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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a rose with thorns, 27 Oct 2007
It is comparatively rare still for a work on garden history to be controversial, and even rarer for a guide to a county's parks and gardens to achieve that distinction. Timothy Mowl, lecturer in Garden History at Bristol University, has now courted controversy in both arenas. Widely known for his work on eighteenth century landscapes and landscape designers, Mowl has brought to garden history an irreverence for long held and cherished beliefs in the subject. His own academic background, at first in architecture and decorative arts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and then on landscape, is firm enough foundation for his work to be taken seriously, even when deliberately provocative (his latest work on the designer William Kent for example was subtitled `architect, designer, opportunist'). Mowl's strengths are his ability to propose and develop new outlooks and sustain these, sometimes with the benefit of detailed evidence, occasionally seemingly in the face of it. These strengths may not at first sight seem ones particularly suited to the writing of a guide to a counties historic gardens, traditionally a task reliant on a firm knowledge of local detail almost to the point of introvertism, Historic Gardens of Cornwall is however no traditional guide.
The fourth in a continuing series, Tempus have already published Mowl's descriptions of gardens in Gloucestershire (2002), Dorset (2003), and Wiltshire (2004) with Worcestershire due out in 2006. The whirlwind nature of the publications is one which more staid members of the garden history fraternity might feel mitigates against detailed and considered examination of a particular county, but is certainly not one which appears to have dented Mowl's own enthusiasm. Cornwall however was a county which Mowl does not appear to have been looking forward to exploring as he frankly admits in his introduction. As an architectural historian by training and an analyser of vistas, views and temples by preference, `soft landscaping' held no enticements. Cornwall is most famous for its planting, its exotics, and its luxuriance of colour and bloom - as Mowl says (p10)' they can grow gardens in Cornwall, but they cannot often build a beautiful house'. In an introduction guaranteed to alienate any `plantsperson' he argues that `although many Cornish Gardens have `admittedly wonderful shows of colour, . . . they treat their flowering bushes much as specimens are displayed in a museum or rare animals in a zoo' . . . their `spatial compositions are relatively rare and that, after June, the gardeners have to fall back on banks of sky blue, mauve and purple hydrangeas' (p16). So have Tempus (and Mowl) made an error in asking a rather controversial, non-Cornish, non-plantsperson, to produce a book on Cornish gardens?
Certainly from the very first page those who flock to the lushly planted `soft' gardens for the sake of their exoticism will be rather alienated by Mowl's dismissal of this `firestorm of colour' (p9). Azaleas and camellias beloved of the plant hunters are described as `infesting' the county's gardens (p99) and one suspects Mowl feels similarly about the plant spotters who come to admire them. The newly re-built School Room at Glendurgan is dismissed as a visible destination for old people struggling up so many steep slopes, with flowering bushes at every turn of non-slip paths (p136). Possibly accurate but most definitely unlikely to endear the author or his book to those who as he rightly points out make up the majority of Cornwall's garden tourists. With only a perfunctory list of gardens to visit, no location maps, relatively few colour illustrations (in a county indecently full of colour) and an index which eschews any reference to plant names, this is not we are informed `yet another glossy guide', but instead a `sequential and selective historical survey', and one from a very particular standpoint.
For those who share this particular standpoint and who are more interested in the architectural and social landscaping of a historic garden than in its planting, this book is a delight. Somewhat quirky and eclectic, even the chapter headings betray the playful approach of the whole. Who but the most determined plantsperson or most traditional of historians could resist chapters entitled `The county in a cautious dalliance with formal garden design'; `Hesitant Steps towards a Modernist apotheosis' or `The problem of Arcadian gardens in a naturally Arcadian county'? All the great designers, and many more minor, make an appearance in this story, Kent, Brown, Mason, Repton, Nesfield, Jekyll, Mawson and many more, whether they designed in Cornwall or not their influence is considered. This, to me, is the real strength of the book. Rather than, or perhaps in addition to, a description of Cornish historic gardens it is a discussion of the role of Cornwall within garden history. The reader of this book will imbibe not only a knowledge of a selection of Cornish gardens but also an insight into the fashions, chronology, characters and concerns running through gardening history as a whole and Cornwalls very particular role within that.
Having rushed pell mell through the counties gardens in what must have been little more than an extended summer, (he calls it his `Cornish year'), Mowl still manages to bring us to a startling halt with questions such as `are these valley paradises great gardens'? `What makes a great garden?', Why did Cornall eschew the hard garden landscapes of the early nineteenth centuries? And what is the role of the Brownian park in a county so floriferous? Using his source materials he goes beyond their detailed description to the overviews and the larger picture. Beyond the `what's there' of the guide book, or the `what was there' of the garden's register, to the `why' of the observant outsider.
A huge wealth of material is gathered within the pages of what is a relatively brief book for one that covers, albeit selectively, a garden rich county and reference to the notes reveals a reliance on other people's work which is inevitable and must be seen as acceptable in a series such as this. What Mowl has added to the previous works is his own inimitable style and persuasive approach, resulting in a book of interest both to those familiar with Cornish historic gardens and those less so. On occasions one feels that the outrage is there just to be outrageous, or the critical there to shoot down easy targets (large tea rooms and English Heritage interpretation signs) but the book is immensely readable, combining as it does the academic, the novelistic, and the personal. The description of getting lost at Penjerrick for example has the result of fixing the site in the mind far better than the usual description of the opening times, facilities and number of borders. Along the way one suspects he will have lost the support of several garden-owners whose modern planting or historic design he is off-handedly dismissive of (`desultory modern planting', `mournful house', `dismal view') and even his main source on garden history is taken to task as an inadequate architectural historian. For those outside of Cornish garden history this is a fascinating, interesting and extraordinarily readable account of the role that county and its gardens and owners have played; for those on the inside one suspects it is not a rose without thorns.
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