Welwyn Garden City was founded by Ebenezer Howard in 1920, the second of his garden cities in Britain. As the centenary of this historic event is fast approaching, a Centenary Committee has been formed with the aim of commissioning a garden for the main avenue at RHS Chelsea as one of the signature events of the town’s centenary year. The Committee’s intention is for the garden to be relocated to the town, for all to enjoy. Further information on the centenary can be found at www.wgccentenary.org

A TOWN OF TREES AND FLOWERS

Gardens and landscaping have been at the heart of Welwyn Garden City’s development from the earliest days and it is the superb interpretation of Howard’s key idea of a “marriage of town and country” by the town’s architect and planner, Louis de Soissons, which attracts visitors from all over the world.

Above: Housing and planting in Parkway. Image from the WGC Heritage Trust archive.

Frustratingly, de Soissons was a man of deeds not words preferring his design to speak for him, so he wrote hardly anything and no planting plans survive from the pre-war days. However, the beauty of the town he created is there for all to see.The main town centre consists of two roads, Parkway and Howardsgate at right angles to each other, both planted formally with grassed areas in the middle. Parkway is nearly a kilometre long and sixty five metres wide, Howardsgate is shorter but the same width. Both are modelled on the wide French boulevards familiar to de Soissons from his years studying in Paris and are a perfect interpretation of Howard’s idea of a central park. A large semi circular area at the northen end of Parkway, the Campus, which extends to four and a half acres planted with grass, trees and garden beds, completes the design. In Welwyn Garden City you can shop or take a lunch time break surrounded by trees, lawns and flowers, without having to walk outside the centre.

Much of the housing is in intimate cul-de-sacs with open plan front gardens and narrow roads, which contrast with the wide open town centre and help to bring the countryside into the town. The overall design is unified by the use of trees, which form the key element. The number and varieties of trees used is remarkable, and from the outset a great amount of care and thought was given by de Soissons to their grouping and arrangement. Every road had a different combination of trees, chosen to suit the buildings and layout and to give the greatest possible variety to the appearance of the streets. For example, one close was planted with purple leaf plum, golden maple and mountain ash, another with lombardy poplar, silver birch and red maple. One fairly long

road had silver birch, abele poplar, chestnut, mountain ash and cherry, with different species used on the bends in the road and to accentuate road junctions. Blossoming trees featured strongly with seven varieties of prunus and four of pyrus recorded in the early years, as well as other trees with interesting foliage and autumn colour. With comparatively small houses such as those which form the bulk of the town, de Soissons planned for the trees to be the dominant architectural note. He also made great use of tree belts to screen industry from housing and to screen factories from the road.

For the formal planting in Parkway and Howardsgate de Soissons chose a double row of limes to give two continuous lines of foliage flanking the roadway and running the whole length of the gardens, separating people from traffic. He believed that, “limes here are almost essential as they lend themselves particularly well to this form of design”. The trees here were planted and the gardens laid out years before any building began to give them a head start. Later the addition of lombardy poplars gave the whole scheme height.

It was not always easy for de Soissons to source the exact variety of tree required from his point of view as a street designer, as there had been very little tree propogation during and just after the First World War. Given these circumstances it is amazing how much was achieved, although the timely purchase of the stock of a bankrupt Surrey nursery helped. The town also started its own Digswell Nurseries in 1921 just a year after building began, to grow its own landscaping material and to plant and maintain it, but also to train its gardeners, showing the importance given to this aspect of the town from the outset. Trees and shrubs grown so locally could be lifted and planted almost immediately thus reducing the risk of them dying.

Above: Tree lined Broadwater Road - part of the industrial area of WGC - photographed by Ken Wright in May 1971.

Any existing trees on the Welwyn Garden City estate were kept wherever possible and incorporated into the street design. Closes were arranged around feature trees and trees were used as markers for road junctions. De Soissons commented in 1930 that while thousands of young trees have been planted, (over 7,000 in the winter of 1926/7 alone), only two trees have been cut down. Some of these stately old trees still survive today.

Details of the flowers and shrubs used in the pre-war years are harder to find. One article from 1927 mentions the flower beds in the town centre being planted with lavender, pink spirea, dwarf veronica, antirrhinum and cypress. This was also the year when 100,000 tulips and iris were planted for the first time, possibly because for the

Above: Parkway - early planting of lime trees. Housing and gardens photographed from Welwyn Stores/Park House.

first few years of the town’s development bankruptcy was never far away, so the Welwyn Garden City Company may not have had any spare money for such things. The roses in Parkway seem to have been planted a year or so later and although the actual bushes have been replaced many times as they have become old and exhausted, roses continue to provide a sparkling summer display. These days the rose beds are also planted with lavender, catmint and geraniums, which adds blue to the colour spectrum, extends the flowering period, and provides good ground cover. It also looks far more attractive than the rather stark beds which appear in old photographs.Roses or shrubs were also used in corner beds at road junctions throughout the town to add interest and a sense of space.

In 1948 the control of the town passed to a Development Corporation, but de Soissons remained as planner together with his recently appointed landscape architect, Malcolm Sefton, so continuity of design was maintained during the following decades when the town doubled in size. Planting plans fortunately do survive from this period and this one shows Sefton incorporating existing trees and hedges into

a new housing scheme. A Development Corporation report from 1956 gives an idea of the scale of the expansion, as five miles of garden hedges, 700 trees, 2250 saplings and 7280 bushes were planted and 12 acres of grass were sown in one year.The responsibility for maintaining Welwyn Garden City’s landscape now rests with the Borough Council. One of the main challenges is the care and replacement of over 140 different varieties of trees as stock from the early days ages, becomes diseased or grows too large. Varieties are replaced like for like if applicable but big fruiting trees are abandoned for non fruiting varieties as children are apt to use the

fruit as weapons, and species are substituted if there are better cultivars available. A line of horse chestnuts at the lower end of Parkway, suffering from bleeding canker, are being replaced by sweet gum, and overmature and rapidly declining lombardy poplars in a central close off Parkway by purple upswept beech. Any renewal of tree planting, especially if a different species is proposed, can cause public disquiet and has done so since the early 1950s, when some plane trees which had grown too large were replaced by american oaks. It indicates the importance of trees to the garden citizens, for as Malcolm Sefton succinctly put it; “It’s no use living in Welwyn Garden City if you don’t like trees”, and one could add, gardens too.

Angela Eserin 7.11.2016