to be lived in and experienced year around.

This transition is credited to building and landscape architect Edwin Lutyens and artist Gertrude Jekyll. They would become the Mars and Venus of the English garden revolution a century ago. Together they coined the term "farmhouse vernacular" to describe the concept behind their collaborations.

Lutyens was the masculine mind, an architect who created rigid space and form. He retained the formality of his predecessors but compartmentalized it. This was based on the farms in rural England. Many of them are very old and expanded incrementally for hundreds of years. On these sites were remnant walls of Elizabethan fortifications, ruined silos, courtyards, arches and assorted old buildings. These stone or brick constructions served to define a series of smaller spaces between them, much like rooms of a rambling house.

While the great estate gardens were a single open and majestic space which emphasized the grandiose notions of the owner. Lutyens preferred to break the space into smaller units that were more in scale with human comfort. Though the overall landscape might be incredibly monumental, its spaces were intimate and arranged for living.

But it was Jekyll who redefined the way gardens were planted. Hers was undeniably the Venus point of view. Earlier in her life, Jekyll was a landscape painter and her favorite subject was the rural cottage gardens of Surrey with their exuberant color and unpretentious homespun arrangements. Learning from these little landscapes, she believed "we should have quiet grace, and verdure, and little pictures month by month."

With such an intimate knowledge of light and color, she planted Lutyens' spaces with seeming wild abandon, almost as though she defied his rigidity. But this did not result in a hodgepodge mixture, but great swaths of hue that were bright and bold and undeniable. Yet all was carefully conceived and arranged with gentle precision.

Her favorite palette was largely old, well known perennials and British natives that had been loved among cottagers for many centuries. She did not believe in becoming indentured to recalcitrant exotics.

Jekyll viewed each of her gardens as a fine landscape painting. Color, balance and composition resulted in a new palette for each compartment. Yet when viewed as a whole, the series of compartments flowed into one another so successfully, the landscape was perceived as a single integral environment.

Since the birth of the Lutyens-Jekyll style, it has dominated the English garden scene. It inspired the famous Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, created by another Mars and Venus couple, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. Hidcote Manor, on every garden tour, is yet another compartmentalized garden. And in England, where all things are incredibly expensive, this model perhaps dominates the contemporary gardens from London townhouses to the suburbs and countryside more than any other influence.

If you and your spouse or partner are planning a new garden, learn from this Mars and Venus formula. Mars will ensure that the site functions and that it is practical, simple and strong. Venus will add the romance through a patchwork of beautiful plants and flowers.

But remember that like any solid human relationship, a great garden requires an equal proportion of both points of view. And in the end, the garden, as a child of this balanced coupling, will prove beautiful, well adjusted, functional and perfectly satisfying.