‘We should, without question.’
‘Let’s go inside and you can tell me more about it over dinner.’
Throughout the main course Jamie did most of the talking, unusual for her. She seemed happy with small talk, mostly about her first impressions of Somerset and Wickersham. Kingston avoided asking further questions about her past, realizing that he had come close to overstepping the bounds of propriety earlier, though he was dying to know what she did in California—what kind of work? Her family?
The conversation drifted back to gardening.
Jamie frowned. ‘How come we don’t have big gardens like Wickersham back home?’
‘There are quite a few actually. Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island comes to mind, Longwood, Dumbarton Oaks, Monticello, of course … out your way Filoli, just south of San Francisco. Superb garden, did you ever go there?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve heard of it but I’m ashamed to say I’ve never seen it.’
‘Got its name from the first two letters of fight, love, and live. It was the family credo.’
‘Clever.’
Kingston nodded. ‘Helps one to pronounce it properly, too.’
‘So when did this English obsession for gardening all begin,’ she asked. It was an innocent enough question but she wasn’t to know that it would take Kingston at least ten minutes to answer.
‘First of all, Jamie,’ he said, ‘you have to realize that throughout civilization, the garden has always played an important role as a natural and often significant extension to the house.’ He took a brief pause, resting his knife and fork beside his plate, then continued. ‘For example, I’ve seen Egyptian tomb paintings of 1400 BC that depict a detailed garden plan with placement of trees, vegetation, papyrus fringed pool and an imposing entry gate reached by a canal used to irrigate and fill the pools. Quite extraordinary. ’
He took his time cutting into the pink filet steak, savoring and swallowing a slice, then washing it down with a healthy gulp of wine. ‘You know,’he said, looking at Jamie, who, up until now hadn’t murmured a word, ‘Roman Senator Pliny’s letters describe in considerable depth, the garden at his two country villas near Rome.’
Another two minutes or so went by before Jamie interrupted Kingston’s discursive lesson on garden history.
‘But what about English gardens?’ she asked.
‘Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Let’s see … well, going back four hundred years, English gardens pretty much followed the vogue of European formality, particularly the French.’ He looked up to the ceiling. ‘Ah, yes, the French—it’s as if they were born with a mandate to prove their mastery over nature by cutting, clipping and pruning everything in sight. If you’ve seen the big chateaux like Versailles and Chenonceau you’ll know the look: symmetrical lines, clipped and regimented trees, straight alleys, parterres and topiaries, that sort of thing.’ He paused to dab a napkin to his mouth before going on. ‘Then, around the middle of the eighteenth century, a new gardening style emerged in England. A relatively unknown Northumberland gardener with the rather lofty name, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, was about to change the face of the country with grander and much more permanent schemes. He widened rivers, created lakes, moved earth to change the contours of the parkland and undertook massive plantings of trees. Little or no attention was paid to flowers.’
‘These were obviously very large gardens, then,’ said Jamie.
‘They were, indeed. And there were lots of them.’ He placed his knife and fork neatly lined up in the center of his empty plate and went on. Jamie, who had also finished her meal, seemed happy to sip wine and just listen.
‘This new style of gardening on a grand scale was called “English landscape” or “natural style” and one by one the large country houses like Hatfield, Blenheim and Studley Royal abandoned their formal gardens and adopted this new approach to garden design. I read of one estate that planted 100,000 trees, mainly oak.’
‘My God, that’s a whole forest,’said Jamie.
Kingston smiled and plowed on. ‘Anyway, by now just about every kind of style had been tried in gardens known to civilization, and it wasn’t until the middle of the nineteenth century before any significant changes in English garden design or philosophy started to emerge. By the time Victoria assumed the throne in 1837, a steady succession of plant hunters, starting with Sir Joseph Banks in 1768, had been setting out from England, scouring remote parts of the globe, bringing back with them shiploads of new plants and trees. This changed everything. These men literally risked their lives and endured all kinds of danger and hardships simply in order to bring back seeds and plants. Their exploits—believe me, Jamie—make Indiana Jones look like an amateur. On one trip alone, the Scotsman George Forrest brought back over three hundred new species of rhododendron from China. Nurseries were soon overflowing with these new selections and, as you can imagine, gardeners were more than eager to try them. As the quantity of plants, shrubs and trees grew exponentially, two distinctly different styles of gardening were in the making.’