Russell Page

Montague Russell Page (born November 1, 1906 in Kirkstead House, Kirkstead Road, Tattershall , Lincolnshire , † January 4, 1985 in London ) was an English garden designer and author.

Life

Montague Russell Page was the second of three children of Harold Ethelbert Page (1876-1966), a notary who worked in Lincoln , and his wife Ida Flora Martin (1875-1963). From 1921 the family lived in a converted farm workers house in Wragby , Lincolnshire. As a child, Page played with his sister Bey Corbally Stouton in the garden and dammed up streams. At the age of 14 he bought a pot of bluebells and began to be interested in gardening, reading books on horticulture and creating a rock garden.

From 1914 to 1924 he attended the private Charterhouse School in Surrey , where he was not comfortable. He was interested in singing, painting, sculpture and architecture. From 1924 to 1926 he studied painting under Henry Tonks at the Slade School of University College London . He left UCL without a degree to study art in Paris with financial support from his father . In France he met the nursery owner André de Vilmorin , who became his lifelong friend. In the summer of 1932 he learned the basics of garden design in the American Amos Laurence's private library in Boussy Saint-Antoine .

From 1928 Page worked as a landscape designer. When he returned to London, he worked as a salesman and draftsman because he needed money. In 1932 he joined Richard Sudell's London office . Between 1935 and 1939 he worked with Geoffrey Jellicoe , including in Ditchley Park , Windsor and Charterhouse. From 1937 to 1939 he was a lecturer in landscape architecture at Reading University .

In 1940, Page was drafted and worked in the Political Warfare Department of the British Foreign Office, where he was responsible for broadcasts by the BBC for occupied France. In 1942 he went to the USA as a member of the Political Intelligence Department to coordinate foreign language propaganda broadcasts. In 1943/1944 he worked in Cairo , where he was responsible for allied propaganda broadcasts in Greece, and in 1945 as a propaganda officer in Ceylon . He left the British Army in late 1945 with the rank of lieutenant colonel .

He initially lived in London and found it difficult to get used to civilian life again. An acquaintance with Oskar Kokoschka made him paint again. In 1946 he came under the influence of the Armenian esotericist Georges I. Gurdjieff . Page worked as a garden architect in France and Egypt, but was bad at organizing his finances and collecting fees all his life, even if the costs of the gardens themselves could be exorbitant. Talking about money, especially among friends, made him uncomfortable.

Page worked primarily for the French and Belgian aristocracy, together with the interior designer Stéphane Boudin ( La Maison Jansen , Paris), whom he had met in Ditchley Park before the war and who gave him numerous commissions. Later he also worked for Swiss bankers and Italian industrialists ( Agnelli ). Among other things, he designed a garden for the ex-King Leopold III. of Belgium in Waterloo and designed the gardens of the Allied Headquarters ( SHAPE ) near Paris. In 1973 he advised his friend Teddy Kollek on the greening of Jerusalem .

Page took on the design of several public green spaces, such as the Festival Gardens in Battersea , London, for which he was awarded the OBE , and the French pavilion at the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958. For the Vilmorin company he created the show garden at the first French garden show ( Floralies ) 1959. From 1960 he also worked in the USA and Barbados .

After the death of his second wife in 1962, he moved from France to London, where he initially lived in an apartment in St John's Wood . There was a small garden in the back courtyard, which he laid out in a system of square beds. It was the only garden Page ever owned.

When he realized in old age that few of his private gardens had survived, he increasingly took on orders for public green spaces, e.g. B. the design of the area of ​​the demolished wholesale market in the Quartier des Halles in Paris (1971–1977), for the Frick Collection in New York, in Venezuela, Chile (from 1978) and for Pepsi-Cola in Purchase , in the hope so to see his work preserved for posterity.

Page was married twice, from 1947 to 1954 to Lida Gurdjieff, daughter of his guru Georgi Gurdjieff, and from 1954 to 1962 with Vera Milanova Daumal . He married Lida in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in 1947 , the marriage, which divorced in 1954, had its only son, David Russell, in 1948. Vera, ex-wife of the poet Hendrick Kramer and widow of the poet René Daumal from the Gurdjieff district, died in Switzerland in April 1962, the marriage remained childless.

Page died of cancer and was buried at his own request in an unmarked grave in Badminton on the property of the Earl of Beauford .

His estate is Jelena and Robert Belder, on Arboretum of Kalmthout managed his niece Vanessa Stouton keeps his unpublished manuscripts. Page did not document his systems photographically, plans were often sketched on the back of an envelope etc. and not systematically archived, which makes it difficult to appreciate his oeuvre .

Gardens

Page worked in a neo-classical style but tried to adapt to the reduced size of the post-war gardens. He always considered the genius locii and tried to combine house, garden and landscape. The preferred design element were precisely trimmed hedges made of box , privet or yew . Ponds and narrow watercourses modeled on the Alhambra were another important design element. Page was opposed to modern architecture. In the last years of his life he also designed some more informal gardens, for example La Mortella on Ischia . However, Page also admired formal Japanese gardens, such as the Ryoangi Gardens in Kyoto .

Awards

• Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• Academie d'Architecture, Paris

Aftermath

According to Countrylife magazine , Pages book The Education of a Gardener is one of the most influential books on garden design of the 20th century. He introduced French traditions into English garden design. However, Page is largely unknown outside of England.

Publications

• 1934–1938 Page wrote articles for the magazine "Landscape and Gardening".
• From 1950 he was a correspondent for the French magazine Maisons et Jardins .
• The Education of a Gardener. Hammondsworth, Penguin 1985.
• A second book was planned but was never completed

bibliography

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Individual evidence

1. ^ Marina Schinz, Gabrielle van Zuylen: The Gardens of Russell Page. Francis Lincoln, London 2008, p. 16.
2. ^ Marina Schinz, Gabrielle van Zuylen: The Gardens of Russell Page. Francis Lincoln, London 2008, p. 15
3. ^ Marina Schinz, Gabrielle van Zuylen: The Gardens of Russell Page. Francis Lincoln, London 2008, p. 17.
4. ^ Marina Schinz, Gabrielle van Zuylen: The Gardens of Russell Page. Francis Lincoln, London 2008, p. 20.
5. ^ Political Warfare Department
6. ^ Marina Schinz, Gabrielle van Zuylen: The Gardens of Russell Page. Francis Lincoln, London 2008, p. 42.
7. ↑ Schinz, van Zuylen, 2008, p. 39.
8. ↑ Schinz, Zuylen 2008, p. 43.
9. ↑ Schinz, van Zuyle 2008, p. 24.
10. ↑ eg. Schloss Freudenberg (Red Cross)
11. ↑ Schinz van Zuylen 2008, 117
12. ^ Marina Schinz, Gabrielle van Zuylen: The Gardens of Russell Page. Francis Lincoln, London 2008, p. 107.
13. ↑ Schinz, van Zuylen 2008, p. 109.
14. ↑ http://www.countrylife.co.uk/countryside/article/511864/Great-British-garden-makers-Russell-Page.html