Clump

History

The clump emerged as a garden feature in the eighteenth century in both England and America. The earliest treatises available in North America defined a clump as a group of seven or eight trees planted to form a single unit [Fig. 1]. The Complete Farmer (1769) stipulated that this grouping of trees was “without shape or order,” and Samuel Johnson (1755) referred to a clump as “a shapeless piece of wood.” Johnson, however, added that the feature was “nearly equal in its dimensions,” suggesting thatit was round in plan. Geographer Jedidiah Morse’s 1789 description of the “circular clumps” at Mount Vernon indicates that some Americans interpreted rounded, symmetrical groupings of trees as clumps.

English author Thomas Whately in 1770 provided an extensive discussion of clumps that was often cited by later treatise writers . He characterized a clump as a smaller version of a “close wood” or an “open grove. ” Unlike his predecessors, Whately insisted that a clump could be made of two trees and that the most agreeable form of it “extended rather in length than in breadth,” thus contradicting Johnson’s stipulation that a clump was “nearly equal in its dimensions . ” Whately’s argument that clumps should be irregular in form derived from contemporary debates in landscape gardening that cautioned against the artificial appearance of overly regularized forms. Inshort, irregularity suggested the desired quality of naturalness (see Landscape gardenin g and Modern style). To adhere to the new aesthetic of naturalness, clumps had to display both a variety of vegetation and forms according to the scenery in which they were placed.

The composition of clumps varied according to American treatise writers and observers. Bernard M’Mahon in 1806 was inclusive when he stated that clumps could be composed solely of trees or shrubs, or a mixture of trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants. Ten years later, G. Gregory in his New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1816) suggested that clumps “of shrubs all of the same kind” created “good” effects. Clumps from a mixture of larger and smaller deciduous trees, such as the horse chestnut and red bud, were created at Monticello, as described by Thomas Jefferson (1807).

The arrangement of plant material within clumps was equally varied. An article in the 1833 volume of the New England Farmer recommended that “a proper system” be adopted in order to avoid “a heterogeneous mass, without meaning, without taste or design.” By contrast, American gardeners John Gardiner and David Hepburn, in the Am erican Gardener ( 1 8 04), recommended the use of a graduated slope for such plantings. Regarding the placement of this feature in the landscape, Whately distinguished between two modes. “Independent clumps,” considered “beautiful objects in themselves” could be used to “break an extent of lawn” or as a “continued line . . . of ground or of plantation.” “Relative clumps,” however, planted in relation to other garden features, could be used to create harmonies and contrasts, thus unifying the disparate parts of landscape garden into a single composition. Whately’s disparagement of artifice led him to regard independent clumps with suspicion because of their obvious artificiality. The best treatment of an independent clump, according to Whately, was the placement of “open” clumps (meaning that the plant material was well spaced) “at the point of an abrupt hill, or on a promontory into a lake or river,” where it served to focus the viewer’s attention. “Relative clumps” were more natural, according to Whately’s aesthetic, and a sensitive placement of them intensified the viewer’s visual experience of the garden by providing a succession of open and occluded views.

Thomas Jefferson, when writing in 1804 of his plan to create “advantageous catches of prospect” through the careful planting of clumps, was clearly familiar with Whately’s guidelines for “relative clumps.” This idea was especially apparent when Jefferson specified that he intended to break up his “canvas” of grove—“trimmed very high, so as to give it the appearance of open ground”—with “clumps of thicket, as the open grounds of the English are broken by clumps” of trees. Even in the 1830s when other garden styles, such as the gardenesque, were current, garden designers still envisioned clumps as a means to control access to a view, as in C. M. Hovey’s 1835 description in American Gardeners’ Magazine of Mansion House in Brookline, Mass. (see Gardenesque).

Several late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American gardens exemplify the use of clumps according to Whately’s categories. Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s 1807 plan for the White House made use of planting features that corresponded to relative clumps, positioned to create a transition from the wood and garden [Fig. 2]. The notion that clumps could “relieve” the plainness of lawns or woods was found in C. M. Hovey’s description in the Magazine of Horticulture of Mrs. Pratt’s house in Boston (1850), which noted how clumps “broke” the monotony of the landscape. At Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass., H.A.S. Dearborn (1831) praised how the clumps of trees and shrubs helped to diversify the “picturesque sheets of water.”

The aesthetic concerns of Whately and his contemporaries were complemented by the material advantages that clumps offered. As Charles Marshall wrote in 1799, clumps of four or five fenced-in forest trees provided an excellent resource for timber. Americans who cleared away trees for their homesteads presumably perceived the advantage of leaving standing clumps of trees for later use as construction or heating materials, as indicated in P. Campbell’s 1793 description of the Catskill Mountains.

Several treatise writers, however, condemned clumps. British designer Humphry Repton, while acknowledging that groups of trees were important elements in landscape design, argued that “formal” clumps of trees of equal height surrounded by a fence for their protection were ugly deformities because of their sameness. In one of his earliest writings (1836), American designer A. J. Downing declared the clump to be perfect. By the time he wrote his treatise (1849), he confessed that experience had taught him that the clump was the product of an amateur ornamental planting. He judged trees of the same height that were planted equidistant from one another in a circular form as overly artificial [Fig. 3]. Like Repton, Downing instead recommended arranging trees in irregular patterns in order to achieve “variety, connexion, and intricacy.”

-- Anne L. Helmreich