A cultivated view of paradise: the art of painting gardens

The greatest royal gardeners in British history are not English. They are Dutch. William and Mary spent lavishly on gardens, patronised great designs and transformed the previous "English" style in the later 17th century. Nowadays we can pay to see Highgrove and wonder if its organic cultivation will survive the Prince of Wales. I never saw the Scottish garden of Mey that was loved and funded by the late Queen Mother. It cost a lot, as wits used to say, adapting lines by the poet Alexander Pope. "In Scotland, spend a day at Mey, Where all cry out, 'What sums are thrown away!'" The free-spending Queen Mother could cite the Dutch couple as precedents. Their gardens at Hampton Court and Kensington Palace were not cheap, but they have remained a challenge to posterity.

Meanwhile, the Royal Collection, now a trust, has continued to acquire fine paintings of garden scenes. I had no idea of their range, but at The Queen's Gallery in London, a selection can be seen in a new exhibition, titled Painting Paradise. In the first three rooms I was wondering where Paradise was going to appear. The rooms from the Renaissance garden onwards are the answer. They are packed with pictures, china and clocks which are unmissable for lovers of gardens who are caught, or thriving, in London. The big catalogue is a must, more essays than mere listings. So is the final room with pictures of anything from "Three Ladies Surprised by a Gentleman" by Ludolf de Jongh, to a walled formal fruit garden, packed with raspberry canes and maybe a melon pit beneath Windsor Castle. I am amazed to discover that this big picture belonged to my family until 1944 when my uncle, then in his teens, presented it to the Queen Mother. Its record of the castle's lower garden is unique and its scenes of lady gardeners at work, one with a watering can and a mob cap, are a joy.

The Royal Collection is unexpectedly strong on images of gardeners. Two watercolours, one by Thomas Sandby, in 1752, the other by his brother Paul in 1798, show unusual work in progress. In the first, gardeners are removing wormcasts off the lawns and rolling the paths at Cranbourne Lodge, a royal residence in Windsor Great Park. In the other, a lady gardener, again with a watering can, is tending a mass of plants in pots, a thoroughly modern feature, beside a lawn in the deputy ranger's garden. The finest such image is an oil portrait of Jacopo Cennini, head gardener of the Medici family in Florence in the 1520s. Painted by Franciabigio, it shows a thoughtful man with no dirt on his fingers but a bunch of keys on his right arm. He is writing in a ledger whose script refers to the family's famous Villa Medici. Cennini was both estate manager and head gardener. His steady look makes me long to employ him and hear his memoirs. This excellent portrait is the earliest known portrait of a professional gardener.

Unexpected garden designs beam at us from the later paintings, whether Bushy Park with waterfalls or the extraordinary terraces of the Tiergarten at Cleves, then in the Netherlands. Ugly Anne of Cleves had long gone and Wolf Hall had finished bringing up the bodies. In the 1670s, about 10 years before William and Mary arrived in England, this remarkable Dutch garden design had semicircular terracing, ponds and statuary on a hill rising up through woodlands. It shows the scale of formal gardening in the lands from which our royal garden-patrons came.

I wish I could be given two of the flower paintings in return for my family's gift of Windsor Castle in oils. In the mid-17th century, Alexander Marshal painted a red-and-white striped tulip above double-white Fair Maids of France, misnamed "white buttercups" in the exhibition's caption, and a pale blue milkwort. It is a superb image of a tulip even after the mad bull market in tulip bulbs had collapsed. Marshal was a gentleman-amateur, but there is nothing amateurish about his watercolours. I would pair his tulip with an excellent Fantin-Latour of white azaleas and pansies in a bowl. Famous for his roses, he is also a masterly observer of spring flowers.

Warming up for these surprises, I fastened on an under-reported detail in a famous image, Landseer's "Windsor Castle in Modern Times". Painted in the early 1840s, it shows the young Queen Victoria holding a flower beside Prince Albert. He is seated in his drawing room in brown floppy boots that would not be wearable nowadays. The picture qualified for "Paradise" because it has a smaller image, seen through the open window, of a rather dull bit of formal garden. In the drawing room there is much more life in the four dogs in various poses beside five dead game birds. These corpses surely never lay on a real-life carpet. A sixth bird is being held proudly by the little child, also a Victoria, in her party dress, aged about four. She is displaying it proudly over a dead white ptarmigan. The bird is a kingfisher and the dog below it is delighted.

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I asked Jane Ridley, expert biographer of our royals, for an update. Little Victoria was married and sent abroad at the age of 17. After a difficult labour, she gave birth, no less, to the Kaiser, Wilhelm II. She was highly likeable and was known for reading Karl Marx at court. Show off a dead kingfisher, read Das Kapital in a palace and give birth to the son whom the historian Margaret MacMillan has aptly compared to Toad of Toad Hall. It may not be Paradise but it is one of many images which give me exceptional pleasure in this show.

"Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden" runs at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London until October 11

Photographs: Royal Collection Trust

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