Description
Like his contemporary Gertrude Jekyll, William Robinson made enormous contributions to the world of gardening. More than any other gardener, he was responsible for sweeping out the rigid Victorian style and ushering in a more relaxed look that used native plants. Here, Richard Bisgrove explores Robinson’s design principles and his transformative role in English gardening. Robinson’s groundbreaking ideas are displayed in numerous illustrations, including photographs of Robinsonian gardens at Gravetye Manor and elsewhere and engravings from his classic books.
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William Robinson (1838-1935) began his horticultural career as a garden boy in Ireland and ended it as the owner of over a thousand acres in Sussex.Robinson is best known for his fervent endorsement of wild gardening, including the naturalising of bulbs (The Wild Garden was published in 1870), and for his all-encompassing English Flower Garden (fifteen editions from 1883 to 1933), His discovery of Alfred Parsons as the ideal artist to illustrate his ideas helped to foster a new era of the plantsman's picturesque and thus to launch the ideal of the English cottage garden, apparent in such gardens as Hidcote Manor and Sissinghurst, which has resonated around the world ever since.Curiously; despite his enormous literary output and his position at the centre of an international circle of distinguished horticulturists, William Robinson remains a surprisingly enigmatic figure. He was generous to friends and retainers but ferocious in his attacks on opponents, a populariser rather than a pioneer, but undoubtedly one of the greatest figures in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century gardening.
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