We rejected being taxed without representation and just to show those Brits, we took their tea and flung it into the harbor. We scoffed at their monarchy and had this wild idea that all men were created equal. We even picked the other side of the road to drive on. But we rebellious Yanks sure do love one iconic British export: the English garden. A celebration of it is coming our way on April 10-12 with Colonial Williamsburg’s “78th Annual Garden Symposium: Celebrating the Influence of Great English Gardens.”
Colonial Williamsburg is a likely locale to toast the English garden as it’s the home of colonial America’s most opulent English garden. The Associated Press compared the English garden of John Custis IV, a wealthy Williamsburg tobacco planter, slaveholder and politician, to a modern-day Lamborghini purchase. As in rich people flaunted their wealth back in the colonial day with an ornamental garden.
Lost to time, a dig illuminates the garden at Custis Square, a four-acre plot at the corner of Nassau and Francis streets that included his home. His garden is believed to have encompassed about two-thirds the size of a football field—American football of course.
A cottage in Colonial Williamsburg.
The Symposium
For the English garden symposium, renowned British garden historian and designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is one of two people giving opening and closing keynote addresses. He’s among the curators, archaeologists and gardeners from Colonial Williamsburg who will be joined by award-winning authors, gardeners, landscape architects, naturalists and horticulturalists from the United Kingdom and the U.S.
Their topics include:
- The importance of imported prints on Virginia’s early gardens.
- Spring flowering bulbs (featuring naturalist, author, photographer and award-winning horticulturalist Brent Heath of Brent & Becky’s Bulbs in Gloucester).
- Gardening in the context of the Age of Exploration.
- The horticultural impact of three cultures fusing into one new world during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Answering questions via email, Longstaffe-Gowan has a simple definition of an ideal garden, English or otherwise: “A garden with a view to an extensive landscape or over picturesque scenery,” he says.
Easy enough to accomplish, perhaps. But what of the traditional English garden? How easy would it be to pull that off? Let’s set aside for a moment that an entry-level Lamborghini is $250,000.
“England has endless gardening traditions—all of which are constantly in a state of flux,” Longstaffe-Gowan says. “Perhaps the most pervasive and romanticized is that of the cottage garden, where small plots are heavily embroidered with a profuse and sometimes unruly tangle of traditional flowers and roses contained by neatly clipped hedges and occasionally topiary. The best English gardens in my view express unabashedly a love of experimenting and engaging with plants and nature and reflect the personal idiosyncrasies of their makers.”
Read that last sentence again. So freeing! Put your own twist on it, he says. There’s not exactly a template, or standard of the English garden. Maybe we have some pinnacles or gardens of renown and inspiration. Some ideals, let’s say.
The Pinnacle
For Longstaffe-Gowan, the pinnacle of the English garden is Rousham in Oxfordshire. It’s an 18th-century garden that is a “masterpiece of garden theatre,” he says. “It has extensive vistas, abounds with undulating lawns, watery conceits and dusky groves, and bristles with temples and statues. Horace Walpole remarked in 1760 that the whole was ‘as elegant and antique as if the emperor Julian had selected the most pleasing solitude about Daphne to enjoy a philosophic retirement.’ ”
Watery conceits? Dusky groves? Rolling lawns bristling with temples and statues? Sign me up!
And yet, the U.S. and England of the 1700s were much different from today in terms of climate. How does that affect the classic English garden, not to mention our own gardens here in tidal Virginia?
“We’re adapting to more severe and unpredictable weather conditions as well as hotter summers and milder, wetter winters,” Longstaffe-Gowan says. “These factors are having an impact on the range of plants we can grow, and this in turn is changing the character of our gardens. It’s challenging, but it’s forcing us to reexamine the way we garden and encouraging us to become more experimental and inventive.”
The Trends
Marta McDowell is an acclaimed garden author and avid gardener based in New Jersey who will explore “New Ideas from English Gardens and English Authors & Their Gardens” at the symposium. She says she shows pictures of the gardens around the Governor’s Palace to her landscape history students at the New York Botanical Garden each year. She demonstrates “how British—or to be precise, Anglo-Dutch—garden styles were transplanted to the North American colonies,” she says.
McDowell says the trends in English gardening are a more naturalistic style with meadow-type plantings and climate- conscious gardening. Then adding in modernist touches, especially in furnishings and ornaments.
Her favorite English garden is Beatrix Potter’s garden at Hill Top in Cumbria. “It has that carefully careless quality of the best cottage gardens, despite the upkeep that goes into keeping it that way,” she says. “Something is always in bloom, from winter snowdrops to the last michaelmas daisies (aka chrysanthemums) of autumn. And it is a size you might imagine tending yourself, rather than estates like Chatsworth which would require a sizable detachment of full-time gardeners. I’ve had the chance to work a few days in her garden, which was great fun.”
I don’t know about you, but she had me at Beatrix Potter.
The Reward
Whether it’s classic English, Virginia backyard or vegetable, the garden is its own reward, McDowell says. “It must be the pheromones, but there is a unique happiness in the regular round of gardening through the seasons,” she says. “If I’m writing about a plant, I really do like to have experience with it. Which is why my garden is so crowded….”
McDowell says she’s smitten with the plant world and its intersections with place, people and the past. “Humans seem compelled to grow plants—and not just for sustenance,” she says. “We arrange plants in functional and symbolic ways. We have the urge to select, shape, and control their growth. We have worshipped them, imitated their forms (think columns), copied them onto pottery, sculpted them into topiary, penjing, and bonsai, and trained them onto walls and arbors.”
There’s another thing. “And, I must say, that plant and garden people are a magnificently quirky and interesting lot,” she says. “They inspire me too.”
The symposium is April 10-12, 2025. For additional information, go to the Colonial Williamsburg 78th Annual Garden Symposium website at bit.ly/3QzpvYB.
