Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Christopher Tunnard

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      The beginnings of irregularity : from “New Principles of Gardening,” Batty Langley, London, 1728.

      The flowers with which Shenstone adorned his ornamental farm were of this kind. One can regard Shenstone, poet, essayist, and man of taste, as a typical artist of the first phase of the landscape movement. He was, of course, an amateur, but then some of the most admired of landscape gardens, Hagley, Persfield, Stourhead and Pain’s Hill, were laid out or developed by amateurs, with the great Price and Knight leading the host of gentlemen turned gardeners. He lacked pretension to architectural knowledge, in an age when every man was his own architect; he could never have achieved Kent’s perfect little temples at Stowe, for instance; but without this, his poetic and pictorial gift sufficed in abundance for the charm of “The Leasowes,” which he laid out to the admiration and envy of his many friends. Apart from the regrettable occupation of the place by fairies, whose presence, together with his reputation for indolence, have always detracted from a general appreciation of their author’s serious intentions towards art, the pictorial arrangement of the woods and fields, the grouping of ornament, and the management of water (of which we have exact descriptions), represent the culmination of all the confused gropings of that time towards a consistent technique. Shenstone had imagination and created pictures; the garden is a series of them, compositions in melancholy, pensiveness, and (we cannot judge, but are prepared to take another’s word for it) “sublimity,” the three tenets of his artistic faith, founded upon a study of Burke and the painters. “Pleasing the imagination by scenes of grandeur, beauty and variety,” was the sum of his demands of the garden as a whole.

      For the reason already given and because of a lack of money, Shenstone left “The Leasowes” remarkably unadorned with buildings. On his arrival “he cut a straight walk through his wood, terminated by a small building of rough stone; and in a sort of gravel or marlepit, in the corner of a field, amongst some hazels, he had scooped out a sort of cave, stuck a little cross of wood over the door, and called it an hermitage; and, a few years after, had built an elegant little summer-house in the water, under a fine group of beeches” (which was afterwards removed by Mr. Pitt’s advice). He had not, Graves goes on to say, “then conceived the place as a whole”; when he did he was far-seeing enough not to crowd the scene with bricks and mortar or to dot the open space with clumps of trees,* but

      “taught the level plain to swell

      In verdant mounds, from whence the eye

      Might all their larger works descry,”

      and was careful to frame his vistas on the neighbouring landscape, instead of some object near at hand, as Kent and Hamilton were content to do. Though reputedly always in debt, he managed to embellish his grounds on a mere £300 a year, while Hamilton at Pain’s Hill, an estate modelled from the pictures of Poussin and the Italian masters, is reputed (no doubt with exaggeration) to have spent forty thousand pounds on the grotto alone.

      In Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening, which has been already quoted, the technique of the artist is revealed. Almost alone among his contemporaries, Shenstone grasps the principles of form in their widest implications, and suggests the modern method of planning in a single sentence. “In designing a house, and gardens, it is happy when there is an opportunity of maintaining a subordination of parts; the house so luckily placed as to exhibit a view of the whole design.” Price, hailed as the originator of our present-day gardens, said very much the same thing. But Shenstone’s chief claim to fame among his contemporaries and the generations immediately following lies in the remark, “I think the landscape painter is the gardener’s best designer,” which was later widely quoted from Unconnected Thoughts as being in direct opposition to Addison’s pronouncement on natural beauty. This remark has been attributed without very good foundation to Kent, but Graves says that, although Kent must have been aware of its implications, Shenstone was the first to make it public. He died in 1763 unconscious of posthumous fame in gardening and in literature, where he is now chiefly remembered as a precursor of the Romantic Movement. His “native elegance of mind” has always had an appeal for the French and his taste for elegiac fragments on urns and seats was not long in finding itself echoed in their gardens. Ermenonville was known as “The Leasowes of France” and contained an inscription to the poet’s memory.

       A view of Shenstone’s garden at The Leasowes. “One can regard Shenstone, poet, essayist, and man of taste, as a typical artist of the first phase of the landscape movement.”

THE GROTTO A MANIFESTATION OF THE TASTE FOR “AWFUL BEAUTY” IN THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GARDEN

      VAUX-LE-VICOMTE

       From France, where as a frame for sculpture or a shady retreat the grotto exists to grace the formal style, it was imported into England and became the toy of Evelyn and his contemporaries: later the rocky cave beloved of Salvator…

      CLAREMONT

      … finding its home at last as a means of escape to Arcadia in the gardens of the pictorial landscape style.

      PAIN’S HILL

      Here in the horrid gloom society shuddered with the poets. An elevating pastime ? Yes, for beauty+horror = sublimity.

      OATLANDS PARK

      For upwards of 100 years the grotto was part of the background of English social life. This one contained a bath, made for the, Duke of Newcastle late in the 18th century. Each of the four chambers had a dominating shell motif, each passage its shaft of filtered daylight. Convex mirrors, the skeleton ribs of epiphytic fern, bright mineral ores and fragments of Italian sculpture were composed to form a design of such complexity that it occupied a man and his two sons for five years in its construction. The grotto was recently destroyed.

      SAINT ANN’S HILL

      As a final example, a garden house with stalactite ceiling decorations, symbolical of that translation of garden romanticism into the sphere of architecture which was to affect so disastrously the architecture of the nineteenth century.

II—The Verdant Age

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