A shrubbery, shrub border or shrub garden is a part of a garden where shrubs, mostly flowering species, are thickly planted. [1] The original shrubberies were mostly sections of large gardens, with one or more paths winding through it, a less-remembered aspect of the English landscape garden with very few original 18th-century examples surviving. As the fashion spread to smaller gardens, linear shrub borders covered up walls and fences, and were typically underplanted with smaller herbaceous flowering plants. By the late 20th century, shrubs, trees and smaller plants tend to be mixed together in the most visible parts of the garden, hopefully blending successfully. At the same time, shrubs, especially very large ones, have become part of the woodland garden, mixed in with trees, both native species and imported ornamental varieties.
The word is first recorded by the OED in a letter of 1748 by Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough to the fanatical gardener William Shenstone: "Nature has been so remarkably kind this last Autumn to adorn my Shrubbery with the flowers that usually blow at Whitsuntide". [2] The shrubbery developed to display exciting new imported flowering species, initially mostly from the East Coast of British America, [3] and quickly replaced the older formal "wilderness", with compartments of smaller trees surrounded by hedges, and little colour. It was a further part of the garden, beyond the terrace and flower garden that the house usually opened onto, and when mature provided shade on hot days, some shelter from a wind, and some privacy.
The shrubbery was at first the development of the plant collector wing of the growing movement of English gardeners, who in the early and mid-18th century eagerly awaited the new seeds and cuttings arriving at London nurserymen such as Thomas Fairchild (d. 1729) from America. [4] There was some tension between them and the more landscape-oriented gardeners such as Capability Brown, though Brown's designs in fact allowed for flower gardens and shrubberies, which have very rarely survived as well as his landscape vistas in the parks. [5]
Shrubbery is also the collective noun for shrubs in other contexts, [6] sometimes used for shrubland, a type of natural landscape dominated by shrubs or bushes. [7] The many distinct types of these include fynbos, maquis, shrub-steppe, shrub swamp and moorland.
According to the garden historian Mark Laird, "by the early 1750s, we may reasonably claim that the shrubbery had been invented". [8] The exact appearance of the earliest examples needs careful reconstruction from such plans, letters, poems and visual images as have survived. A high proportion seem to have been viewed from "serpentine" paths, already a very fashionable layout for gardens, using an expanded version of the line of beauty promoted by William Hogarth's book The Analysis of Beauty of 1753. In plans some of these proceed in a single overall direction, with several more or less curves to left and right, and often no exit shown at the end. With large shrubs these would first bring plants into view when fairly close, supplying a succession of surprises. There was great emphasis on "graduation" in planting, with shorter plants, including herbaceous flowers, at the front near the path or lawn, with middle-sized ones behind, and the largest, and any trees, at the back. This principle, to some extent self-evident, has governed much planting ever since, for example that of Gertrude Jekyll, but was rather novel in European gardening at this point, where the different sizes of plants were usually planted in different areas.
A shrubbery was a feature of 19th-century gardens in the English manner, or the gardenesque style [9] of the early part of the century. A shrubbery [10] was a collection of hardy shrubs, quite distinct from a flower garden, which was also a cutting garden to supply flowers in the house. The shrubbery was arranged as a walk, ideally a winding one, that made a circuit that brought the walker back to the terrace of the house. Its paths were gravel, so that they dried quickly after a rain. A walk in the shrubbery offered a chance for a private conversation, and a winding walk among shrubs surrounding even quite a small lawn was a feature of the garden behind a well-furnished Regency suburban villa.
"Mr Rushworth," said Lady Bertram, "if I were you, I would have a very pretty shrubbery. One likes to get out into a shrubbery in fine weather." — Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).
In the later part of the 19th century hardy Asian shrubs from the hills around the Himalayas and Western China became the most exciting new additions to the European garden, and large Asian rhododendrons now often dominate shrubberies and woodland gardens planted in the period that have not been carefully maintained, especially the invasive rhododendron ponticum . This had a wide range across Asia, extending to southern Spain, and it was introduced to England in the 1760s. But many sections of gardens, mostly from about 1890 to 1950, were planted as "rhododendron gardens" or "azealea gardens" from the start.
A variant on this, from the 1890s onwards, was a European interpretation of the Japanese garden, whose aesthetic was introduced to the English-speaking world by Josiah Conder's Landscape Gardening in Japan (Kelly & Walsh, 1893). Conder was a British architect who had worked for the Japanese government and other clients in Japan from 1877 until his death. The book was published when the general trend of Japonisme, or Japanese influence in the arts of the West, was already well-established, and sparked the first Japanese gardens in the West. Initially these were mostly sections of large private gardens, but as the style grew in popularity, many Japanese gardens were, and continue to be, added to public parks and gardens. These are to a large extent planted with shrubs, as well as small trees.
