Garden History

From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life—one without constant, environmentally damaging growth—might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community.
         
At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.

Christopher Otter, Ohio State University
"This highly original, absorbing, and beautifully written work rethinks Ruskin by anchoring his thought, and that of his friends and associates, in their daily routines, showing how a style of thought we might call “ecological” emerged through prosaic practices. But it also shows the difficulties inherent in creating such a style of thought, and the complexities and compromises that emerged alongside ecological thinking. The issues raised in this book, vital today, will become only more significant in the future."

Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
"Green Victorians provides a welcome exploration of an important but overlooked aspect of British environmental history. A valuable addition to the recent upsurge of interest in Ruskin's sociocultural work and legacies, it also brilliantly revises the history of environmentalism, making a powerful case for tracing the roots of modern ideas on sustainability, low growth, and artisanship to John Ruskin and his lakeland disciples. This is a Victorian book for the Anthropocene."

Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame
"Green Victorians traces the critique of consumer society and the fossil fuel economy to John Ruskin’s circle in England’s Lake District.  There among the hills, the erratic, brilliant art historian and an idiosyncratic band of visionaries including London barrister Albert Fleming, the charismatic Coniston gardener Susanna Beever, and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley tried to revive handicraft production and simpler modes of life divorced from consumerism.  This bracing story, eloquently told, traces the allure of the ‘culture of sufficiency’ and its downfall.  A joy to read as well as an edgy political challenge, Green Victorians looks at the past with an eye to our future."

Mark Fiege, Colorado State University
“Here is a remarkable and prescient recovery of a forgotten moment when a group of people tried to reenvision what it means to be modern. Their struggles to achieve what the authors call a ‘culture of sufficiency’ remind us of the enduring need for all people to live fulfilling lives without laying waste to the planet. Thoughtful, beautifully written, and profoundly unsettling, this is a model history suited to the new epoch in which we find ourselves.”

From research on the history of country residences near Warsaw. The precincts of the Brühl family palace in Młociny (from the mid-18th century).
The palace in the village of Młociny near Warsaw was part of a large early-modern complex, including a park, outhouses and outbuildings, as well as gardens on the bank of the Vistula, decorative pavilions, a game park, an inn and a windmill. It was the most northward residential complex of this type along the Warsaw Embankment. It did not survive long in its most extensive form, as it started to be reshaped at the end of the 18th c., which led to its degradation.
The article discusses structures that were part of the Młociny palace-and-garden design and had various functions (some were used as living quarters, some for leisure pursuits and entertaining guests, some were purely decorative). Various available data were collected, including written and iconographic sources, archival maps and photographs, results of excavations from 2010 and of non-destructive research (an analysis of numerical models of the area generated by the GIS software). Correlating data from all those sources made it possible to the characterize the buildings and trace their histories from the design through the construction to the gradual destruction, as well as localize and identify those that have disappeared completely.
The oldest structures, designed by Johann Friedrich Knöbl and constructed in the years 1748–1763, when the palace in Młociny was owned by Henryk Brühl, were three wooden outhouses and a brick kitchen, probably a palisade–pergola on the courtyard, a neighbouring home farm with a brickyard, a game park with a pheasantry, a massive gate facing the south, a forest theatre and a temple of Diana. The next owner, Alojzy Fryderyk Brühl, who employed the architect Szymon Bogumił Zug, probably commissioned most of the decorative pavilions on the riverbank and some utility buildings, constructed in the years 1772–1784. These were brick outhouses, some small outbuildings (?), a new pillared gate, an Oriental pavilion, a monopteros (gloriette), two “peasant cottages”, a “fisherman’s cottage”, alias hermitage, an inn and
a windmill. Most of those garden structures did not survive beyond the mid-19th century. The complex was largely transformed and some of its 18th-century elements were rebuilt at the beginning of the 20th c., when the palace with its closest surroundings was taken over by Stefan Grodzicki. The elements reconstructed at that time were the outhouses, whose usable floor space was extended, the small neighbouring buildings, which were turned into living quarters, and — partly — the palisades. A new greenhouse, stable and barn were built, while the garden wall was modernized to make a passage to the courtyard.
Excavations on the plot to the south of the palace revealed relics of some of those structures, i.e. the outhouses further from the palace, the neighbouring outbuildings, the palisades-pergoles, the gates and the passage. An analysis of the sources resulted in establishing the approximate location of the 18th-century home-farm buildings and brickyard. A comparison of Zygmunt Vogel’s watercolour A View of Młociny with 19th-century maps helped to identify the location of the possible remains of the structures visible in the painting but non-existent now: the inn and the Oriental pavilion. A thorough analysis of the archival cartographic sources and their integration with the numerical model of the area revealed remnants of two islands in the game park, on one of which there used to be some buildings in the mid-18th c. The buildings described above were integral parts of the residential complex in Młociny and had varied functions, which influenced their varied form and character. In most cases, as far as it can be established on the basis of the available sources, their form was determined by a coherent architectural vision reflecting current trends in designing palace-and-garden complexes. The Młociny complex was shaped mostly by the two architects commissioned by the owners, Johann Friedrich Knöbel i Szymon Bogumił Zug, whose work survived for less than a century. Most credit goes to Zug, whose artistic vision was fully implemented here, with eclectic solutions characteristic of his designs integrated into the Vistula landscape. Due to its coherent design and varied details, the Młociny complex can rival larger grandiose magnate residences of that epoch located in Warsaw or nearby.