William Robinson, pioneering garden writer and creator of the magnificent gardens at Gravetye Manor in rural West Sussex, believed spring should come with a touch of wildness about it.
‘In our islands, fanned by the winds of iceless seas, spring wakes early in the year...’ he wrote in his seminal 1893 book, The English Flower Garden. He then lets loose, with signature vigour, on all the ways in which spring should be liberated from the stranglehold of ‘unnatural’ formality.
His remedy is simple yet radical. We should look to the sublime artistry of Nature herself for our inspiration: to the ‘woods, copses, heaths and meadows’, which ‘have no little loveliness in spring’. For Robinson, our opportunity – indeed our obligation – should be to take these ‘wild
