ABSTRACT
The twentieth-century garden was primarily a nineteenth-century creation. By the turn of the century, two conventions dominated the garden’s design and use. The first had evolved from the English vernacular tradition of rural cottage gardening. Although the cottager’s plot, with its fusion of vegetables, fruit and flowers was a model of efficiency and aesthetics, it was largely displaced by a different style of gardening adapted to a suburban setting. This style was marked by formal design and constrained by the availability of land. The contrived landscapes from which its formality arose were based on an abundance of land, and attempts to diminish the grand to the small scale have been a recurrent theme in gardening since the nineteenth century. Whilst the Victorian suburban tradition has proved more influential, the vernacular tradition has persisted to the present day, and both have left a clearly identifiable legacy to the modern domestic garden. Consequently, we must explore this legacy before we can begin to understand the twentieth-century garden.