Technically the rose garden is a specialized type of shrub garden, but it is normally treated as a type of flower garden, if only because its origins in Europe go back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, when roses were effectively the largest and most popular flowers, already existing in numerous garden cultivars. Roses were never out of fashion, but received a great boost in the 19th century, as many hybrids from Asian species were developed, above all from rosa chinensis (the "China rose"), which is still the dominant parent in most modern garden roses. Large rose gardens became highly popular as features of public parks at the end of the century, and remained popular additions in the 20th. Many rose breeders also show off their plants in gardens at their nurseries.
After the turn of the new century Gertrude Jekyll offered a chapter of suggestions for "Wood and Shrubbery Edges" in Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (London, 1908) in which her descriptions were based on her own garden at Munstead Wood, south of Godalming, Surrey, but her shrubbery and hardy perennial plantings were designed to soften transitions: "Where woodland joins garden ground there is often a sudden jolt; the wood ends with a hard line, sometimes with a path along it, accentuating the defect." [11] In the expansive space of even a small Edwardian garden, Miss Jekyll recommended a space "from twenty-five to forty feet" planted so as to bring wood and garden into harmony, "so planted as to belong equally to garden and wood." Rhododendrons were the stand-by in these shrub belts, combined with ferns, wood-rush, lilies, white foxgloves and white columbines.
In the 1980s John Nash's never-executed plans for the garden setting of the Brighton Pavilion, illustrated in Nash's volume Views of the Royal Pavilion (1826), were finally carried out in connection with the extensive restorations of the Pavilion itself. [12] Its "fairly open landscape of soft lawns dotted with trees and set with lightly-wooded, sinuous shrubberies" are best illustrated in Augustus Charles Pugin's [13] watercolor view c. 1822 of the west front of the Pavilion, [14] reproduced in Nash's publication. The winding perimeter walk circling the lawn among the shrubs and trees, enriched with island beds of herbaceous perennials, began to be laid out in 1814, with a flush of activity 1817-21. Two books of commentaries proved indispensable for the replanting scheme. One was Henry Phillips, who wrote in 1823
The shrubbery is a style of pleasure-garden which seems to owe its creation to the idea that our sublime poet formed of Eden. It originated in England and is as peculiar to the British nation as landscape planting. [15]
The formulas for arranging a shrubbery were founded on contemporary painterly requirements for the Picturesque; judicious contrast and variety were essential, but Philips seems to have been among the first garden writers to notice that yellowish-green leaves in the foreground seem to throw bluish green-leaved shrubs deeper into a perceived distance. [16] The desirable undulations of paths and islands and bands of shrub plantings would ideally undulate in elevation too: "break up the level by throwing up elevations,' Philips suggested, "so as to answer the double purpose of obscuring private walks and screening other parts from the wind." [17]
Nash was at work also on the public parks of London, devising the shrubberies of Regent's Park and of St. James's Park, where the German visitor Prince Pückler-Muskau discerned that
Mr Nash ... masses the shrubs more closely together, allows the grass to disappear in wide sweeps under the plants or lets it run along the edges of the shrubs without trimming them ... hence they soon develop into a thicket that gracefully bends over the lawn without showing anywhere a sharply defined outline [18]
Such precise effects were made immeasurably simpler by the invention in 1827 by the English engineer Edwin Beard Budding of the rotary lawn mower, an extrapolation of machinery commonly used to cut velvet pile.
A shrub or bush is a small-to-medium-sized perennial woody plant. Unlike herbaceous plants, shrubs have persistent woody stems above the ground. Shrubs can be either deciduous or evergreen. They are distinguished from trees by their multiple stems and shorter height, less than 6–10 m (20–33 ft) tall. Small shrubs, less than 2 m (6.6 ft) tall are sometimes termed as subshrubs. Many botanical groups have species that are shrubs, and others that are trees and herbaceous plants instead.
An arboretum is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees and shrubs of a variety of species. Originally mostly created as a section in a larger garden or park for specimens of mostly non-local species, many modern arboreta are in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants and are intended at least in part for scientific study.
A parterre is a part of a formal garden constructed on a level substrate, consisting of symmetrical patterns, made up by plant beds, plats, low hedges or coloured gravels, which are separated and connected by paths. Typically it was the part of the garden nearest the house, perhaps after a terrace. The view of a parterre from inside the house, especially from the upper floors, was a major consideration in its design. The word "parterre" was and is used both for the whole part of the garden containing parterres and for each individual section between the "alleys".
William Robinson: was an Irish practical gardener and journalist whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to the popularising of the English cottage garden, a parallel to the search for honest simplicity and vernacular style of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and were important in promoting the woodland garden. Robinson is credited as an early practitioner of the mixed herbaceous border of hardy perennial plants, a champion too of the "wild garden", who vanquished the high Victorian pattern garden of planted-out bedding schemes. Robinson's new approach to gardening gained popularity through his magazines and several books—particularly The Wild Garden, illustrated by Alfred Parsons, and The English Flower Garden.
