English Landscape Gardens

English Landscape Gardens.

Because I’ve created a new Cotswolds small group tour, that will include a couple of very special gardens, I thought that I should write a little piece on England’s gardens....landscape gardens in particular. Over the years, I’ve been fortunate enough to visit some great gardens scattered all over  the British Isles, and I have to say that the Brits are justifiably proud of this aspect of their culture.

The predecessors of the landscape garden in England were the great parks created by people such as Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) and Nicholas Hawksmoor at Castle Howard (1699–1712), Blenheim Palace (1705–1722), and the Claremont Landscape Garden at Claremont House (1715–1727). These parks featured vast lawns, woods, and pieces of architecture, such as the classical mausoleum designed by Hawksmoor at Castle Howard. At the center of the composition was the house, behind which were formal and symmetrical gardens in the style of the garden à la française, with ornate carpets of floral designs and walls of hedges, decorated with statues and fountains. These gardens, modelled after the gardens of Versailles, were designed to impress visitors with their size and grandeur.

The royal gardens at the private residence of Charles, Prince of Wales, Highgrove House, have been open to the public for 25 years. The gardens of the late 18th century home were overgrown and untended when Charles first moved in but have since flourished and now include rare trees, flowers and heirloom seeds. Current organic gardening techniques have allowed the gardens to serve also as a sustainable habitat for birds and wildlife.The gardens were designed by Charles in consultation with highly regarded gardeners like Rosemary Verey and noted naturalist Miriam Rothschild.

A New Concept of Naturalness developed in around 1700 in English and French Garden Theory

1. Around 1700, there were noticeable efforts both in English and in French garden design to establish a new naturalness in the design of gardens. These efforts influenced each other and were reflected in the theoretical literature.Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville’s (1680–1765)  treatise La théorie et la pratique du jardinage, which was published in Paris in 1709, summarized the design motifs and principles of the classical French garden for the first time and also formulated a new, more natural garden concept. The book was also very popular in England. The second, expanded edition (1713) contained a phrase that expressed for the first time a new understanding of nature and made this understanding a model for landscape design: “Faire céder l’Art à la Nature” (“to make art yield to nature”). In English garden theory of the 17th century – as in France – there had been calls for the imitation of nature in gardens, though this did not automatically lead to irregular garden designs. Early concepts of the English landscape garden and the stronger orientation towards nature called for in Dezallier d’Argenville’s treatise are phenomena which developed in parallel. So from the early 1700s onwards, garden designs in England were to diverge from the designs created in France and Europe.... they were to become surreal landscapes, that copied nature.

Landscape paintings offered an artistic concept and a model for poetic mood in gardening but no template was directly adopted from them. The classical temples, nymphaeums, exedras and grottos in the early English landscape gardens of the 1730s to the 1750s transformed the gardens in the perception of walkers into intellectual and associative free spaces. They were as much references to real or reconstructed buildings in the Roman Campagna as ideal landscape paintings are. The educated visitor and observer understood the artistic, literary, historical and political allusions of the garden scenes, which in his/her eyes were superimposed with works of painting. The variety of classical references in William Kent’s gardens has often been discussed. The grouping of groves is indicative of his experience as a theatre decorator. Kent, who had not only seen paintings by Claude Lorrain in the original but also the latter’s collection of drawings of his own compositions, the so-called “Liber veritatis”, described his pictorially designed gardens as “picturesque”. Essentially landscape gardens and gardeners were following landscape artists in attempting to creat a new but natural environment to surround the great houses of England.

Organisations such in Britain such as the National Trust and English Heritage, are custodians and caretakers to many gardens ( and houses), and they keep hundreds of them open to the public for most of the year. It’s one of the joys of traveling through the country, that you’ll always be able to find a lovely cup of tea and a cake, and can enjoy it in these beautiful surroundings.