On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening,: with Biographical Notices of Them, 2nd edition, with considerable additions

The Story

Samuel Felton’s book opens as a memorial project and a plea for attention. He explains that he limits himself to English writers on gardening who are deceased, and that his aim is to gather together portraiture, biography, and literary testimony for people whose work might otherwise be forgotten. He is modest about the scale of the undertaking. Again and again he calls the book a compilation rather than an original research monument, yet the modesty has a purpose: if great historical personages deserve painted likenesses, so too do the men who shaped English gardening in text and practice. He wants readers to see these figures “as they lived,” and to connect their faces with their ideas, because portraits can keep affection alive for the dead and make the reader feel that the past is still present.

From this opening, the book turns backward into a survey of gardening’s early history in England. Felton pauses over the Middle Ages, and especially over the claim that Christian monastic life helped preserve horticultural knowledge during centuries of turbulence. He admits that he has not dwelt on Saxon, Danish, or Norman gardens as fully as he might have, but he uses the authority of other writers to sketch a long continuity: monastic gardens, orchards, and vineyards survive while the wider country is ravaged by war; vegetables are conserved in sacred ground; and even by the time of the Normans gardens are found not only with religious houses but with lay households as well. His historical frame is cumulative rather than dramatic. The story of gardening is not a sequence of sudden inventions but a slow cultural endurance, carrying cultivated plants, practical knowledge, and domestic habits through political change.

The book then enters the early modern period by moving through a series of writers and printed works. Felton names and briefly characterizes men such as William Lawson, Simon Harward, Thomas Johnson, Ralph Austen, Francis Austen, John Bonfeil, Stephen Blake, and William Hughes. These notices are compact, but together they show a field becoming more technical, more literary, and more various. Lawson is remembered for his orchard and garden treatise; Harward for a work on propagating vegetables; Thomas Johnson for his learned editing and his botanical zeal; Austen for fruit trees and for the spiritual analogies he draws from orchards; Bonfeil for vines and wine; Blake for practical gardening; Hughes for vineyard, flower-garden, and American plant life. Felton is building a lineage. Each writer adds a separate part of the art: grafting, planting, vines, flowers, herbs, or the moral uses of rural labor. Gardening is not only useful; it is a literature with its own succession of voices.

A second great movement in the book is the shift from practical husbandry to a more reflective, aesthetic, and moral gardening culture. The figure of George London stands for the professional gardener in the service of the great houses, working with patrons, traveling to France, and helping manage Brompton Park and royal gardens. Felton relays Switzer’s praise of London as a man whose industry and ability win him favor across rank lines. The passage is important because it marks gardening as an occupation with social visibility, not just a rural craft. Soon after, the book reaches John Evelyn and the circle around him. Evelyn appears as a writer, planter, observer, and gentleman whose own gardens, woods, and essay on trees become a public statement of improvement. Felton notes the various portraits of Evelyn and the many eminent people who sought him out, but he especially values his Sylva as a durable memorial to his amusement, his learning, and his public usefulness. Evelyn becomes a key bridge between practical forestry and cultivated taste.

From Evelyn the book moves into a widening literary landscape where gardens are also scenes of moral reflection, poetic description, and national taste. Timothy Nourse’s country house essays, with their meditations on flowers, fountains, solitude, death, and domestic felicity, show the garden as an education in transience and restraint. Thomas Whately, though discussed through scattered quotations and later commentary, represents the development of landscape gardening as a language of place, movement, and feeling. Felton lingers over Whately’s descriptions of Claremont, Blenheim, Stowe, Persfield, Middleton Dale, Matlock, Bath, Dovedale, Tintern Abbey, the Leasowes, Painshill, and Hagley. These places are not merely named; they are presented as scenes where nature, art, and memory meet. Whately’s writing turns the garden into an art of perception, in which rivers, cliffs, valleys, ruins, and plantations are arranged and read almost like a poem.

The last major movement is an argument over style: the old formal garden against the newer “natural” manner, and the men who shape that change. Felton gives special attention to Kent, Addison, Pope, Mason, Price, and the critics of artificiality. Kent is praised as the liberator from stiff lines, clipped forms, and grotesque topiary; he is said to have opened the way for later designers and writers. The book does not wholly reject older gardening, but it clearly prefers the livelier, freer landscape that follows Kent’s example. Yet it remains wary of destructive fashion. Felton repeatedly complains that modern improvement can flatten the marks of earlier art, erase terraces and avenues, and leave old places over-simplified. In this final argument, the garden becomes a historical text that can be ruined by overzealous taste. The book ends by insisting that there is value in preserving what remains, and by treating the history of gardening itself as a form of inheritance, one that includes both practical skill and the feelings attached to place, portrait, and memory.

The People

• Samuel Felton is the guiding presence, though he stays in the background as compiler, commentator, and advocate. He wants to rescue neglected gardeners and writers from obscurity, and what stands in his way is not conflict so much as scale: the field is large, the records are scattered, and many figures are minor or half-remembered. He ends as a patient arranger of fragments, convinced that even a small memorial has value.

