A rebel spirit and an artist’s eye: Russell Page’s landscape design

Russell Web page (1906-85) was a brooding, chain-smoking loner who one way or the other grew to become one of the glamorous panorama designers of the Twentieth century. Born in Lincolnshire, England, he spent a lot of his profession in Paris and labored everywhere in the world, travelling to southern Europe, the Americas, Australia and the Center East. Web page designed grand gardens for aristocrats, industrialists and establishments, in addition to many small-scale initiatives for his associates. His solely e book, The Schooling of a Gardener (1962) – a memoir mixing historic and philosophical meditations with sensible steerage – remains to be admired as a masterpiece of backyard writing, reissued by New York Evaluation Books (2007) and Classic Classics (2023).

For all his shimmering success, nonetheless, Web page is one thing of an outsider, onerous to position within the canon of panorama design. Although he was extensively thought to be an ideal artist, he didn’t set up his personal progressive signature fashion, and most of his gardens have been remodelled or destroyed. The importance of Web page’s profession appears curiously obscure. ‘The place does this man stand within the historical past of backyard making?’ Fred Whitsey, the longtime gardening correspondent for The Every day Telegraph, requested after Web page’s demise. ‘He stays elusive.’

The query of Web page’s legacy is partly a matter of fashion. Though he made many various sorts of gardens, he was most well-known for extremely formal designs within the classical French and Italian traditions. When you’ve got ever checked out photos of the gardens at Versailles, created by André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV, then you will have seen the enduring instance of formal design, with its inflexible geometries and tightly managed planting schemes. Most Twentieth-century English designers, in contrast, favoured looser, extra casual landscapes. In latest a long time, new sorts of naturalistic gardens, corresponding to these of the Dutch grasp Piet Oudolf, have gained prestigious commissions on either side of the Atlantic, and now a brand new motion for ‘wild’ gardening is designing backyard habitats for biodiversity and ecological restore. To modern eyes, classical gardens have come to seem inflexible, even soulless, of their efforts to regulate nature. And so Web page may merely be seen as an outmoded artist, the final of the good formal designers, left behind by fashionable occasions.

Because it seems, although, Web page’s interested by gardens is simply too unusual and too lovely to observe such an oversimple script. A better take a look at his writing, particularly The Schooling of a Gardener, reveals how deeply he thought-about his personal place within the improvement of garden-making. Like different midcentury designers, Web page discovered himself coping with distinctly fashionable circumstances, attempting to check a future for dwelling gardens within the period of suburban sprawl. Not like many others, he responded to this drawback in an unorthodox approach – by adopting a quasi-religious mysticism.

Removed from soulless, Web page devoted himself to an esoteric religion, influenced by the charismatic non secular chief G I Gurdjieff and the Sufi trainer Idries Shah. After coaching as an artist in England and France, Web page widened his perspective to check the design histories of many different, distant cultures. In The Schooling of a Gardener, he praised the forgotten panorama architects from ‘the Zen sect of Buddhism’ in Fifteenth-century Japan and ‘the sooner Mogul gardens in India’. To see a path ahead within the Twentieth century, Web page proposed, Western garden-making wanted to reconnect with the common spirit that had guided historical Jap traditions.

This, I feel, was Web page’s actual contribution to design historical past – not a lot a particular form of planting scheme as a particular position for the designer. He cultivated a picture of himself as an artist-mystic, spiritually estranged from British imperialism and shopper capitalism which, he felt, tended to create ugly, life-stunting landscapes wherever they imposed themselves. In opposition to the backdrop of mass-produced suburbia, he created therapeutic sanctuaries of distinctive concord and tranquility.

Reconsidered on this mild, Web page’s work speaks to our personal second in unsettling, stunning methods. Whereas immediately’s naturalistic and wild types may outline themselves in opposition to his classical formality, additionally they unwittingly echo his non secular critique of colonial and suburban landscapes. Web page’s profession reveals how a vaguely orientalist ethos might be appropriated as a form of high-end branding. On the similar time, although, he presents unconventional theories and practices that anybody can use, on any scale, for making gardens within the ruins.

