New Garden Styles Rooted in Arts and Crafts Design

At the 2012 Chelsea Flower Show, a "new English" planting style emerged in show gardens like Andy Sturgeon's M&G Investments Garden. This style has roots in early 20th-century Arts and Crafts gardens.

The new English style retains traditional cottage garden feel with a fresher look. It uses familiar Arts and Crafts components—linear paths, terraces, tall clipped hedges backing wide herbaceous borders, bold topiary—but adds a modern twist. Plantings shift from meadow style toward voluptuous borders with repetitive perennial clumps softening path and wall outlines.

The Arts and Crafts movement was championed by Charles and Henry Greene in America, Gertrude Jekyll in Britain. Though short-lived, it greatly influenced garden design in Britain, America, and beyond.

HartmanBaldwin Design/Build

Integrating House with Garden

For the first time in garden design history, Arts and Crafts integrated house and garden. Design features reflected each other.

Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens (late 19th/early 20th century England) characterized the style with traditional materials and working methods achieving organic completeness.

Schmechtig Landscapes

The Birth of the Garden Room

The movement introduced separate garden rooms—each part with a different feel. Great British gardens (Hidcote Manor, Sissinghurst, Great Dixter) have partitioned areas with different planting schemes, ornamentals, water features, or hard landscaping.

Stunning planting idea: monochromatic plantings, white gardens being favorite.

Paul Moon Design

British Arts and Crafts grew from contempt for restrictive Victorian design. Geometric bedding, winding paths, exotic plants replaced by nostalgic medieval ideals, regionalism, craftsmanship.

Small formal areas echo formal movement designs—knot gardens, parterres from medieval gardens. Well-placed ornaments (two-tiered bowl fountain complementing not overshadowing) were favorite embellishments.

The Return of Topiary

Garden rooms created by enclosing with walls or hedging. Movement spurred traditional hedging: yew (Taxus baccata) and boxwood (Buxus sp). This brought topiary back.

Topiary, out of favor for ~100 years, resurrected by Arts and Crafts.

Susan Cohen Associates, Inc.

Modern gardens show amazing hedges of different species/heights—low boxwood edging to tall formal enclosing hedges. Design roots in Edwardian gardens: strong enclosing lines softened by naturalistic plantings overspilling boundaries.

Maria Hickey & Associates Landscapes

The Flair of Cottage Garden Planting

Planting schemes moved from Victorian restrictions to naturalistic/cottage style—relating to site, soil, local identity, natural growth. Plants grown in drifts spilling over paths/edging with little obvious control—the image of traditional English country garden.

Wallace Landscape Associates

Tapestry style: perennial drifts interwoven for months of color (early spring to late autumn). Effective but labor-intensive—staking, supports, regular splitting/replanting. Today: modern dwarf/self-supporting varieties achieve same effect with less maintenance.

Leo Dowell Designs

The Use of Claire-Voies

Normally 17th-century gardens, claire-voie ("clear way") also in some Arts and Crafts gardens. Openwork gate/fence at end of allée (open walk) with view to wilder garden/landscape.

Two fine examples in Lawrence Johnson's Hidcote Manor: end of beech-lined (Fagus sylvatica) allée, and open Cotswold countryside from pleached hornbeam (Carpinus betulus) walk.

David Ward

2012 Chelsea example: Cleve West's Brewin Dolphin Garden—ornamental gates between rustic stone pillars leading eye to traditional garden room behind.

Celebrating Local Materials

Principles of local materials and handcrafting popularized brick paving. Locally made bricks mirror house brickwork in original Arts and Crafts gardens. Herringbone and basket weave most common in paths.

Samuel H. Williamson Associates

Modern back garden uses brick paving around another Arts and Crafts favorite—the rill. Water features gentle and understated. Linear paths/terraces combined with mirrored water channels/rills.