‘I am strongly of the opinion that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention.... It is just in the way it is done that lies the whole difference between commonplace gardening and gardening that may rightly claim to rank as a fine art.’

So wrote Gertrude Jekyll in 1908. Within just a few years the ideas that led to the formation of the Arts and Crafts movement had come to dominate gardens to the extent that these represented, and still do, the most enduring image of a ‘traditional’ English garden. And yet this image provides a very narrow view of gardens created in a century that saw greater social changes than at any previous time, a century that began and ended with a ‘new naturalism’ (though the interpretation at each end could not be more different).

Through a selection of public and private gardens in Somerset and Dorset this tour explores the work of some of the greatest garden designers of the twentieth century and puts their work into the historical, artistic and social contexts to which they are inextricably linked. Among them are Hestercombe, one of Jekyll and Lutyens’s most important works, and Cothay Manor, where Reggie Cooper, friend to both Harold Nicholson and Lawrence Johnston, created a garden of rooms that was to inspire both Hidcote and Sissinghurst.

We consider how designers have been inspired by abstract art, Modernism and the geometry of the de Stijl movement. While Modernism as a garden style continued to develop throughout the century, planting design underwent a considerable change in the last two decades with the emergence of the New Perennial Movement. It is the marriage of these two elements that epitomise the gardens of the late twentieth century, and we see several private examples created by some eminent contemporary garden designers, including Dan Pearson and Arabella Lennox-Boyd.

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