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. Most professional garden designers have some training in horticulture and the principles of design. Some are also landscape architects, a more formal level of training that usually requires an advanced degree and often a state license. Amateur gardeners may also attain a high level of experience from extensive hours working in their own gardens, through casual study, serious study in Master gardener programs, or by joining gardening clubs.
Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens is a botanical garden in Boothbay, Maine. It was opened in 2007.
University of Nevada, Reno Arboretum is a state arboretum located across the campus at the University of Nevada, Reno in Reno, Nevada.
The cottage garden is a distinct style that uses informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. English in origin, it depends on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure. Homely and functional gardens connected to cottages go back centuries, but their stylized reinvention occurred in 1870s England, as a reaction to the more structured, rigorously maintained estate gardens with their formal designs and mass plantings of greenhouse annuals.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin, as well as from the classic Chinese gardens of the East, which had recently been described by European travellers and were realized in the Anglo-Chinese garden.
Bowen Park is a heritage-listed park of 17,740 square metres (191,000 sq ft) at O'Connell Terrace, Bowen Hills, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1863 to 1950s. It was also known as the Acclimatisation Society Gardens. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 26 February 1999.
Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park, which includes the Coe Hall Historic House Museum, is an arboretum and state park covering over 400 acres (160 ha) located in the village of Upper Brookville in the town of Oyster Bay, New York.
Hamilton Gardens is a public garden park in the south of Hamilton owned and managed by Hamilton City Council in New Zealand. The 54-hectare park is based on the banks of the Waikato River and includes enclosed gardens, open lawns, a lake, a nursery, a convention centre and the Hamilton East Cemetery. It is the Waikato region's most popular visitor attraction, attracting more than 1 million people and hosting more than 2,000 events a year.
Luscombe Castle is a country house situated near the resort town of Dawlish, in the county of Devon in England. Upon purchasing the land at Luscombe in 1797, Charles Hoare demolished the existing house and commissioned architects John Nash and Humphrey Repton to design a new house and gardens at the site. Nash and Repton came up with an asymmetrical designed building made from Portland stone, with castellated parapets, turrets and pinnacles to create the feel of a picturesque castle.
The Morris Arboretum & Gardens of the University of Pennsylvania is the official arboretum of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Arboretum is open daily except for major holidays. It is located at 100 East Northwestern Avenue, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The New York Chinese Scholar's Garden is part of the Staten Island Botanical Garden, located in the Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Materials were shipped to Staten Island in the spring of 1998, when a team of 40 Chinese artists and artisans from Suzhou constructed the garden. It opened in June of 1999.
In English gardening history, the pleasure ground or pleasure garden was the parts of a large garden designed for the use of the owners, as opposed to the kitchen garden and the wider park. It normally included flower gardens, typically directly outside the house, and areas of lawn, used for playing games, and perhaps "groves" or a wilderness for walking around. Smaller gardens were often or usually entirely arranged as pleasure grounds, as are modern public parks.
Paris today has more than 421 municipal parks and gardens, covering more than three thousand hectares and containing more than 250,000 trees. Two of Paris's oldest and most famous gardens are the Tuileries Garden, created in 1564 for the Tuileries Palace, and redone by André Le Nôtre in 1664; and the Luxembourg Garden, belonging to a château built for Marie de' Medici in 1612, which today houses the French Senate. The Jardin des Plantes was the first botanical garden in Paris, created in 1626 by Louis XIII's doctor Guy de La Brosse for the cultivation of medicinal plants. Between 1853 and 1870, the Emperor Napoleon III and the city's first director of parks and gardens, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, created the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, Parc Montsouris and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, located at the four points of the compass around the city, as well as many smaller parks, squares and gardens in the neighborhoods of the city. One hundred sixty-six new parks have been created since 1977, most notably the Parc de la Villette (1987–1991) and Parc André Citroën (1992).
In the Western history of gardening, from the 16th to early 19th centuries, a wilderness was a highly artificial and formalized type of woodland, forming a section of a large garden. Though examples varied greatly, a typical English style was a number of geometrically-arranged compartments closed round by hedges, each compartment planted inside with relatively small trees. Between the compartments there were wide walkways or "alleys", usually of grass, sometimes of gravel. The wilderness provided shade in hot weather, and relative privacy. Though often said by garden writers at the time to be intended for meditation and reading, the wilderness was much used for walking, and often flirtation. There were few if any flowers, but there might be statues, and some seating, especially in garden rooms or salle vertes, clearings left empty. Some had other features, such as a garden maze.
A woodland garden is a garden or section of a garden that includes large trees and is laid out so as to appear as more or less natural woodland, though it is often actually an artificial creation. Typically it includes plantings of flowering shrubs and other garden plants, especially near the paths through it.