In his introduction to The Schooling of a Gardener, Web page remembers how his skilled profession started within the early Nineteen Thirties when, after artwork college and a few years overseas in Paris, he took ‘a really subordinate job’ underneath Richard Sudell, a London-based panorama architect. The work, Web page writes, concerned ‘designing plantings for the infinite new blocks of low cost flats then being constructed within the London suburbs.’ His tone is dreary, frivolously snobbish. He wanted the wage to get by however, from the beginning, suburban growth weighed heavy on his spirits.

Quickly, although, Web page’s first huge fee took him out of London and, like a fairytale, into an enchanted previous. The positioning was Longleat Home, a distinguished however deteriorating Elizabethan property. Web page’s shopper, Lord Henry Bathtub, the inheritor to Longleat, confirmed him round, offering what turned out to be a crash course in backyard historical past.

Within the 1600s, the marquesses of Bathtub had constructed grand gardens in a proper fashion influenced by continental fashions, with straight traces and tightly clipped hedges, to enhance Longleat Home, a formidable work of Elizabethan structure. Such gardens have been related to Renaissance beliefs of aristocratic energy, ordered hierarchy and management over nature. In England, although, they ultimately fell out of vogue.

Gardeners collected unique crops and ornaments, like vacationers shopping for souvenirs, then jumbled them collectively

By the late 18th century, within the eyes of England’s ruling courses, formal gardens got here to look too inflexible, too summary – too French. The legendary backyard designer Lancelot ‘Functionality’ Brown was employed to interchange Longleat’s formal plantings with pastoral parklands. As an alternative of neat parterres and summary shapes, demarcated from the panorama past, Brown favoured naturalistic varieties – a clump of bushes, the bend of a river – in order that the backyard appeared to roll towards the horizon. The impact was picturesque, although it required large investments of labor and cash. Brown and his followers remodelled so many estates on this approach that the historian Roy Sturdy would later dedicate his examine The Renaissance Backyard in England (1979) to the ‘reminiscence of all these gardens destroyed by Functionality Brown and his successors’.

Longleat’s gardens have been remodelled as soon as once more within the Nineteenth century, this time by including what Web page referred to as a ‘profusion of unique bushes and shrubs’ imported from across the empire. Such abundance displayed Britain’s world energy, however Web page didn’t prefer it. English design, he felt, had fallen sufferer to its personal imperial excesses. Gardeners collected unique crops and ornaments, like vacationers shopping for souvenirs, then jumbled them collectively. There was an excessive amount of materials, not sufficient centered intention. Good design, in Web page’s eyes, referred to as for some restraint.

‘We walked the open parkland for days,’ Web page remembered, analysing what ‘the composition of the panorama appeared to require.’ Longleat was a form of palimpsest of historic types: Renaissance formality, Romantic picturesque and Victorian extravagance. Web page tried to peel away the newest layer, to revive the parklands within the spirit of Functionality Brown. He preserved clumps of 18th-century bushes, particularly beechwoods, whereas including some limes and scarlet oaks to harmonise the views. Remodelling the location for its future proprietor, Web page was additionally correcting the previous errors that had spoiled its quiet class.

After the celebrated fee at Longleat, Web page’s fortunes have been rising. He discovered a kindred spirit in Geoffrey Jellicoe, a well-connected panorama architect. The 2 shared pursuits each in classical design – Jellicoe wrote Italian Gardens of the Renaissance (1925) with John Shepherd – and in esoteric theories of the soul, together with Gurdjieff’s. Web page and Jellicoe began their very own agency, taking over prestigious commissions. In addition they grew to become concerned with a brand new skilled organisation, the Institute of Panorama Architects, and its quarterly, Panorama and Backyard, edited by Sudell.

