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A shrubbery, shrub border or shrub garden is a part of a garden where , mostly flowering species, are thickly planted.OED, "Shrubbery, 1": "A plantation of shrubs; a plot planted with shrubs". The original shrubberies were mostly sections of large gardens, with one or more paths winding through it, a less-remembered aspect of the English landscape garden with very few original 18th-century examples surviving. As the fashion spread to smaller gardens, linear shrub borders covered up walls and fences, and were typically underplanted with smaller herbaceous flowering plants. By the late 20th century, shrubs, trees and smaller plants tend to be mixed together in the most visible parts of the garden, hopefully blending successfully. At the same time, shrubs, especially very large ones, have become part of the woodland garden, mixed in with trees, both native species and imported ornamental varieties.
The word is first recorded by the OED in a letter of 1748 by Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough to the fanatical gardener William Shenstone: "Nature has been so remarkably kind this last Autumn to adorn my Shrubbery with the flowers that usually blow at Whitsun".OED, "Shrubbery"; Laird, 113 quotes other uses in the correspondence, a little later The shrubbery developed to display exciting new imported flowering species, initially mostly from the East Coast of British America,Wulf, 7-11, 15 and quickly replaced the older formal "wilderness", with compartments of smaller trees surrounded by hedges, and little colour. It was a further part of the garden, beyond the terrace and flower garden that the house usually opened onto, and when mature provided shade on hot days, some shelter from a wind, and some privacy.
The shrubbery was at first the development of the plant collector wing of the growing movement of English gardeners, who in the early and mid-18th century eagerly awaited the new seeds and cuttings arriving at London nurserymen such as Thomas Fairchild (d. 1729) from America.Wulf, 7-11, 15, 22-23, 26-27, etc. There was some tension between them and the more landscape-oriented gardeners such as Capability Brown, though Brown's designs in fact allowed for flower gardens and shrubberies, which have very rarely survived as well as his landscape vistas in the parks.Wulf, 144-145; that Brown's designs in fact allowed for flower gardens and shrubberies is a major theme in Laird.
Shrubbery is also the collective noun for shrubs in other contexts,OED, "Shrubbery, 2", first recorded 1777 sometimes used for shrubland, a type of natural landscape dominated by shrubs or bushes.A singular shrub is also known as a bush. The many distinct types of these include fynbos, maquis shrubland, shrub-steppe, shrub swamp and moorland.
"Mr Rushworth," said Lady Bertram, "if I were you, I would have a very pretty shrubbery. One likes to get out into a shrubbery in fine weather." —Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).
In the later part of the 19th century hardy Asian shrubs from the hills around the Himalayas and Western China became the most exciting new additions to the European garden, and large Asian now often dominate shrubberies and woodland gardens planted in the period that have not been carefully maintained, especially the invasive rhododendron ponticum. This had a wide range across Asia, extending to southern Spain, and it was introduced to England in the 1760s. But many sections of gardens, mostly from about 1890 to 1950, were planted as "rhododendron gardens" or "azealea gardens" from the start.
A variant on this, from the 1890s onwards, was a European interpretation of the Japanese garden, whose aesthetic was introduced to the English-speaking world by Josiah Conder's Landscape Gardening in Japan (Kelly & Walsh, 1893). Conder was a British architect who had worked for the Japanese government and other clients in Japan from 1877 until his death. The book was published when the general trend of Japonisme, or Japanese influence in the arts of the West, was already well-established, and sparked the first Japanese gardens in the West. Initially these were mostly sections of large private gardens, but as the style grew in popularity, many Japanese gardens were, and continue to be, added to public parks and gardens. These are to a large extent planted with shrubs, as well as small trees.
Technically the rose garden is a specialized type of shrub garden, but it is normally treated as a type of flower garden, if only because its origins in Europe go back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, when roses were effectively the largest and most popular flowers, already existing in numerous garden . Roses were never out of fashion, but received a great boost in the 19th century, as many hybrids from Asian species were developed, above all from rosa chinensis (the "China rose"), which is still the dominant parent in most modern . Large rose gardens became highly popular as features of public parks at the end of the century, and remained popular additions in the 20th. Many rose breeders also show off their plants in gardens at their nurseries.
The shrubbery is a style of pleasure-garden which seems to owe its creation to the idea that our John Milton formed of Eden. It originated in England and is as peculiar to the British nation as landscape planting.Philips, Sylva florifera. The Shrubbery, Historically and Botanically treated, with observations on the formation of Ornamental and Picturesque Scenery (London, 1823), quoted in Hinze 1996:49.
The formulas for arranging a shrubbery were founded on contemporary painterly requirements for the Picturesque; judicious contrast and variety were essential, but Philips seems to have been among the first garden writers to notice that yellowish-green leaves in the foreground seem to throw bluish green-leaved shrubs deeper into a perceived distance.Philips 1823:23, noted by Hinze. The desirable undulations of paths and islands and bands of shrub plantings would ideally undulate in elevation too: "break up the level by throwing up elevations,' Philips suggested, "so as to answer the double purpose of obscuring private walks and screening other parts from the wind."Philips 1823: I.20, quoted in Hinze 1996:51.
Nash was at work also on the public parks of London, devising the shrubberies of Regent's Park and of St. James's Park, where the German visitor Prince Pückler-Muskau discerned that
Mr Nash ... masses the shrubs more closely together, allows the grass to disappear in wide sweeps under the plants or lets it run along the edges of the shrubs without trimming them ... hence they soon develop into a thicket that gracefully bends over the lawn without showing anywhere a sharply defined outlinePückler-Muskau, (S. Parsons, ed.) Hints on Landscape Gardening (Boston, 1971:71-72), noted by Hinze.
Such precise effects were made immeasurably simpler by the invention in 1827 by the English engineer Edwin Beard Budding of the lawn mower, an extrapolation of machinery commonly used to cut velvet pile.
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