• George London stands for professional gardening at the level of estates and royal service. He wants advancement through skill, and he gets it through industry, travel, and patronage. What shapes him is the world of nobility and court employment. By the end of the account, he appears as one of the figures who turns gardening into a recognized art of state and taste.

• John Evelyn wants to improve knowledge while also enjoying the private satisfactions of planting and trees. He is surrounded by political change, court life, and learned society, yet his garden remains central to his identity. He ends as a model of cultivated public service joined to personal delight, with his Sylva treated as a lasting monument.

• Thomas Whately wants to describe and interpret landscape with precision and feeling. His obstacle is that he is known only in pieces here, through quoted judgments and examples, but those fragments show him as a writer who sees gardens as expressive forms. He ends as the book’s clearest voice for scenic gardening and its moral-aesthetic language.

• William Kent wants, in effect, to free gardening from stiffness. In Felton’s account he stands opposed to the clipped, formal, and artificial world of earlier taste. What stands against him is entrenched fashion. He ends as a major turning point: the man credited with making the “natural” style thinkable and fashionable.

• William Shenstone wants beauty that is intimate, pastoral, and personal. The Leasowes embodies his mind, but his obstacle is expense and the strain of shaping a place to match inward feeling. He ends as a beloved but financially burdened figure, remembered through an urn, inscriptions, and the landscape he made.

In Its Own Voice

Felton’s aim is partly memorial, and he says so plainly in his prefatory reflections on likeness and memory:

“it must be interesting to have exhibited before our eyes our fathers as they lived”

That interest in preserving old forms appears again when he warns against overzealous alteration of historic grounds:

“the owner less ready to listen to a professor, whose interest it is to recommend total demolition.”

The older practical literature often speaks with cheerful directness about pleasure and usefulness, as in Lawson’s praise of an orchard’s living variety:

“what a pleasure is this?”

What It's Really About

At its deepest level, the book is not merely a catalogue of writers on gardening. It is an argument about how taste survives, how it changes, and how later readers ought to honor the people who made it possible. Felton keeps returning to the relationship between written description and visible likeness. Portraits matter because they make memory bodily; books matter because they preserve thought; gardens matter because they hold both practical labor and emotional meaning in one place. The work assumes that the art of gardening is inseparable from the art of noticing, and that the people who write about gardens help teach a nation how to see.

A second theme is continuity through use. Felton’s historical notes repeatedly connect gardening with domestic life, religious houses, orchards, vineyards, and everyday cultivation. His early history is less about aristocratic display than about survival: vegetables preserved, gardens maintained, knowledge handed down. Even when he later celebrates landscape gardening, he does not abandon usefulness entirely. The older writers he cites care about fruit, wine, bees, walkways, exercise, and the moral effect of rural life. The garden is at once a productive space and a school of feeling. That duality runs through the book.

The strongest debate in the work concerns style. Felton is fascinated by the transition from enclosed, formal, and decorative gardening to the freer landscape mode associated with Addison, Pope, Kent, Whately, Mason, and Price. He clearly admires the latter style, especially when it joins scenic beauty to poetic and philosophical reflection. Yet he is not naïve about fashion. He knows that “improvement” can become a destructive word. His repeated cautions against levelling, demolition, and monotony show that the book is also a defense of historical variety. Old terraces, avenues, and features may look outdated, but they still contain ideas worth preserving.

Another important question is authorship versus inheritance. Felton honors originality, yet much of the book is about influence, quotation, adaptation, and example. One writer improves another; one designer frees the next from confinement; one essay becomes a guide for later taste. The garden, in his telling, is never wholly self-invented. It is always part memory, part citation, part response to earlier practice. That makes the book unusually attentive to lineage. It treats gardening as a conversation across generations, and the portraits serve the same purpose: they make the conversation visible in faces as well as words.

Why Read It Today

Readers who enjoy the history of taste, landscape design, or literary culture will find the book rewarding because it sits at the intersection of all three. It is full of names, quotations, and judgments, but those elements are not dry lists. Felton uses them to build a sense of gardening as an intellectual tradition, one shaped by monks, physicians, clergymen, poets, improvers, and country gentlemen. If you care about how English landscapes became associated with feeling, memory, and national character, the book offers a layered view of that process.

The reading experience is selective rather than continuous. It moves by notice, quotation, and example, so it asks for patience. There is also some period texture: long sentences, evaluative language, and occasional assumptions about rank, taste, and “improvement” that belong to the early nineteenth century. Felton’s admiration for certain writers can be sweeping, while his judgments against others, especially the over-formal designers, can be sharp. Still, the book’s honesty about alteration and loss gives it force. It repeatedly asks what is erased when the old is replaced by the new.

What stays with you is the sense that gardens are historical documents. They preserve ideas about labor, pleasure, morality, and memory, and they can be damaged by careless enthusiasm as easily as by neglect. Felton’s pages are especially engaging when they join a place to a personality: Shenstone and the Leasowes, Evelyn and his Sylva, Whately and his scenic descriptions, Kent and the overthrow of stiffness. The book rewards readers who like their literary history grounded in soil, trees, and the human wish to make a beautiful order out of the world.