Web page’s beat for the journal was worldwide backyard historical past. He travelled round Europe, taking pictures and writing quick dispatches, exploring varied traditions – Seventeenth-century French classicism, Islamic influences in Portugal. Web page printed a two-page unfold with a one-word title: ‘Urns’. However the level of studying historical past was to not imitate earlier fashions. ‘Now we have inherited relics of all these types and travesties of fashion,’ Web page wrote in The Schooling of a Gardener. Too typically, the impact was a nostalgic pastiche quite than historic constancy, kitsch as an alternative of creativity.

What older gardens did present, nonetheless, have been fashions of an ethos. In every of the traditions that Web page studied, he noticed gardeners responding authentically to the character of their websites, in accordance with the values of their native cultures and their occasions. The problem for contemporary panorama structure was to specific the spirit of its period, simply as earlier gardeners had expressed their very own. Web page’s excursions into the previous weren’t time-travel fantasies; he was searching for methods to reorient himself within the current. He was starting to search out his steadiness – philosophically fashionable, but traditionally knowledgeable. However then a world battle disrupted all the pieces.

Visiting gardens overseas, he cultivated a cosmopolitan perspective in a time of violent nationalisms

‘Our follow ceased to exist,’ Web page wrote, bluntly, ‘and all my modest accumulation of plans, pictures and 18th-century backyard books went up in flames within the first London blitz.’ His agency was defunct, his archive in ashes, destroyed by the Luftwaffe. ‘Gardening belonged, it appeared, solely to the previous; there was no future – solely the urgent current.’

Web page joined Britain’s Battle Division, going south and east to distant stations – Egypt, India, Sri Lanka. He by no means publicly mentioned his wartime work, which can have been propaganda, however the travels expanded his schooling. Web page was studying ‘that life might be in any other case skilled than from the European standpoint.’ Visiting gardens overseas, he cultivated a cosmopolitan perspective in a time of violent nationalisms. His writing emphasised the shifting spirituality of Jap cultures. ‘There have been all of the marvellous mosques to discover,’ he remembered of his time in Cairo, the place he heard a voice ‘chanting verses from the Quran – each sound vibrant with which means and devotion.’

Even on the opposite aspect of the world, although, Web page noticed the grim indicators of British imperial growth. In a single telling passage, he talked about arriving in Sri Lanka, ‘with its historical cities of a former Buddhist civilisation buried within the tropical forests and the skinny veneer of Nineteenth-century British pink brick structure which has made Colombo as commonplace as Southsea or the Bronx.’ Colonisation had imposed a generic, industrial floor not simply onto the land but in addition on to human cultures, in every single place.

When peacetime got here, Web page discovered himself adrift. He had no cash and no vocation. His thoughts was rattled. ‘I used to be completely at a loss in a world to which I had develop into unused,’ he confessed.

Web page turned to associates for assist. Beneath the mentorship of the Austrian émigré painter Oskar Kokoschka, who had settled in London, Web page retrained himself, beginning with ‘the issue of actually drawing’. Earlier than he might compose once more, he needed to rehabilitate his eyes. ‘To check the character and type of the thing in entrance of me gave me again the opportunity of one other form of imaginative and prescient and one other form of self-discipline, and little by little an enormous weight of amassed superficialities fell away.’

Web page understood his self-discipline as a follow of trying by way of surfaces till he discerned a deeper actuality, then making shapes in concord with what he discovered. This mix of meditation and composition grew to become his postwar remedy. ‘I felt refreshed and quiet as a result of I knew once more that there’s a persevering with actuality behind the appearances and issues of on a regular basis.’

It’s onerous … to see Web page’s gardens from his standpoint with out acknowledging how mysticism formed his artwork

Two French acquaintances, Stéphane Boudin and André de Vilmorin, helped Web page arrange a brand new follow in Paris. He began over, engaged on many scales, from grand chateaux to smaller city plots. He additionally joined the circle of bohemian intellectuals and artists who gathered in Gurdjieff’s salon on the rue des Colonels Renard. In 1947, Web page married Lida Gurdjieff, sometimes called the well-known mystic’s daughter, although some reference sources establish her as his niece.

