I have been seeing the word 'arcadia' as I read about the development of Chatsworth…
English Garden Design Discouraged Mixed Beds
The English garden design discouraged mixed beds at one time.
Today we often talk about the impact of mass planting which is using many plants of one variety.
The annual conference for the Association for Garden Communicators happened to be in Atlanta this year.
Part of the meeting included visiting local gardens.
In a garden tour there I saw the use of a single variety of plant to create a carpet bed look around a fountain. [below] The clusters of color made of one plant provided a pleasing sight.
For decades English gardeners looked down on planting more than a single plant of one variety for a bed or border. A mixed variety was then the style.
David Stuart says in his book The Garden Triumphant: A Victorian Legacy, “The old method of planting garden flowers was in a mixture, and flowers had been planted that way certainly since the seventeenth century. It was once believed that to have two flowers of the same sort next to one another was a grave error of taste, and it seems likely that such planting ideas had an even more ancient past.”
To include more than one plant of the same variety was not in style.
Stuart continues, “The idea of grouping flowers, so that only one sort was to be seen in each bed, was as much a major departure from the conventions of history as was the passion for informal landscape gardens of the previous century [the eighteenth].”
The head gardener at Chatsworth Joseph Paxton, Stuart writes, in 1838 recommended no mixed beds with perennials but rather carpet bedding with annuals which became the major garden fashion in the Victorian period.
The mixed bed however did survive. Stuart says, “The mixed mode of bedding survived in rather specialized areas of gardening until the end of the nineteenth century.”
Carpet bedding became the popular style during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Thus, fashion in gardening is most important to heed.
The poor lonely plant doesn’t know the difference, but we do.
Today we plant in a mass or we plant in a mixed border. Both styles have their appeal.
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