Portrait or landscape?

One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a border (or equally considered clashes) and long, swooping vistas. It evokes soft sfumato smudges of pink and green, much as I imagine the interior of the late Queen Mother’s wardrobe must have looked. But it’s also misleading. Among minor inconsistencies of British culture is that, despite the national obsession with gardening and an attachment to landscape painting, the two have failed to find one another. We still have no more than a fitful tradition of garden painting.

Granted there have been moments. Under the later Stuarts, a gaggle of Netherlandish artists produced paintings and engravings that offered the viewer aerial panoramas of country houses within their garden and landscape settings. Jan Kip, the brothers Leonard and Jacob Knyff and Jan Siberechts all created images that, like contemporary formal gardening, straitjacketed their subjects into tight geometric patterns.