The over-wide title of the Ideas Magazine for Enthusiasts of Gardens, English Parks and for Owners of Country Estates, a pamphlet that first appeared in Leipzig and Paris in 1796 and was later collected and bound in five quarto volumes, is actually an abbreviation. In its entirety, it rambles on for another mile or so, declaring the magazine’s purpose: ‘to Beautify and Ennoble Gardens and Rural Areas, by Means Both Small and Large, According to the Most Original English, Gothic, [and] Chinese Manners of Taste’. Each issue consisted of some ten assorted copperplate engravings with short accompanying texts in German and French.
The magazine saw its target audience as the ‘wealthy and rich classes’ among ‘educated nations’, who had begun to take pleasure – so the initial editorial went – in ‘country life, field- and garden work’. The original engravings, it was pointed out, came from London, ‘for which reason we have maintained the English measurements, which can easily be converted to ours’.
Looking for a stylish hen house? Search no further: plate IV from the fourth issue of 1796 shows the ne plus ultra: a kind of octagonal folly with bird-sized nest rooms. ‘This bird- and hen house,’ the text explains, ‘designed in a good style, can be placed in front of a friendly villa to fine effect. The birds and hens are to be found in the cabinets on the four corners of the building, from which they may be allowed to enter through doorways into the great hall.’
Until 1806, issues were published in irregular instalments – there had been around 45 of them by then. In that year, their reclusive editor, Friedrich Gotthelf Baumgärtner, who had, by his own admission, intended to call it quits, unmasked himself and bowed to the pressure from Russia, Poland, Silesia, Holland, yes, even from Florence to continue the series in a brief encore. (Though Baumgärtner claimed he had always been the ‘hidden editor’, in what are now the first four bound volumes he was listed as the publisher. No author was given, but they were said to have come into being under the ‘guidance’ of a professor of philosophy in Leipzig, Johann Gottfried Grohmann; the magazine is often referred to simply by his name).
And the magazine is a source of philosophical or, perhaps more precisely, cultural diversions. A particular structure of rustic design somewhere between a stall and a chapel, it suggests, might ‘be dedicated, according to its English architect, to some beloved animal... A horse’s skull, for instance, could be hung on the façade, and on a plaque beneath it could be listed the virtues of this noble animal. The water trough could be used as a sarcophagus. Incidentally, we hope that the German Nation will gladly accede to the English this manner of using the building and will search instead for a more suitable one.’
It was but a passing criticism. The German nation, in general, was grateful to accept whatever advice England had to offer on Romantic gardens in the final third of the 18th century and throughout the first third of the 19th, during which time the English landscape garden became something of an idée fixe. In 1764, after a long trip to England with his architect and gardener, Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau set in motion his plans for the park at Wörlitz. By 1808, Goethe was already at work on his Wahlverwandtschaften, which was notable, among other things, for placing its unfolding drama within the confines of just such a constructed ‘natural’ landscape. Two decades later, in 1826, when Prince Pückler-Muskau travelled to England to find a rich wife who would finance his extravagant passion for gardening, the isle still seemed the source for all things green: gardens, that is, and funds, too. (Pückler-Muskau was, in spirit, if not in letter, already married and had been since 1817; in the year of his trip he and his wife arranged a pro-forma divorce to make wav for the rich young bride to come. ‘Ach, my pet,’ Pückler-Muskau wrote of his progress abroad to poor Lucie, waiting at home, ‘if only you had 150,000 guilders, I'd marry you all over again.’)
The prince, of course, was precisely the sort of person towards whom the Ideas Magazine had been marketed, and his pecuniary predicament was plausibly a direct result. Perhaps predictably, he eventually published a pattern book of his own on landscape gardening. It was a description of his philosophy, what he had seen, and how he had put it to use in Muskau. The published works of Pückler-Muskau – known in England as ‘Prince Pickle’ – and Grohmann/ Baumgärtner before him, were part of a long line of how-to (and how-not-to) literature about the Romantic garden ideal, from Stephen Switzer’s Ichnographia Rustica, or, The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation (1718) to Humphry Repton’s Observations on the Theory and Practice ofLandscape Gardening, including some Remarks on Grecian and Gothic Architecture (1803). A subset of this type – writers writing about gardens and their experiences in them – describes an arc from Alexander Pope to Vita Sackville-West to Eleanor Perénvi, whose Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden does with words what Grohmann/Baumgärtner’s magazine does with copperplates: it disseminates, like seed, ideas to the fertile imagination.
The long title was to the genre in the 18th and 19th centuries as the creeping vine is to the garden wall. Baumgärtner actually lengthened the name of his publication when, in 1806, he rebranded it as the ‘New’ Ideas Magazine. The rest of the title serves, all by itself, as a précis of the work’s contents, listing, like the lesser titles of a nobleman, just shy of two dozen additional nouns before being brought to a exhausted stop by an ‘etc., etc.’, dropped with a thud as though they were two bags flung down from the nobleman’s arriving coach: ‘...including Follies and Garden Houses, Temples, Hermitages, Huts, Bridges, Garden Seats, Ruins, Portals, Monuments, Bowling Greens, Look-outs, Winter Quarters, Vineyard Houses, Shelters, Ha-Has, Volières, Doorways, Mills, Gondolas, Benches, Pavilions, (and] Well Decorations’. Etcetera, indeed.
A version of this appeared in the January 2007 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
