1882) of Birtles Hall, vicar of Over Alderley, who married Grace Cook and fathered pianist Viola Mary Tunnard (1916–1974), Thomas Newburgh Tunnar (b.

[1] Born and educated in Victoria, British Columbia, where his Lincolnshire-born father had moved as a young man, in 1929 Christopher Tunnard went to England and obtained a Diploma from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1930.

His noted landscape projects include his landscape architecture for Serge Chermayeff's house Bentley Wood at Halland, Sussex;[3] and for his modification of existing 18th-century gardens at the circular Art Deco St Ann's Court (a Grade II* Listed Building) in Chertsey designed by Raymond McGrath, where Tunnard lived for a short time with his then partner, the stockbroker GL Schlesinger.

[5] In the same year he emigrated to America, at the invitation of Walter Gropius, to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Madeline had moved to New York City to be near her other son, Peter Kingscote, who was with the Michael Chekhov's Theatre Studio at Ridgefield, CT, 40 miles away.

[1] Christopher Tunnard was drafted into the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943 and after the war took a job teaching city planning at Yale.

Enjoying the work, he did little further garden design, and reached the post of professor and chairman of the department of city planning.

[8][9] In 1969 Yale disciplined him by demotion for sending out unauthorized admission letters to prospective students, following an unresolved departmental dispute.

Tunnard came to England in a period when garden design was strongly influenced by the work of Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott.

The eclectic Arts and Crafts movement was drawing on this background to focus on garden features such as crazy paving, pergolas, sundials, sunken pools and statuary.

For instance, his acclaimed landscape for Chermayeff's Bentley Wood house, itself Modernist, simply thinned the surrounding woodland and replanted areas with drifts of daffodils.

[14] In sum, Jellicoe reviews the new landscape that Tunnard describes as having a response from readers as either "shocked from it altogether, or carried off their feet with enthusiasm.

"[14] Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley and James Rose, while together at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard during 1936 to 1938, cite reading Gardens in the Modern Landscape as inspiration against the strict rules of the curriculum of the GSD and a major influence for their work.

Tunnard cites the Swedish Garden Architect's Associations’ paper as describing this new garden as paths and walks are reduced to the minimum and often consist only of stepping stones between which grass or creeping plants are allowed to grow, thus conserving a homogeneity between the unites of the plan.

Trees are not numerous in these gardens; most people prefer to have flowering shrubs.The styles, axial and symmetrical planning, ostentatious decoration- all this rhetoric has been discarded to make way for simple statement.