William Robinson (gardener)
Robinson advocated more natural and less formal-looking plantings of hardy perennials, shrubs, and climbers, and reacted against the High Victorian patterned gardening, which used tropical materials grown in greenhouses.
[5] From there, he went to the estate of an Irish baronet in Ballykilcavan, County Laois, Sir Hunt Johnson-Walsh,[6] and was put in charge of a large number of greenhouses at the age of 21.
According to one account, as the result of a bitter quarrel, one cold winter night in 1861 he let the fires go out, killing many valuable plants.
[7] Whether in haste after the greenhouse incident or not, Robinson left for Dublin in 1861, where the influence of David Moore, head of the botanical garden at Glasnevin, a family friend, helped him find work at the Botanical Gardens of Regent's Park, London, where he was given responsibility for the hardy herbaceous plants, specialising in British wildflowers.
[10] In 1866, at the age of 29, he became a fellow of the Linnean Society under the sponsorship of Charles Darwin, James Veitch, David Moore, and seven other distinguished botanists and horticulturists.
Two months later, he left Regents Park to write for The Gardener's Chronicle and The Times, and represented the leading horticultural firm of Veitch at the 1867 Paris Exhibition.
[citation needed] He first met Jekyll in 1875—they were in accord in their design principles and maintained a close friendship and professional association for over 50 years.
Jekyll wrote about Robinson that: ...when English gardening was mostly represented by the innate futilities of the "bedding" system, with its wearisome repetitions and garish colouring, Mr William Robinson chose as his work in life to make better known the treasures that were lying neglected, and at the same time to overthrow the feeble follies of the "bedding" system.
It is mainly owing to his unremitting labours that a clear knowledge of the world of hardy-plant beauty is now placed within easy reach of all who care to acquire it, and that the "bedding mania" is virtually dead.
His campaign included trying to win an unwilling public to the advantages of cremation over burial, and he quite freely shared unsavoury stories of what happened in certain crowded graveyards.
[16] With his writing career a financial success, in 1884 Robinson was able to purchase the Elizabethan Gravetye Manor near East Grinstead in Sussex, along with about 200 acres (0.81 km2) of rich pasture and woodland.
On the edges, and in the cleared spaces in the woods, Robinson established plantings of Japanese anemone, lily, acanthus, and pampas grass, along with shrubs such as fothergilla, stewartia, and nyssa.
The idea of introducing large drifts of native hardy perennial plants into meadow, woodland, and waterside is taken for granted today, but was revolutionary in Robinson's time.
Meadowflowers included goldenrod and asters, rampant spreaders from North America long familiar in English gardens.
The book's popularity was largely due to Robinson's promise that wild gardening could be easy and beautiful; that the use of hardy perennials would be less expensive and offer more variety than the frequent mass planting of greenhouse annuals; and that it followed nature, which he considered the source of all true design.
