Over the past year, the United States was fortunate to host two traveling exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts movement: International Arts and Crafts, organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, showed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (September 25, 2005–January 22, 2006), and The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880–1920: Design for the Modern World, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, closed its national tour at the Cleveland Museum of Art (October 16, 2005–January 8, 2006). Given the interest in the Arts and Crafts movement generated by these exhibitions, Judith Tankard’s new book is well timed.

Tankard, who teaches at the Landscape Institute, Harvard, and was a founding editor of the Journal of New England Garden History Society, explains in her preface that her study developed from “a desire to present Arts and Crafts gardens in the broad context of art, architecture, interior design, and decorative arts in which they need to be appreciated,” and draws upon her own collection of turn-of-the-century books and journals as well as paintings and decorative objects (7). To this list can be added her own photographic archive, as the book is amply illustrated with many beautiful photographs by the author. These images testify to Tankard’s own personal experience of the featured sites, and this first-hand knowledge informs her text. Indeed, as she notes in the preface, readers are given a “highly personal selection of houses and gardens of the Arts and Crafts era, with an emphasis on the diversity of designers who helped forge a special approach to garden design” (7).

Tankard’s caveat is worth keeping in mind as one moves forward into a text written in a lively descriptive voice. Her introduction roots the beginnings of the Arts and Crafts movement in the emergence of a new aesthetic that threw off “the heavy shroud of Victorian design sensibilities” (9), espoused “a fundamental disdain for the falseness of High Victorian design” (15), and translated, in garden design, to a new appreciation of the garden as part of a unified whole composed of garden, house, and interior. These gardens, as Tankard points out, drew upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tudor and Stuart pleasure grounds as well as vernacular sources, and they were small in scale when contrasted with vast nineteenth-century estate gardens “stiffly planted with brightly colored annuals and jarring foliage” (15). Here one can detect Tankard’s sympathy for the Arts and Crafts movement—indeed, in her preface she confesses to an “addiction” (7). In fairness to mid-Victorian garden design, it should be pointed out that key designers of the day, such as Donald Beaton and John Lindley, were heavily invested in ongoing debates about color theory, with particular attention to complementary contrast, spurred by the publication of Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1840, trans. Charles Eastlake) and M. E. Chevreul’s The Law of Simultaneous Contrast in Colors (1839), as Brent Elliott reveals in his discussion of the high Victorian garden in Victorian Gardens (Portland, OR: Timber Press, 1986).

The subsequent ten chapters of Tankard’s narrative explore the Arts and Crafts garden in Great Britain, beginning with Reginald Blomfield’s charge issued in his book The Formal Garden in England (1892) that garden design should be the purview of architects rather than gardeners, and traced through William Morris’s historicist and utopian projects. Tankard further discusses the Cotswold-based work of Ernest Gimson and Ernest and Sidney Barnsley; the pages of The Studio, which brought the work of Charles Mallows, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, C. F. A. Voysey, and M. H. Baillie Scott to the attention of the public; the writings and executed work of Thomas Mawson; master gardeners William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll; the partnership of Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens; the Scottish twist to Arts and Crafts exemplified in the work of Robert Stodart Lorimer; the Welsh houses and gardens created by writer H. Avray Tipping and architect Clough Williams-Ellis; and the colorful garden palettes created by painter Alfred Parsons, wealthy heiress Ellen Ann Willmott, horticulturalist Norah Lindsey, and Jekyll. Chapter 10, “Color in the Flower Garden,” extends beyond the traditional framing dates of the Arts and Crafts movement to look at gardens produced after World War II that were nonetheless influenced by the color theories of Jekyll and her circle.

The final two chapters briefly survey Arts and Crafts gardens in the United States, emphasizing gardens linked with the Craftsman style, the Prairie school, the California bungalow, Colonial Revival, the Cornish colony in New Hampshire and related summer colonies, and gardens directly influenced by Jekyll. Tankard acknowledges the limitations of her account of U.S. gardens and leaves “it to others to write the penultimate studies on American Arts and Crafts gardens” as well as the “ramifications of the movement on international garden design” (7). Indeed, new studies on U.S. Arts and Crafts garden designers are forthcoming, as indicated by Dianne Harris’s Maybeck’s Landscapes: Drawing in Nature (Pasadena, CA: William Stout Publisher, 2005).

In her epilogue, Tankard’s account rejoins the present with a discussion of contemporary gardens that exemplify key features of Arts and Crafts garden design, “namely craftsmanship, sophisticated plantsmanship, intimacy of scale, and harmonious relationship with the house” (193). We are thus brought back full circle to Tankard’s opening account of Arts and Crafts gardens, drawn from the theories of J. D. Sedding and Blomfield, “distinguished by their exceptional architectural detailing, exemplary craftsmanship, emerald-green lawns, simple flower borders, and neatly clipped hedges” (29).

