Gardeners searching for inspiration for natural, low-maintenance havens would do well to look to the late-17th- and early-18th-century wilderness, says Tilly Ware
MODERN-DAY gardeners want to work with Nature, not overpower it. Wildflower meadows, no-dig veg patches and borders crammed with winter seedheads are top of their wish lists. Although wild-style gardens (as opposed to simply wildly neglected ones) fit with ideas of ecological stewardship and a harmonious relationship with the earth, they can also be a tough trick to pull off. No one lusts after thickets of brambles, but too much fiddling about and the naturalness is quickly lost. Gardeners searching for that balance may find inspiration in a design idea that dominated English gardens about 300 years ago: the wilderness.
Wilderness is a slippery word with many connotations, but, in garden history, it is emphatically not wild. It is wildness that is artfully contained. Highly fashionable in the late 17th and early 18th century, a wilderness was an ornamental group of trees with a strong pattern of permanent paths through it. The areas between paths (‘quarters’) were densely planted with mainly native species and usually lined by hedges. At the intersection of paths, there were open clearings, known as cabinets, where you might find a statue, fountain or specimen tree. Stephen Switzer, writer and creator of the wilderness at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, had high hopes for these cabinets, in which he believed, ‘the Mind may privately exult and breathe out those Seraphick Thoughts and Strains, by which Man is known and distinguish’d as an Intelligent Being’. A prototype of forest bathing, perhaps.
One of the earliest references to a wilderness is at Ham House, west London, in the 1650s. It is also now one of the few places where you can walk in one, as the National Trust has recently reconstructed the rectangular space cut with straight and curving paths, enclosed by high hornbeam hedges. A few miles away, at Hampton Court Palace, there are similar plans for restoration. Leonard Knyff’s splendid 1702 panoramic painting details the spectacularly grand wilderness to the north of the palace, an intricate scheme of flat-topped hedges and dense trees, filled with a lacework of labyrinthine paths, as well as two mazes. It remained relatively intact until the 1850s, before becoming overgrown, muddled by interplanting and morphing into a general woodland. It is now a grassy picnicking spot covered with hordes of daffodils. Yet ‘a number of paths survive, the wilderness didn’t completely vanish,’ explains Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, the garden historian and designer who has rehabilitated the Royal Palace gardens for the past three decades. He plans to strengthen existing paths and rein
