AN ENGLISH ARCADIA: SYMPOSIUM

SYmposia dedicated to garden history are still rare. All credit then to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens of San Marino, California, for organizing the symposium "An English Arcadia: Landscape and Architecture in Britain and America" on October 26 and 27, 1991. The event complemented the traveling exhibition of material from the collection of the National Trust. Entitled "An English Arcadia 1600-1990," the exhibition was on show at the Huntington until midNovember. Methodologies of garden history remain as open as the largely unwritten history of the subject itself, and varying approaches were employed by the speakers. The best paper in the symposium was the first, given by Stephen Daniels and dealing with John Constable’s two paintings of his father’s flower and kitchen gardens. Applying the methodology of cultural geography to this deliberately limited subject matter allowed Daniels to lay out precisely what was at issue, personally for the painter and in a larger historical context, in Constable’s depictions of the gardens and the fields beyond them. The choice of narrowly circumscribed subject matter could serve as a model for beginning garden historians and could have been usefully adopted by some of the later speakers. It begins to bring an unruly and loosely defined subject under control. After Daniels, analysis of words took precedence for the remainder of the first day. A narrow focus informed Therese O’ Malley’s paper on gardening books in colonial America and the immediate postcolonial period. This was related to her work attempting to fix the meanings of certain key terms at specific historical moments and geographical locations. Peter Mandler considered the character of landscape conservation movements in Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries, although his generally ironic tone often seemed to confuse his message. His paper would have benefited from an incisive analysis of the crucial question of the place of class relations in the conservation issue. Stephen Bending grappled with published literature about landscape gardening in 18th-century Britain and its relationship to the perhaps overschematized emblem-expression discontinuity first postulated as important twenty years ago (almost the mists of antiquity for garden history). Harriet Ritvo, in the keynote address, encountered some of the difficulties that garden history presents to newcomers in the field. These include the question of deciding what constitutes a primary source so far as gardens are concerned and the consequent overreliance on unreliable secondary sources. There is also the problem of nontransferability of concepts from other subject disciplines: at one point Ritvo claimed that, in the early 19th century, plants that transgressed conventional taxonomy were deemed too threatening and were excluded from botanical collections! Not a shred of evidence was presented to support this view. Even if it were true of animals in zoos or taxidermists’ collections, rarity and oddity in plants was often the best reason for including them in gardens. At the center of the inquiry in garden history is a multidimensional object composed of varying materials, including stone, gravel, wood, metal, clay, and plants--themselves almost infinitely subdividable and manifold. These objects often contain words, architecture, and examples of visual art; they change over time and are part nature and part sign. If one attempts to sidestep the complex problems an analysis of the object raises, by analyzing the discourse of garden writings, then one has achieved precisely that--an analysis of an obscure branch of nonfiction prose, not an understanding of gardens and their histories. The object at least returned on the second day, which was given over to the British National Trust. Peter Mandler had missed a good opportunity for questioning the National Trust’s often woeful role in landscape conservation, but the papers by the Trust’s own experts scattered clues about their shortcomings in that regard. The subject was Stowe, and the low point came when the Trust’s land agent (what was he doing at an academic conference anyway?) confessed that the Trust had failed to implement its plans for archaeological investigation of the garden, simply because excavation of waterways was considered too difficult. This decision was reprehensible. A great opportunity for cross-referencing of archaeological and historical evidence has been lost irrevocably. He showed slides of bulldozers sloshing about in muddy ponds. What a mess. What should have been presented instead were the results of the Trust’s own intensive pre-"restoration" survey of the grounds. Tantalizing glimpses of this were given us, such as the news that two Roman roads ran across the site of Stowe and had determined the layout of the garden, even seventeen centuries after their making. But the Trust withheld the information that would have turned an interesting symposium into a fascinating one. The Trust may have the economic resources, but on the evidence of this symposium it seems to lack the intellectual resources to do justice to what it owns. What are we to make of its plan to bring the Chinese House (recently discovered in Ireland) back to Stowe, its place of origin, but to put it not on its original site, but in another part of the gardens, amidst the relics of a much later Japanese garden? To the National Trust, Japanese and Chinese are obviously all pretty much the same thing. The exhibition of plans and drawings of gardens and garden buildings that occasioned the symposium travels on to Chicago, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. We wait to see whether other events arranged in conjunction with it can deliver the intellectual excitement of which garden history is capable, but which was only intermittently provided by most papers at the Huntington. Michael Charlesworth, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles 90089-0291.