There is a logic to Tankard’s repeated attempts to distill the Arts and Crafts garden into a set of easily recognizable features. But in its own day, the Arts and Crafts garden aesthetic was never spelled out to the same degree as that of the decorative arts. The term “Arts and Crafts” was coined by T. J. Cobden-Sanderson in reference to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which never regarded garden design within its bailiwick. Furthermore, as Tankard herself notes, “the movement was a philosophical approach to design, rather than an identifiable style” (6). Nonetheless, this has not prevented recent scholars from attempting to characterize the Arts and Crafts garden. Tankard has been preceded by, for example, Wendy Hitchmough (Arts and Crafts Gardens, published in Great Britain by Pavilion in 1997 and in the United States by Rizzoli in 1998) and Peter Davey (his revised edition of Arts and Crafts Architecture, London: Phaidon, 1980; 1995, includes a lengthy treatment of gardens).

Hitchmough’s book is similar to that of Tankard in its high production values and the author’s personal selection of gardens, although Hitchmough’s range of designers is much narrower. In compensation, so to speak, Hitchmough gives more attention than Tankard to the intellectual debates of the era, for example, linking garden design to changing concepts of nature formulated in response to Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and a concomitant rise of spirituality expressed by new religions such as Theism. Both authors are highly aware of the role played by women, particularly as designers, in gardens of the period, and Hitchmough calls for further research into the “clear relationship between the women’s suffrage movement and the Arts and Crafts garden” (8).

Davey hews more closely to an architecturally derived notion of the Arts and Crafts garden than either Tankard or Hitchmough, and he selects his examples accordingly. He thus underscores the hostility of Blomfield and Sedding to the natural gardening theories of William Robinson, whereas Tankard’s tent is big enough to include the opposing camps. Alun Powers, writing for the International Arts and Crafts exhibition catalogue (Karen Livingstone and Linda Parry, eds., London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2005), likewise focuses on the role of architects, although he also acknowledges that “gardens offer a different pattern of historical development” than domestic architecture (120). Moreover, Powers asserts, drawing upon Hitchmough, “even more than houses, Arts and Crafts gardens were feminized spaces” (120). Powers also calls attention to another key theme overlooked in Tankard’s account of style: the debates over Englishness that shaped garden design in this period. Indeed, since social history is largely absent from Tankard’s narrative, the central paradox of the idealistic Arts and Crafts movement—reforming designers’ desire to make a new world through products affordable only to a wealthy elite, clearly elucidated by Gillian Naylor in her groundbreaking study The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of its Sources, Ideals and Influence on Design Theory (London: Studio Vista, 1971)—remains undeveloped. For further insight into the patrons of gardens, readers can turn to Jane Brown’s study Lutyens and the Edwardians: An English Architect and His Clients (London: Viking, 1996).

The wealth of recent literature on Arts and Crafts gardens could easily convince readers that such a thing as the Arts and Crafts garden existed, despite its absence from Cobden-Sanderson’s treatise, and that a canon, of sorts, of Arts and Crafts gardens has been identified. But I caution against the latter conclusion by calling attention to David Ottewill’s The Edwardian Garden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). Ottewill devotes a chapter to the Arts and Crafts garden, which features many of the same designers discussed by Tankard (including Morris, Voysey, and Mallows), but he distinguishes the Arts and Crafts garden from the formal-garden revival initiated by Blomfield and Sedding, the Scottish Pleasaunce, the naturalistic garden, and the Lutyens and Jekyll garden, all of which Tankard includes within the Arts and Crafts label. Ottewill’s strategy of structuring his narrative via chronology, rather than attempting to enfold all significant turn-of-the-century gardens within the Arts and Crafts rubric, thus releases him from drawing connections between strikingly disparate forms.

Tankard’s text concludes with a highly useful gazetteer of houses and gardens to visit, replete with contact details. This, combined with those published by Ottewill and Hitchmough, will hopefully entice into the field another generation of researchers who can build upon these surveys of Arts and Crafts gardens to produce in-depth materialist studies of individual sites situated in the complex web created by local geographic and climatic conditions, available materials, patron, architect, gardener, and treatise literature. A wealth of untouched primary source materials—such as plans and house archives—remains unpublished. As Mark Laird has shown in his study, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), “the interaction of landscape gardener, client, nurseryman, land agent, and gardener” still remains to be profitably explored (xvi–xvi). Through such materialist analyses, the discussion of style will be shifted from the written page to the spaded ground. Moreover, such studies will continue to underscore, as Tankard’s book has done, the “rich legacy” the Arts and Crafts movement left Great Britain, the United States, and the Continent (7).