Gurdjieff’s instructing appealed to educated Westerners who rejected mainstream Christianity however nonetheless craved some form of transcendence – a non secular imaginative and prescient past the confines of Church or nation. His concepts influenced Web page’s former accomplice Jellicoe and the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, in addition to Web page himself. Drawing from varied world religions, Gurdjieff taught artists to align their work with common ideas of geometry and steadiness.

Even sympathetic readers of The Schooling of a Gardener have struggled to assimilate this facet of Web page’s thought. The Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox, in his introduction to the New York Evaluation Books version, waves it away as ‘the purest baloney’. The English gardener and tv host Alan Titchmarsh, introducing the brand new Classic Classics model, doesn’t point out spirituality in any respect. However it’s onerous to grasp Web page’s e book, or to see his gardens from his personal standpoint, with out acknowledging how mysticism formed his artwork.

Explaining his idea of composition, Web page wrote that ‘each object emanates – sends out vibrations past its bodily physique that are particular to itself.’ The panorama designer Kevin Barton, who studied Web page’s archives for a grasp’s thesis in backyard historical past, reveals how these feedback echo Gurdjieff’s teachings. Web page had discovered to consider design as a approach of recreating cosmic geometries. When the vibrations have been in concord, the composition labored; the backyard attained its peculiar ‘magic’.

While Web page’s philosophy grew to become unorthodox and orientalist, his follow grew to become extra conventional and, on its floor, classically Western. After twenty years away from England, he acknowledged: ‘my strategy to designing was modified by the better formality of classical French planning and the extra sculptural strategy of the Italian custom.’

Web page’s work from this period is richly introduced in two coffee-table books, each printed after his demise: Marina Schinz and Gabrielle van Zuylen’s The Gardens of Russell Web page (1991) and the American Academy in Rome’s Russell Web page: Ritratti di Giardini Italiani (1998). Each function the identical backyard on their covers. Two stone sphinxes stand guard over the doorway to the backyard, which descends a steep hillside in three extensive, rectangular terraces. A straight path by way of the higher terrace establishes the principle axis. It runs between two rectangular parterres after which, by approach of some steps, all the way down to the center terrace, which is sort of solely taken up by a shallow, stone-edged pool. On the decrease degree, a tightly clipped hornbeam hedge varieties a maze-like arabesque sample.

That is Web page’s backyard at Villa Silvio Pellico, south of Turin, Italy, and it virtually poses for the digicam. The geometry is evident and orderly. No paths curve into darkness; no vines snake by way of the scene. Van Zuylen calls it: ‘proof of Web page’s understanding of the classical Italian backyard.’

Web page continued to be appreciated as a proper designer, even when he labored in England and the USA, the place extra casual types prevailed. In 1958, he gained one in every of English gardening’s highest honours, a gold medal on the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Present, for a kitchen backyard with French particulars, its vegetable beds framed by boxwood hedges. Ernestine Carter of The Sunday Occasions praised the backyard’s ‘delicate formality’. Later, for Manhattan’s Frick Assortment, Web page made a courtyard with neat flowerbeds, just a few bushes and a reflecting pool. A New York Occasions author described it as an ‘beautiful little classical backyard’, a museum piece in its personal proper.

Deeper than English informality or French formality, the Islamic custom was Web page’s best supply of inspiration

Whereas these observers celebrated Web page’s works, they tended to solid him as a conservative artist, defending classical formality in a casual age. However it is a misreading. Web page dismissed the entire query of ritual and informality as a shallow one in every of secondary significance. ‘The diploma of ritual you’ll use will rely on the character of the home and the idiom of the panorama,’ he suggested. The formal clipping of a hedge or the casual curve of a flower mattress have been simply ‘superficialities’. The actual artwork of design was the deeper construction – kind as form, not affectations of ritual. Or, as Web page put it: ‘I like gardens with good bones.’

