WILLIAM ROBINSON, THE MAN AND HIS WORK 
The Great Genius of the Art of Gardening As We Know It To-day, and 
His Estate in England Where He Has Made His Dreams Come True 
Editor’s Note: In a recent personal letter Mr. Robinson reminded me that his retirement from editorial work comes at the end 
of more than half a century spent in the direction of gardening publications. Hence it seems appropriate to pay a jubilee tribute to this 
great and influential teacher, inasmuch as the present quickening of interest in gardens and gardening is so noteworthy, and his contri- 
butions have so revolutionised gardening the world over by restoring it to its first principle, Nature. So I asked my friend Mr. Arthur 
Herrington to tell something of the story of Mr. Robinson s life and work, since he knows him better than I do, having worked with him 
and under his direction, both as a maker of gardens and as a writer about garden plants; and at Mr. Robinson s own request Mr. J . IVilkin- 
son Elliott has been asked to describe the gardens at Gravetye. — L. B. 
I.— THE WORK THAT HE HAS DONE, By ARTHUR HERRINGTON 
|0 FEW men is it given to labor continuously and with 
such marked singleness of purpose as has Mr. William 
Robinson through a period of over half a century, and 
to sustain and justify convictions in spite of misunder- 
standing, misrepresentation and even of ridicule. For to under- 
stand and appreciate all that 
this great leader of English 
gardening has done for the 
garden art of the world, one 
must know something about 
the gardening methods that 
prevailed when he assumed 
the self-imposed task of lead- 
ing the thoughts of people 
generally, back to truer 
ideals for the garden. The 
gardens of England forty 
years ago, for example, were 
laid out mechanically by 
people who knew plants and 
flowers not at all, and used 
only such materials as con- 
formed to the lines of their 
geometric patterns. I n some 
extreme cases no vegetation 
whatsoever was permitted to 
soften or obscure the fanci- 
ful scroll lines delineated in 
Box! Indeed the writer has 
vivid recollections of making 
over under Mr. Robinson’s 
direction one of these “gar- 
dens,” where the color 
scheme of white and blue 
and yellow had been carried 
out with white sand instead 
of flowers, and broken bricks 
painted blue and yellow. 
This amazing creation of 
grass, gravel, Boxwood, sand 
and painted stones was more- 
over extolled as the work of 
a genius! 
Such exhibitions could 
not fail to stir profoundly 
one who knew the thousands 
of existent flowers, yet found few or none of them in gardens. 
So Mr. Robinson wrote a book on “hardy” flowers, in which 
he described more than a thousand of the most ornamental 
species; also, having studied Alpine flowers as they grew 
on the mountains, he gave us “Alpine Flowers for English 
Gardens,” which introduced to us veritable hosts of beautiful 
things that we had never thought of growing in gardens. Fol- 
lowing this came his “Wild Garden” to show how countless 
flowers from all parts of the temperate and northern world could 
be permanently established under natural (or wild) conditions 
and, thus rightly planted, would become gardens in perpetuity 
and care for themselves. 
Immediately there was a great hue and cry, some deriding, 
others showing actual alarm 
at what they thought was 
an attempt to turn the gar- 
den into a wilderness, with 
Nature running riot — but 
nothing that could be said 
induced him to change his 
course. Indeed it seems 
likely that the spirit of the 
Crusader has always been his 
—as well as the vision. For 
then came the most compre- 
hensive, most helpful and 
most suggestive of all of Mr. 
Robinson’s works — “The 
English Flower Garden” — 
which, first appearing in 1883, 
has passed through many 
editions and remains to-day 
the most complete epitome 
of good gardening that has 
ever been written. Mr. 
Robinson is at present en- 
gaged upon a final revision 
of this great work. The aim 
of this book was “to uproot 
the idea that a flower garden 
is necessarily of set pattern, 
usually geometrical, placed 
on one side of the house,” 
to show that “the wants of 
flowers can be best met, and 
their varied loveliness shown 
only in a variety of posi- 
tions,” and to correct “the 
error of arraying all our 
flowers in one spot under 
exactly the same conditions.” 
The treatise “Garden De- 
sign” was written to confute 
two London architects, who 
undertook to show that formal gardening was the only garden- 
ing worthy of consideration, and that the architect of the house 
should always design the garden. Being usually ignorant of 
the sizes, habits or requirements of plants, the only garden 
an architect can design is the formal one whereas the greatest 
beauty on earth is the natural form and coloring of trees 
and plants — and the artistic garden will never destroy all 
this natural beauty. 
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