The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia by Tim Richardson Frances Lincoln, £40 ISBN 978-0711290921
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This sumptuous book claims to be the ‘first ever large-format book to be published on the topic of the 18th-century landscape garden’ – but is there anything new to say about this quintessentially British creation, with rolling hills, forest clumps, mirror-flat lakes, grazing Longhorn cows and eye-catching monoliths and temples, so typically created by ‘Capability’ Brown and William Kent?
Author Tim Richardson takes us on a tour of 20 of the finest surviving examples and there is inevitably a longer list of gardens that have been excluded. Initially this is worrying, but it turns out to be one of the strengths of the book: Richardson has time and space to focus upon each landscape, its narrative and the ambitious landowners’ original intentions. It is in this that Richardson excels.
In the chosen 20 are several of the greats: Stowe, Chiswick House, Petworth and, of course, Wrest Park and Rousham. The selection continues with the beautiful Castle Hill and the very royally connected green sanctuary that is St Paul’s Walden Bury. Then we have the magnificent Blenheim Palace, named after the 1704 Battle of Blenheim. Richardson reintroduces us to what he argues was the intention of the architect Sir John Vanbrugh’s original landscape: to evoke the plan of the battlefield at Blenheim, with the alignments of ‘soldiers’ in battalions of trees and a ‘triumphant’ five-storey bridge ‘suitable for a glorious and victorious entry to a city.’ The landscape was largely swept away by ‘Capability’ Brown, who softened the alignment of the trees and made the bridge (subsequently regarded as a carbuncle) less dominant and more appealing by submerging much of it in a lake.
Hawkstone Park is designed to elicit a thrill of fear in visitors as they traverse rocky precipices and encounter live hermits
Stourhead is seen by Richardson as a joyous landscape, which runs contrary to the received perception of it being a ‘landscape of loss’, a sad memorial to owner Henry Hoare’s many lost family members and filled with Whiggish solemnity. He also disputes further the oft-accepted notion of it being a narrative from landscape artist Claude’s oil painting of Aeneas at Delos – a painting that was not even available to view when Henry Hoare was creating Stourhead.
However, it is at the utterly scandalous West Wycombe Park created by the dilettante Sir Francis Dashwood that Richardson really gets excited, for Dashwood is a man he clearly admires. He gives the largest section to the landscape that has been so often dismissed as having mere humorous and frivolous effects, packed with innuendo. Richardson gets into Dashwood’s mindset and appreciates the garden as a riposte to the hypocrisy and self aggrandisement of the time. One of the highlights of the book.
We head north to Studley Royal, a dreamy and utterly immaculate valley garden that culminates with a view down and across the ruins of a Cistercian abbey. Here Richardson enthuses that this is ‘perhaps the most transcendentally beautiful landscape garden of all. The one that most nearly conjures a vision of Arcadia or the Elysian fields.’ And where John Aislabie had sought refuge after being accused of financial misdemeanours by his fellow Whig government colleagues. He created the most elegant riposte imaginable: a grandly original landscape garden that came to be regarded as better than anyone else’s.
The book ends with the three Picturesque Hs (or as Richardson describes them ‘the homegrown, budget version of the Grand Tour, particularly appealing to women’): Hackfall, Hawkstone and the sublime Hafod. Richardson takes us through each of them energetically, revealing how Hawkstone Park, as is common to all three, is designed to elicit a thrill of fear in visitors as they traverse rocky precipices and encounter live hermits.
The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia has reignited my imagination, my interest and passion for the gardens of the 18th century and I am sure it will do the same for you. In answer to that initial question: there was definitely more to say on the English landscape garden, and this book is a welcome addition to any garden history library.
Reviewer Stephen Parker is a garden historian, lecturer, author and design curator.
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