He discovered his favorite form of bones in southern Spain, close to Malaga airport, when he went to see ‘a fantastic elaborate late Seventeenth- or early 18th-century “Italian” backyard of paved terraces, balustraded stairways, fountains and a amount of statues.’ Whereas Web page appreciated these particulars, he ‘sensed that the location of each home and backyard had been rigorously chosen (as solely the Moors knew how), and I got down to discover the much less frequented areas of the backyard.’ His hunch proved proper, and ‘positive sufficient, I discovered an octagonal fountain of the 14th century falling to items in a cabbage patch and an extended canal-like reservoir.’ The essential factor was not the Italian ornamentation; it was the design under.

Deeper than English informality or French formality, the Islamic custom that had made its approach into Europe from North Africa was Web page’s best supply of inspiration. In it, he discovered a mystical view of garden-making because the artwork of bringing every website into concord with itself and its surroundings – and so with the universe. This philosophy, as Web page understood it, didn’t require him to mimic the floor particulars of ‘Moorish’ gardens. It allowed him to be versatile about fashion, utilizing formal or casual touches as the location required. It additionally allowed him to salvage, quite than demolish, the perfect supplies from his websites.

However there was a darkish irony on the coronary heart of Web page’s profession: fairly often, he labored for purchasers whose wealth got here from the identical mass-marketed shopper industries whose results Web page criticised so scornfully. His backyard at Villa Silvio Pellico was funded by the Fiat car manufacturing fortune. His ultimate venture can be a sculpture backyard for the world headquarters of PepsiCo. Web page’s purchasers created and profited from the degraded suburban panorama; in his elegant sanctuaries, they loved the privilege of retreating from it. What started as an ascetic response in opposition to shopper capitalism was now in the marketplace as a luxurious expertise.

In the long term, Web page’s design ethos grew to become his true product. Shoppers who employed him have been persuaded that his expertise went past technical competence or a modern fashion. They have been coping with a deep soul whose gardens supplied therapeutic – perhaps even sacred – atmospheres.

Seen on this mild, his legacy shouldn’t be actually elusive in spite of everything, neither is it confined to the classical custom of formal design. We would detect Web page’s affect within the orientalist minimalism of way of life magazines like Architectural Digest, with their shiny pictures of boutique meditation spas and Silicon Valley ‘Zen’ gardens. However we’d additionally discover stunning resonances between Web page’s ethos and the important, progressive design actions which are actively reimagining gardens for social justice and ecological restore.

In 1985, the 12 months Web page died, a younger panorama designer named Chris Baines launched his ‘wildlife backyard’ on the Chelsea Flower Present. Within the midst of a competition identified for elaborate, costly floral shows, Baines used widespread, native crops to attract in pollinators and songbirds. Baines had recreated the house backyard as an oasis of nature throughout the sterile expanses of suburbia. It was the signal of a brand new period, and now, virtually 4 a long time later, wild is ‘the phrase of the second’, as one journal author noticed in February 2022. The concept of the wild garden, which as soon as appeared paradoxical, is ‘presently dominating design’.

The formal backyard stands for summary rationality, in opposition to the casual backyard’s romance and spirituality

Reckoning with local weather change and habitat destruction, backyard design has begun to deal with sustainability, and a few landowners have deserted standard gardening altogether. Within the UK, Lowther Fort and the Knepp Property – the varieties of websites that used to rent Web page – are working with environmentalists on ‘rewilding’ missions, turning cultivated lands again into biodiverse ecosystems. On a smaller scale, gardener-activists like John Little in England, Mary Reynolds in Eire and Douglas Tallamy within the US are reimagining dwelling gardens as little wildlife sanctuaries, with biodiversity as their first precept.

