What are Gardens For? by Rory Stuart

Author:Rory Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI

‘There’s no accounting for tastes’ is a familiar saying, given more dignity when expressed in Latin – De gustibus non est disputandum (you can’t argue about tastes). But there is only a grain of truth in these well-worn maxims. About some tastes there is, in truth, nothing to be said. Honey and a piquant cheese is a combination of flavours that appeals to some and not to others, and no amount of argument or explanation will alter the mind of the person whose palate is disgusted. No amount of argument, either, will persuade you that a ‘New Dawn’ rose of palest pink makes a fine combination with the jaundiced yellow of Rosa ‘Whisky Mac’ if you do not enjoy that particular combination of colours. However, it is sometimes possible to explain a preference, and to account for an aesthetic judgment in such a way as, perhaps, to persuade another person to share one’s view, or, at least, to understand it better. If this were not so, literary criticism and other kinds of critical writing would be of little value.

Let us take an example. There are two famous gardens on the outskirts of Florence, one of which seems to me a failure as a work of art, while the other is a triumph. Both gardens feature in all the best guidebooks to Italian gardens – those of Helena Attlee and Penelope Hobhouse, for example. The guidebooks offer, rightly, almost no judgment of the merits of the gardens they include; rather they tell us what we shall find, and a little of the gardens’ stories. The early history of the Villa Gamberaia is not entirely certain; the garden seems to have taken much of its present form in the eighteenth century, when the place was bought by the Capponi family. We know it was altered by the addition of pools of water, which replaced the flower or vegetable beds in the late nineteenth century; equally certainly both villa and garden were wrecked in the Second World War and restored by Marcello Marchi thereafter. The garden at La Pietra has a shorter history; the guidebooks tell us it was laid out in the early decades of the twentieth century by the Englishman Arthur Acton, very largely as a place to display his collection of sculpture. Helena Attlee does allow herself to hint at an opinion in the conclusion of her entry for La Pietra: having admitted it is a garden difficult to classify, and reflected on Acton’s eclectic taste, she writes, ‘The result is the kind of Italian garden one might see in a dream.’ I wonder if she meant ‘in a nightmare’.

Most writers on the subject of Tuscan gardens agree that both La Pietra and Gamberaia are of major importance. Ethne Clarke’s The Gardens of Tuscan Villas boasts a foreword by Sir Harold Acton, son of Arthur and owner of La Pietra, who styled himself ‘the last aesthete’. This is a book of photographs to which Clarke has added a paragraph or

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