Landscapes of scents and sensibility

Books are impossible things to throw away. Our sagging shelves still hold all D H Lawrence's novels, even though I know the chance of my reading them again is as likely as my attacking Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, the only book I have ever failed to finish. There are rafts of books in the house - William Golding, James Joyce, James Thurber, Mervyn Peake - that chart particular times of my life, the people I was seeing, the way my mind was working (if it was), but which don't speak to me now at all.

Books are impossible things to throw away. Our sagging shelves still hold all D H Lawrence's novels, even though I know the chance of my reading them again is as likely as my attacking Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, the only book I have ever failed to finish. There are rafts of books in the house - William Golding, James Joyce, James Thurber, Mervyn Peake - that chart particular times of my life, the people I was seeing, the way my mind was working (if it was), but which don't speak to me now at all.

But there are much bigger piles - of P G Wodehouse, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh - that I read again and again. Each time different things shine out. Pride and Prejudice was first fed to me at school, and even at that stage, I recognised the characters Jane Austen was writing about in the people who lived around us. Now, even more so.

Take the unspeakable Mr Collins, Elizabeth Bennett's statusconscious suitor. "Mr Collins invited them to take a stroll in the garden, which was large and well laid-out, and to the cultivation of which he attended himself. To work in his garden was one of his most respectable pleasures ... Here, leading the way through every walk and cross walk, and scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises he asked for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind."

I would certainly have glossed over that episode when I was at school. But now, I'm into gardens and anyone who goes garden visiting has had the experience that Austen describes, the guided tour so jam-packed with detail ("Well, previously of course, we had a white solanum on that wall, but it really didn't do, so we transplanted it to that wall over there, do you see, just beyond the Salvia turkestanica, and decided to replace it with a rose, but the nursery sent the wrong one 'Felicia' instead of 'Penelope', not the same thing at all, and we had to complain, such a nuisance, and then in the meantime I thought perhaps ...") that you reel out, punch-drunk, with no idea of what the garden itself was trying to say at all.

You don't get in Jane Austen any of the intimate love of gardens that crops up in the novels of Mrs Gaskell or George Eliot, later in the 19th century. Austen uses gardens and the subject of gardening as social indicators, a way of exposing pretension, weakness, rarely strength.

In Mansfield Park, the land-owning Mr Rushworth returns from a visit to his friend, Mr Smith, who lives in a neighbouring county. He has been very impressed by the work recently carried out there by an "improver", as landscape designers were then known, and tells Miss Bertram how eager he is to do the same kind of thing on his own estate.

"Your best friend upon such an occasion," says Miss Bertram calmly, "would be Mr Repton, I imagine."

"That is what I was thinking of. As he has done so well by Smith, I think I had better have him at once. His terms are five guineas a day," replies Rushworth, anxious to know he is getting The Latest Thing, much as a moneyed garden owner now might call in Arabella Lennox-Boyd or John Brookes.

Mansfield Park was written in 1814, four years before the death of Humphry Repton, who had succeeded Capability Brown to become the most influential landscape gardener of the age. Presentation was the key to his success. Long before the age of spin-doctoring, PR and glossy brochures, Repton captivated potential clients with his famous Red Books, manuscript texts, bound in red-leather covers, decorated with paintings of his clients' parks and gardens. If you lifted a flap on a painted view, underneath was a new view, as proposed by Repton. As a selling device, the Red Books, with their "before and after" scenes, were a sensation. Repton made more than 400 of them. And many still exist.

As he was the most famous designer of her time, Austen would, of course, have known about Repton. She may even have read his widely circulated books on the theory and practice of landscape gardening. But she tells us a great deal about her character, Mr Rushworth, by showing that he is ready, so uncritically, to turn over his estate to Repton. And that he knows precisely what the work is likely to cost.

But not everyone was on Repton's side. Only two years after Jane Austen published Mansfield Park, Thomas Love Peacock brought out his satirical novel, Headlong Hall. Here, Repton is thinly disguised as the improver, Marmaduke Milestone, drumming up business with a prospective client. "My dear sir," says Mr Milestone, "accord me your permission to wave the wand of enchantment over your grounds. The rocks shall be blown up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats shall vanish like mist. Pagodas and Chinese bridges, gravel walks and shrubberies, bowling greens, canals and clumps of larch, shall rise upon its ruins."

"Give me leave," said Sir Patrick O'Prism, "to take an exception to that same. Your system of levelling, and trimming, and clipping, and docking, and clumping, and polishing, and cropping, and shaving, destroys all the beautiful intricacies of natural luxuriance ... I never saw one of your improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing but big bowling greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at random out of a pen ... that I did not think it was for all the world like Hounslow Heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen."

"Hurrah!" I feel like shouting. But it's wonderfully odd to realise that Repton, presented to us now as a Grand Old Man of garden history, is used by Austen and Peacock as a cultural marker, part of the contemporary scene. You don't get that kind of thing happening in modern novels. There's never been a time when more fuss has been made of gardens and gardening, but at the same time, gardens have been marginalised. We make game shows about them. They are no longer seen, as they were for so long, as objects as worthy of debate as any picture or novel or symphony.

Over the last 100 years, there has been a shift away from the garden as a place of ideas to the garden as a repository of plants. This change is mirrored in the few references that gardening gets in 20th-century novels. Katherine Mansfield, for example, makes a nice point in The Garden Party (1922) when she writes that: "As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing."

Writers now use garden plants, rather than principles, to divide the sheep in their books from the goats. In Love in a Cold Climate (1945) Nancy Mitford, making her point more coarsely than Jane Austen ever did, damns Sir Leicester's Surrey garden by telling us that the flowers there were "twice as large, three times as brilliant" as they ought to have been. The daffodils were "new varieties of terrifying size, either dead white or dark yellow, thick and fleshy." Hello snobbery. Goodbye wit.

The illustration from one of Repton's Red Books is taken from 'Jane Austen and the English Landscape' by Mavis Batey published by Barn Elms (£19.99), tel 0181-748 6875