(1910 – 1979) Arthur Coney Tunnard, later known as Christopher Tunnard, was a Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape.
Landscapes often contain and are subject to natural processes that change the designer’s original plan. There are also landscape designers who intentionally seek to obscure the human act of design. These concerns deepened with the development of modern landscape architecture in the twentieth century. Borrowing many of its tenets from modern architecture, which distrusted allusion and stressed honesty of expression and truth of materials, modern landscape architects considered how their work could be a true evocation of modern times. This thinking is evident in the writing by one of its earliest proponents, Christopher Tunnard. For Tunnard, gardens and landscapes that appeared to be the act of natural processes were not only old fashioned, but also deceiving. In his appraisal of the work of Swedish Garden Architects at the First International Congress of Garden Architects in Paris in 1937, he chided this Association for clinging to a romantic conception of nature when they suggested that planting should ‘give the impression that they have grown there spontaneously’. Tunnard cautioned, ‘the imitation of nature is a long perpetuated fraud’.
The school of 1830, which is typified by Corot, knew of the power of light, but chose to paint suffused rather than illuminated scenes. After them came Monet, who struck into the brightness of midday and painted the landscape of the Île de France flooded in golden sunlight. This did not make work easy for Monet, who died at an advanced age still struggling to capture on his canvas all in that landscape that was colour, form and light, but his achievements taught others that the struggle was worth while. It is interesting to compare his long life with that of Gertrude Jekyll, the most outstanding planter since the eighteenth century, whose own covered the same period in time. Both had an almost primitive love of the soil, a passion for gathering from Nature the nourishment to sustain burning convictions and long-cherished beliefs. Both preferred an existence withdrawn from civilization, surrounded by familiar, daily-renewed contacts with the lesser inanimate things. Both suffered from failing eyesight, and both achieved greatness through work and love of the tools and methods they employed. But apart from these similarities there was a fundamental difference in their achievements. Monet, in his later years, planned and made an inspired garden, a painter’s garden indeed, but an achievement acknowledged to be equal to some of his work on canvas. Jekyll, the amateur artist, on the other hand, though accomplished enough as a technician, was not of the calibre of Gertrude Jekyll, the planter. If she had been able to express herself as well with the brush as with the planter’s hand, the problem of light and colour which she constantly disregarded might have been recognized and solved. As it was, in upsetting the crude Victorian paintpot, she failed to provide an alternative large enough to serve as a source of inspiration for posterity. What Gertrude Jekyll did accomplish was a careful and accurate estimate of colour effects through observation and experiment. Hers was not the eye to overlook gradations of tone in plant foliage, for instance, or the intensification of tonal value in flowers of pure colours when placed in close proximity to white. Before her time, too, crimson might establish itself anywhere in the wide gulf between scarlet and magenta, and cerise be known as amaranthine red; systematic colour classification, though not directly of her instigation, derives from her efforts to value each shade and suggest its merited place in the garden scheme. Such physiological colour considerations have made responsible garden planning a more accurate and scientific affair than it was in the days before tonal values were discovered as a new plaything for the academically minded designer of ribbon borders and herbaceous walks. But these tonal values in themselves have never been able to carry us very far, and in some ways it is a matter for regret that they were ever discovered at all. As Amedée Ozenfant has pointed out, since we evolved a colour science we have been afraid to employ it in a straightforward English way. If it were not for the charts of the interior decorator and the dressmaker, our favourite colours would still be the bright red and blue of the national flag, egg yellow, the tobacco brown which with white and emerald green still decorates our pleasure boats, the burnt sienna of the sails of fishing smacks and the vermilion of the pillar box. A primitive taste, perhaps, but in keeping with the English tradition.
In the last quarter of the century, women began to intrude into this gendered society through the access by upper class women to higher education. From the 1860s onwards a group of well-educated and morally concerned upper class “new women” entered society from recently established women’s colleges. They channeled a burgeoning sense of public responsibility into work in settlement houses, and membership in social clubs. However, the full impact of the “new women” was not evident until early in the twentieth century. Control of the domestic domain of the garden consequently involved women in design. In both Europe and America, garden design was indelibly shaped by the work of design was indelibly shaped by the work of English garden designer and author Gertrude Jekyll. Jekyll transformed the nature of gardens with her sensitive designs and discussion of structural details, and proto-ecological planting based on the consideration of exposure, soils and microclimate. Her numerous books inspired twentieth century American landscape designers including Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Shipman, Marion Coffin, and Florence Bell Robinson.
landscape theory 