The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden

Beautiful Objects and Agreeable Retreats

Kate Felus

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784535728
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786720078
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Georgian landscape gardens are among the most visited and enjoyed of the UK's historical treasures The Georgian garden has also been hailed as the greatest British contribution to European Art, seen as a beautiful composition created from grass, trees and water – a landscape for contemplation. But scratch below the surface and history reveals these gardens were a lot less serene and, in places, a great deal more scandalous. Beautifully illustrated in colour and black & white, this book is about the daily life of the Georgian garden. It reveals its previously untold secrets from early morning rides through to evening amorous liaisons. It explains how by the eighteenth century there was a desire to escape the busy country house where privacy was at a premium, and how these gardens evolved aesthetically, with modestly-sized, far-flung temples and other eye-catchers, to cater for escape and solitude as well as food, drink, music and fireworks. Its publication coincides with the 2016 tercentenary of the birth of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, arguably Britain's greatest ever landscape gardener, and the book is uniquely positioned to put Brown's work into its social context. 

Notes

CHAPTER 1

1.It was the influential art historian Kenneth Clark who first pointed out the importance of the Landscape Style in his pioneering television series and book of 1969 Civilisation.

2.For much of the Georgian period the majority of landowners favoured the classical style for their houses; Horace Walpole’s Gothic fantasy Strawberry Hill being a notable exception. Eye-catchers on the other hand were often, as Giles Worsely observes, far more stylistically adventurous than their parent house. Building on a smaller scale and smaller budget allowed patrons to experiment with style. Garden buildings in the oriental taste, for example, were created from the late 1730s onwards, but this style was not used for a large-scale parent building until the Royal Pavilion at Brighton in the early nineteenth century. G. Worsley, Classical Architecture: The Heroic Age (New Haven CT, 1995), p. 212.

3.Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (Dublin, 1770), p. 117. Although Whately spelled his ‘agreable retreats’ with only one ‘e’, I have taken the liberty of using the standard modern spelling ‘agreeable’ for the rest of the book.

4.There are precedents for distant garden buildings in the earlier period, for example the Elizabethan retreats of the New Beild at Lyveden (Northamptonshire) and Wothorpe at Burghley (Lincolnshire), but there is a difference in scale between these sorts of retreat and most Georgian garden buildings; moreover they were not part of a proliferation of structures within the design.

5.This compares with the wealth of pictorial sources for activities in the garden in pre-revolutionary France. One particularly charming and informative series derives from the transparencies of Carmontelle (1717–1803), who experimented with long scrolls of translucent paper, rolled across a beam of light, while accompanied by a commentary. Intended to evoke a stroll through a garden, they have been described as the ‘cinema of the Enlightenment’.

6.Although a wide range of jolly goings-on and more sedate pastimes are included here, there are some necessary omissions. Blood sports particularly are not discussed. Hunting, which was perhaps the most dominant form of sport, was not exclusively carried out within parks and not deliberately within gardens, but rather ranged across the wider countryside. Shooting did take place within landscape parks and help to shape their form. Kennels were used as eye-catchers, but tended to be noisy and rather un-fragrant, so not places where the general company would want to take a picnic, or sit and read a book. The relationship between these activities and the designed landscape warrants a book in itself.

CHAPTER 2

1.Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London, 1973 [1813]), pp. 266, 382, chs 42 and 59.

2.John Phibbs has calculated that the acreage of landscape on which Brown had influence adds up to around half a million acres, the equivalent of an average English county.

3.The nickname ‘Capability’ was barely used in his lifetime and, as Jane Brown has pointed out, never to his face.

4.Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London, 1985 [1814]), p. 87, ch. 6.

5.For a detailed discussion of the development of the Landscape Style during the Georgian period, see Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes (Stroud, 1998); Timothy Mowl, Gentlemen and Players (Stroud, 2000).

6.Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (London, 1980), charts the evolution of the architecture of the country house away from the medieval tradition of the household as a family to one where, by the eighteenth century, servants were kept at arm’s length, which manifested itself with the development of back stairs and garrets.

7.For the management of water by Brown, see Steffie Shields, ‘“Mr Brown Engineer”: Lancelot Brown’s Early Work at Grimsthorpe Castle and Stowe’, Garden History, 34:2 (2006). See also Judith Roberts, ‘‘‘Well Temper’d Clay”: Constructing Water Features in the Landscape Park’, Garden History, 29:1 (2001).

8.Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London, 2000), pp. 122–9.

9.Quoted in Williamson, Polite Landscapes, p. 122.

10.The agricultural revolution is intrinsically linked to the phenomenon of ‘enclosure’, by which private owners took control of land that had for centuries been cultivated or grazed communally. The extent to which the Enclosure Acts affected the designed landscape has been hotly debated by economic and landscape historians. For a summary, see Williamson, Polite Landscapes, pp. 9–15.

11.John Phibbs, The Art of Capability Brown: Place-making 1716–1783 (London, 2016).

12.A term used by Catherine Battie in the journal of her stay in Selborne in 1763; see Rashleigh Holt-White, The Life and Letters of Gilbert White of Selborne, vol. 1 (London, 1901), pp. 139–40.

13.See Stella Tillyard, Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740–1832 (London, 1995), p. 131.

14.Nicola Shulman, Fashion and Gardens (London, 2014), pp. 27–31.

15.The number of views of each seat should not be taken as a fair representation of their degree of influence; much was due to the ease of finding views with which to illustrate such an extensive service. Thus, while Stowe justifiably takes up 48 views, some fairly obscure Staffordshire seats are also represented, being close to Wedgwood’s factory at Etruria. Peter Hayden, Russian Parks and Gardens (London, 2005).

16.Thomas Weiss, Infinitely Beautiful: The Dessau–Worlitz Garden Realm (Berlin, 2005), pp. 130–42.

17.Hayden, Russian Parks and Gardens, pp. 82, 96.

18.Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven CT, 2010), p. 6.

19.In the Georgian period the term ‘polite’ would denote a knowledge of taste and a sense of decorum. This was not limited to the upper classes but, increasingly as the period progressed, filtered down to the middle echelons of society too.

20.Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, pp. 26–7.

21.Girouard, Life in the English Country House, p. 189.

22.Lord Coventry, then Lord Deerhurst, to Sanderson Miller, February 1750, in Lilian Dickens and Mary Stanton (eds), An Eighteenth Century Correspondence (London, 1910), p. 162.

23.For example, see Joanna Martin, Wives and Daughters: Women and Children in the Georgian Country House (London and New York, 2004), p. 305.

24.Girouard, Life in the English Country House, p. 161.

25.Earl Temple to Hester Pitt, Lady Chatham, summer 1770, Public Record Office 30/8/62 Folio 199.

26.Beckford to Sir Isaac Heard, Fonthill, 24 July 1799, in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London, 1910), p. 256. Sir Isaac Heard was officer of arms at the College of Arms in London.

27.Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, p. 147.

28.Girouard, Life in the En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• One: Introduction
• Two: Setting the Scene
• Three: Morning
• Four: Afternoon
• Five: Evening
• Six: The Night-time
• Afterword
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• List of Figures