On my way to see Lizzie Philps, in residency at glorious Hestercombe, I came across a reference to the Arts & Crafts garden from Monty Don, who compares it to the Persian charhar bagh design (2018). Looking at the images below, one can see why.
However, although designed by Edwin Lutyens (with planting by Gertrude Jekyll), the garden at Hestercombe (1904) pre-dates the Lutyens’ work in New Delhi (1911), and I can’t find any references that would suggest any influences prior to that project (although of course it is possible and there are Indian designs in William Morris wallpaper).
Ann Helmreich suggests that Lutyens was actually influenced by Italianate, early modern knot designs for gardens, as recommended by Gervase Markham, publishing around the same date as the building of the Mughal gardens of Jahangir or Shah Jahan (early 17th century). When one looks at Hestercombe’s 20th century garden as a whole, it does seem more persuasive. But Monty Don’s suggestion therefore prompts the question – does anything connect these garden traditions apart from their contemporaneity?
Ebba Koch points to analogies between Jahangir and 17th century ‘Mannerist’ European tendencies to frame, ornament and engrave the ‘natural’ landscape (2017), without suggesting a directly causal link. In a chapter that forms the Epilogue to the same volume, Anatole Tchikine suggests that rather than direct influences between Islamic garden designs and Italian Renaissance gardens, the elaborate, geometric ‘parterre’ evolved in Italy in the 16th century as a way of displaying plants imported from the Middle East, while innovations in the use and manipulation of water were necessitated by the craze for citrus planting in the late 16th and 17th centuries. These things took place: ‘against a background of an intensive material and botanical exchange with the Middle East’ , and alongside the analogous self-display of elites ‘by related strategies of appropriating landscapes’ (2017:228).
If Lutyens later looked to reference European, Mughal, Buddhist and Hindu architectural styles in Delhi, there are perhaps some indications here of such a potential fusion – or confusion – even if well submerged in English garden traditions and hiding in plain sight.
Don, Monty and Moore, Derry, 2018. Paradise Gardens: the world’s most beautiful Islamic gardens. Hachette UK.
.Helmreich, Anne (2002), The English Garden and National Identity: The Competing Styles of Garden Design 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press.
Koch, Ebba, 2017. ‘Carved Pools, Rock-cut Elephants, Inscriptions and Tree Columns: Imperial Expression and its Analogies to the Renaissance Garden’, in Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires: Encounters and Confluences. Ed. Mohammad Gharipour. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, pp.183-210.
Tchikine, Anatole, 2017. ‘Epilogue: Italian Renaissance Gardens and the Middle East: Cultural Exchange in the Longue Durée’, in Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires: Encounters and Confluences. Ed. Mohammad Gharipour. Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, pp.213-232.