MID 19TH CENTURY GARDEN FURNITURE. CAST-IRON GARDEN SEAT. CAST-IRON GARDEN CHAIRS AND TABLE.
MID 19TH CENTURY GARDEN FURNITURE
BOTANY WAS A HOUSEHOLD SCIENCE in the 19th
century, appealing to the rational, genteel, pious, and relentlessly self-improving Victorian mindset. Its popularity inspired an unprecedented interest in gardening that permeated the social strata. Jane Loudon’s 1840 publication Instructions in Gardening for Ladies advocated the pastime as one eminently suited to the disposition of the fairer sex, and was a runaway success. The terrarium, invented in 1827 by Dr Nathaniel Ward, allowed people to grow exotic plants in a cold climate — even on a window sill —and protected delicate specimens from harsh urban environments. The abolition of glass tax in 1845 made conservatories more affordable, and they became fashionable settings in which to entertain one’s guests.
Gardens of the period were generally bright and bold, with vast beds planted with swathes of colourful plants very much in vogue. Garden ornaments took many forms, but were rarely subtle. The era that witnessed the introduction of the garden gnome to Britain also saw householders hang brightly coloured
glass globes, called gazing balls, as decorative additions to their gardens. Urns, statues, birdbaths, obelisks, and even life-sized reproductions of animals, all in metal or stone, populated the gardens of the wealthy. The same ostentatiousness was at work in garden furniture design of the period. Where garden chairs and tables had been relatively restrained early in the century, they became increasingly elaborate as the 19th century progressed. Simple, wrought-iron forms gave way to industrial cast iron that mimicked the triumverate of styles — Greek, Gothic, and Rococo —that dominated interiors.
IRON CHAIRS FROM IRONBRIDGE Cast iron was far cheaper than wrought iron or bronze and was ideally suited to use in the garden, owing to its strength and resistance to rust. A number of iron foundries across Europe had been engaged in the production of garden furniture for some time when the Darby family owners of a large iron works at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, turned their attention to the manufacture of iron products. Taking their lead from companies such as Val d’Osne in France, they built the Coalbrookdale
TRAINED TREE
Heinrich Weber ’s engraving shows
a more unusual approach to garden
furniture. Instead of buying a canvas
sunshade for your garden table and
chairs, it suggests creating a natural,
yet rather formal, sunshade by
training the branches of a tree over
an umbrella-shaped trellis. The table
and chair are cast-iron. c 1850.
Company into the pre-eminent manufacturer of
garden furniture of the mid 19th century. Its
most popular designs are still in production
today The process was an industrial one:
iron was cast from moulds in a variety of different shapes, and then pieced together to produce furniture of various styles. At
the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, the company won a Council Medal, and Queen Victoria paid £300 for a statue of Andromeda made by them. The centrepiece of Coalbrookdale’s 1851 exhibit was its new range of Nasturtium chairs and benches, which epitomized garden furniture design of the period. The ironwork was elaborately pierced with floral designs and scrolling to give a Rococo look, yet the actual
construction of the furniture was simple and suited to mass production.
RUSTIC FURNITURE
A vernacular tradition of handcrafted garden
furniture persisted in tandem with the industrial cast-iron aesthetic. Local craftsmen fashioned and sold basic wooden benches and chairs, as well as more elaborate novelty forms. Unfortunately, few examples now survive due to wood’s tendency to rot, especially when exposed to the elements. In the United States, a celebrated form of rustic timber furniture started to gain popularity in the later part of the 19th century. Named after the mountain range – now a national park – in upstate New York from which it originates, Adirondack furniture used native timbers, such as oak, cherry, butternut, birch, and walnut, and often included the bark. It echoed the local Great Camp
style of architecture in that it assimilated the
natural contours of the branches and roots
from which it was fashioned.
CAST-IRON GARDEN CHAIRS AND TABLE
Each of these chairs has a pierced scroll back and circular pierced seat on four scrolling legs. The table has a solid top and stands on three scrolling legs. There is a lady’s mash at the top of each
table leg. 1880
CAST-IRON GARDEN SEAT The back of this green-painted, cast-iron garden seat for two features a lily-of-the-valley design. The seat is a scrolling cast, and there is leaf decoration on the legs. It may have been made by the American A.J. Mott foundry. Late 19th century.
SWAN GARDEN BENCH This garden bench with its simple board seat and back is transformed by the cast-iron ends formed in the shape of swans. There tire traces of old white and orange paint and repainting in places.
KEW GARDENS
The first gardens at Kew Park were laid out by the Capel family during the late 17th century In 1772, George III inherited the Gardens from his mother and, by the end of the 18th century,
many of the monuments and buildings familiar to generations of visitors were in place. The development of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew coincided with a revival of interest in Classicism, itself a consequence of the vogue among the landed classes to go on the Grand Tour. Expeditions by botanists throughout Britain’s expanding Empire unearthed myriad newly discovered plants, which were brought back and exhibited at the Gardens under the “kind superintendence” of Sir Joseph Banks, whom George III had established there in 1773. Banks, who became President of the Royal Society in 1778, established the Gardens as the
British centre for economic botany His death in 1820 coincided with George Ill’s, and Kew
Gardens lost its direction for 20 years.
Between 1841 and 1885,
father and son William and Joseph Hooker held consecutive directorships of the Gardens and contrived a renaissance in its fortunes. Among the developments they oversaw were the construction of the iconic Palm House and the Temperate House – the largest surviving mid 19th-century
glass structure in the world. William Nesfield, a watercolourist turned landscaper, designed a new arboretum for the Gardens as well as the cedar-lined Broad Walk and the parterres around the Palm House. The Victorian obsession with botany bequeathed the world an educational and recreational landmark – Kew Gardens became a World Heritage Site in 2003.
The Palm House This was built between 1844 and 1848 by Richard Turner, with Decimus Burton as architectural consultant. Light but strong wrought-iron “ship’s beams” were used to create a vast 15.2m (50ft) open, pillarless span.