'Force, Fortitude, and Fortune': John Ruskin's gardening at Brantwood

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Resource type
Journal article
Creator (person)
Ikin, Caroline
Date published
2023
Abstract
In his later years, John Ruskin (1819–1900) turned his attention from art criticism to political economy. The concurrency in 1871 of Ruskin’s purchase of a new home at Brantwood, Coniston, with the publication of Fors Clavigera and his formation of the Guild of St George highlights the preoccupations of his thinking while laying out a garden. The availability of land facilitated an intermediate step in the translation from thought to page: the sixteen-acre Brantwood estate offered Ruskin the opportunity to validate his ideal of a sustainable pastoral landscape, his small-scale interventions comparable with the self-sufficient livelihood encouraged by the guild and promoted in Fors as a means to save Britain from moral failure. Underpinning all Ruskin’s gardening is the moral value of purposeful labour, whereby the mode of execution is more relevant than the quality of the result, and ethical integrity and aesthetics supersede functional outcome. With an understanding informed by Fors, Ruskin’s garden-making is presented here as conceptually distinct from ornamental gardening, and it is argued that the moral purpose guiding Ruskin engaged horticulture as a means of landscape redemption, far beyond the superficial aesthetics of conventional nineteenth-century garden practice.
Volume
51:1
Publisher
The Gardens Trust
ISSN
0307-1243
Rights statement
In Copyright
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