The First Wild Garden - A new book celebrates the historic English garden that launched a modern movement.

Without naming the most grotesque examples of tree mutilation in England, it is clear that much beauty is lost in our gardens by the stupid and ignorant practice of cutting trees into unnatural shapes,” wrote the Victorian-era gardener William Robinson in Gravetye Manor: Or Twenty Years’ Work round an Old Manor House (1911). Robinson’s fighting words were laid out in the preface to his book, an account of the decades he spent creating his garden at the Elizabethan house of Gravetye Manor in Sussex, England, and recently reproduced in facsimile by Rizzoli alongside stunning contemporary photographs.

- By Chloe Schama

Without naming the most grotesque examples of tree mutilation in England, it is clear that much beauty is lost in our gardens by the stupid and ignorant practice of cutting trees into unnatural shapes,” wrote the Victorian-era gardener William Robinson in Gravetye Manor: Or Twenty Years’ Work round an Old Manor House (1911). Robinson’s fighting words were laid out in the preface to his book, an account of the decades he spent creating his garden at the Elizabethan house of Gravetye Manor in Sussex, England, and recently reproduced in facsimile by Rizzoli alongside stunning contemporary photographs. Born in Ireland in 1838, Robinson was just nine when the Great Famine descended, and he began working as a garden boy before he was a teenager. Over the following decades, he would labor in the gardens at Regent’s Park, travel the world to learn about botanical specimens, and publish more than 70 books. When, in 1934, he was offered a knighthood, he politely refused: “I feel I must leave life as I entered it, and therefore decline with renewed thanks,” he said.

Scenes from the garden at Gravetye Manor, designed in the late 19th century and revived in the 21st.