The place does all this depart Russell Web page? To some ecological gardeners, the classical fashion that characterises Web page’s most well-known works has come to signify the colonial, harmful conceitedness of the fashionable West. Critics now describe classical gardens in virtually monstrous phrases. In Gardening in a Altering World: Crops, Individuals and the Local weather Disaster (2022), the English designer Darryl Moore calls them: ‘ostentatious shows of energy and conspicuous wealth articulated by way of the medium of meticulously outlined structural planting.’ From this standpoint, the formal backyard stands for summary rationality, in opposition to the casual backyard’s romance and spirituality. The formal backyard represents imperial energy and wasteful capitalism, versus mild sweetness.

On the floor, the brand new experiments in ecological garden-making look nothing like Web page’s formal compositions. On the similar time, although, in calling for a brand new ethos, the brand new designers typically echo Web page’s non secular critique of Western tradition. In A New Backyard Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Unsure Future (2017), for instance, the American backyard author Benjamin Vogt asks readers to ‘open our hearts and minds and rethink magnificence – a deeper, useful magnificence designed for species and environments apart from our personal.’

At one degree, Web page’s story offers a cautionary story. His profession reveals how any design ethos, even a non secular protest in opposition to empire and shopper capitalism, can develop into a form of branding – distinguishing itself in opposition to the ugliness of Western, middle-class excesses solely to raise its personal market status. To redress our social and ecological crises in a considerable approach, garden-making must assist create open, quite than personal, sanctuaries for folks and nature on each scale, from rewilded city tons to sustainably managed state and nationwide conservation areas.

At one other degree, although, Web page’s personal work offers sources that is perhaps put to make use of in new, progressive initiatives. In actual fact, one in every of Web page’s personal considerations was to assist gardeners determine which precious items ought to be saved, which ineffective ones discarded, once we are working with a mixed-up website. Web page approached his work as a set of restoration initiatives on long-inhabited properties the place, he felt, each ecology and tradition had been degraded over time. Within the ruins, he appeared for salvageable varieties, then turned them into new gardens whose futures he didn’t management.

At the top of his life, within the early Eighties, Web page returned to the casual, picturesque fashion that he had first used at Longleat half a century earlier. His fee was to rework the sculpture gardens surrounding the PepsiCo workplaces in Westchester County, New York. When he died of most cancers in January 1985, the venture was incomplete, however his designs have been ultimately carried out and, not like most of Web page’s different gardens, this one has been nicely preserved over time. On a vibrant, heat day in June, I went on my own to wander by way of the grounds.

PepsiCo is the worldwide distributor of soppy drinks, Taco Bell franchises and Frito-Lay snacks and, as I made my approach into the property, I had some uneasy emotions. I used to be interested by how Web page protested the flattening results of shopper capitalism, but labored for this conglomerate that suburbanised the planet. I used to be questioning whether or not his design may really feel as sterile as an atypical workplace park.

A small walkway, or ‘golden path’, led me right into a backyard of understated magnificence. There was a pond within the centre of a inexperienced garden, with just a few mature weeping willow bushes round its edges, swaying within the breeze. Tucked away in a single nook of the bigger park, I came across Web page’s small, elegant formal backyard, the place water lilies floated on rectangular swimming pools. The general impression was serene, however it was not lifeless. I recognised the sensibility that I first encountered in Web page’s writing, and I believed once more that there are some helpful issues to be taken from his work, regardless of its troubling complicities.

At its finest, Web page’s considering leads past the oversimple debate between formality and informality, the artist’s composition and the ecosystem’s thrum. In a single manuscript fragment, quoted in Barton’s thesis, Web page pictured gardens as ‘ordered three-dimensional patterns mounted in time and area, by way of which flows nature, the vegetable world, proliferation, rising, dying, budding, flowering and seeding, impermanent undisciplined and normally the antithesis of order.’ He by no means needed to dominate the earth by imposing summary order on its thorny funk. He liked each artwork and crops alike with what he referred to as his ‘verdant coronary heart’. To a imaginative and prescient of the panorama’s future, he presents up a insurgent spirit and an artist’s eye.