An Author and a Gardener:
The Gardens and Friendship of Edith Wharton and Lawrence Johnston
by Allan Ruff

Synopsis

This book is a critical biography of two important gardeners, Lawrence Johnston, the designer of the iconic garden at Hidcote in Gloucestershire, and Edith Wharton, the novelist. They were both expatriate Americans from upper-class New York families. Their fathers disappeared or died when they were both very young, as a result of which they were dominated in early life by their mothers. Yet both spent many formative years in Europe: Johnston was born in Paris in 1871 and later schooled there, and Wharton (née Jones) travelled extensively with her parents in Italy and France. After an early upbringing in New York City, both Johnston and Wharton eventually lived abroad: he in England and she near Paris, ultimately spending much of their later lives in the warmer south of France, respectively at Serre de la Madone at Menton, and at Sainte-Claire at Hyères near Toulon.

Johnston is a shadowy figure for biographers because he kept neither a diary (only one appointments diary of the period 1929–32 has been found) nor letters, and so knowledge of him can be found chiefly through other people’s reminiscences and biographies. After Cambridge University in the 1890s, he began to live like a country gentleman by learning about farming and estate management in Northumberland. This was interrupted by a military career that saw him serve as a naturalized Englishman in the Northumberland Hussars during the second Boer War (1889–1902) and in the First World War (1914–18). He began to design the garden at Hidcote after his mother and he moved there in 1907. Although Johnston was a reserved man, he nevertheless had an active social life partly from which he gained many contacts and his horticultural ideas: among his distinguished gardening friends were the Hon. William Barrington at Nether Lypiatt, Col. Reginald Cooper at Cothay Manor, Reginald Cory at Dyffryn, Mark Fenwick at Abbotswood and Norah Lindsay, the socialite garden designer, to name a few. He retired from the Army as a Major in 1922, and devoted the rest of his life to gardening at Hidcote and Serre, and to plant collecting. He met Edith Wharton most probably in the early 1920s, beginning a friendship that revolved around gardening. He died in 1956 having made Hidcote over to the National Trust, which in turn became the Trust’s first garden, and nowadays the second most-visited after Sissinghurst.

Wharton, who was born in 1862, described herself as being totally uneducated, but before her father died during her teens, she had been able to see the art and architecture of Italy and France, the qualities of which she aspired to emulate all her life. A cousin took her education in hand, after which she became the complete ‘renaissance man’ having amassed a wide knowledge of art, architecture, literature and science. She eventually escaped the clutches of her mother and New York society through marriage to Teddy Wharton, and ultimately went on to design her own house and garden, The Mount, at Lenox, Massachusetts, acquiring a passion for gardening at the same time. She became a popular author writing novels about New York society with such books as The Age of Innocence. After the break-up of her marriage, she settled in Paris in 1906, where she was the centre of a select circle of artistic and cultured friends, as well as a wider social haut monde in England and on the Continent. She threw herself wholeheartedly in to war work in France during the First World War, for which she was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. Exhausted at the end of the war, she was able to find peace and contentment at the Pavillon Colombe at St. Brice-sous-Forêt, north of Paris in the summer and at Sainte-Claire in the south during the winter, where she could write and garden extensively. She died in 1938.

What makes this book different to published accounts of Hidcote and of Wharton the novelist and socialite, is that Allan Ruff has brought the two together, calling upon his lifetime’s knowledge of landscape and garden design to assess the influences and techniques in the gardens of these two remarkable people, all set against a long-vanished society background.

Contents

Introduction; the New York Beginnings; the Arbiter of Taste; the Cotswolds and the American Diaspora; Edith Wharton in England; Making the Garden at Hidcote; the First World War; Hidcote and Friends; Edith Wharton and her French Gardens; Serre de la Madone; Plant Collecting; the Diary Years 1929–32; the Final Chapter; Afterwards; Appendices; Bibliography; Gardens to Visit; Index.

The Author

Allan Ruff is a landscape architect who joined the Department of Planning and Landscape, University of Manchester, in 1972. There he undertook research into the use of native plants in urban areas, then common in The Netherlands but virtually unknown in Britain. His book, Holland and the Ecological Landscapes (1979) encouraged landscape architects to adopt an ecological approach to open space design and management. He lectured on this subject at many institutions, including Lincoln College, Christchurch, New Zealand, the School of Landscape Planning, Alnarp, Sweden and visited Moscow and Leningrad at the invitation of the British Council. In 1987 he undertook research for the Department of Public Housing, Physical Planning and Environmental Management at Delft University of Technology as part of the UNESCO Man and Biosphere programme. While Director of Landscape Studies at Manchester, he established the first Master’s Degree course in Land Management in Europe. Ruff was a member of the Council of Europe Committee on Environmental Education, and in 1980 delivered a paper in Strasbourg on ‘The Use of School Grounds for Environmental Education’.

From 1990 Allan Ruff has specialized in landscape and garden history. In 1994 he presented a paper to the ‘Man and Nature’ conference organised jointly by the Universities of Venice and Shanghai. Other publications include A Biography of Philips Park, Manchester, 1846–1966 (2000) and a contribution to the special issue of the Journal of Garden History (Winter 2002) dedicated to Dutch influences.

After leaving the Landscape Studies Department, he set up a 3-year Certificate programme in Landscape and Garden Studies for the Centre for Continuing Studies, University of Manchester. While undertaking research for this course Allan Ruff became fascinated by Hidcote and the worlds of Lawrence Johnston and Edith Wharton, which has led to this book.

Date of Publication: November 2009.
ISBN: 978 185341 136 6 (Casebound only)
Pages: 256
Dimensions: 253 x 195 mm; weight: 1.100 kilos
Price: £25.00