William Robinson (1838-1935), Garden Beauty and the Sublime

This article looks at the gardening practices of late Victorian gardener and magazine editor William Robinson (1838-1935). It shows that those practices can be interpreted within the intellectual context of the reception of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory, mainly through his concept of the sublime. In particular, this paper demonstrates the extent to which the developments of natural and human sciences, in particular geology and archaeology, transformed the perception and representation of space and time, and how they underpin Robinson’s understanding of the world, garden aesthetics and gardening practices. The article explains how the acquaintance with plants led to a deeper understanding of the vegetable kingdom and to the new awareness of a continuity between humankind and the world. This experience of being one with the world may be called sublime, especially with the knowledge of the world’s vastness in space and immensity in time, as revealed by evolutionary sciences. The garden space and its representations were transformed accordingly, including the blend of temporal and spatial dimensions of evolutionary theory into the “freer” styles that Robinson advocated.