Ashrubbery,shrub border orshrub garden is a part of a garden whereshrubs, 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 theEnglish 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 thewoodland garden, mixed in with trees, both native species and imported ornamental varieties.
The word is first recorded by theOED in a letter of 1748 byHenrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough to the fanatical gardenerWilliam Shenstone: "Nature has been so remarkably kind this last Autumn to adorn my Shrubbery with the flowers that usually blow atWhitsuntide".[2] The shrubbery developed to display exciting new imported flowering species, initially mostly from the East Coast ofBritish 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 andflower 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 Londonnurserymen such asThomas Fairchild (d. 1729) from America.[4] There was some tension between them and the more landscape-oriented gardeners such asCapability 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 forshrubland, a type of natural landscape dominated by shrubs or bushes.[7] The many distinct types of these includefynbos,maquis,shrub-steppe,shrub swamp andmoorland.
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 theline of beauty promoted byWilliam Hogarth's bookThe 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 ofGertrude 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 theEnglish 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-furnishedRegency suburbanvilla.
"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 theHimalayas and Western China became the most exciting new additions to the European garden, and large Asianrhododendrons now often dominate shrubberies and woodland gardens planted in the period that have not been carefully maintained, especially the invasiverhododendron 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 theJapanese garden, whose aesthetic was introduced to the English-speaking world byJosiah Conder'sLandscape 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 ofJaponisme, 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 therose garden is a specialized type of shrub garden, but it is normally treated as a type offlower garden, if only because its origins in Europe go back to at least theMiddle Ages in Europe, when roses were effectively the largest and most popular flowers, already existing in numerous gardencultivars. 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 fromrosa chinensis (the "China rose"), which is still the dominant parent in most moderngarden 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 centuryGertrude Jekyll offered a chapter of suggestions for "Wood and Shrubbery Edges" inColour Schemes for the Flower Garden (London, 1908) in which her descriptions were based on her own garden atMunstead Wood, south ofGodalming, 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 1980sJohn Nash's never-executed plans for the garden setting of theBrighton Pavilion, illustrated in Nash's volumeViews 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 inAugustus 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 oursublime 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 thePicturesque; 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 ofRegent's Park and ofSt. James's Park, where the German visitorPrince 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 engineerEdwin Beard Budding of therotary lawn mower, an extrapolation of machinery commonly used to cut velvet pile.
