Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Christopher Tunnard

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      Top, a “picturesque” cottage for a retainer at Oatlands Park. Left, Kent’s park at Claremont, as improved by Brown. The present mansion is reputed to be the only one ever built by Brown, although he altered many; here the architectural magnificence at which he aimed has somehow not materialized. In 1850 it was possible to write that “… its present royal possessor … greatly enlarged the estate by the purchase of adjoining lands. These purchases were made to frustrate the speculating intentions of certain persons who were contemplating the erection of buildings around Claremont; by which its domestic privacy, and sweet retirement, would have been destroyed.” The irony of these remarks today will be appreciated after a glance at the photographs on pages 151 to 154.

      This period is the age of Lancelot Brown, who held undisputed sway, except for the jealous bickerings of Chambers, from 1750 until his death in 1783. This man, who refused work in Ireland because he “had not yet finished England,” was a tremendous influence and not altogether an unmixed blessing to the country he was so zealous in “improving.” He could rise to magnificent heights, as at Blenheim, which has always been considered his masterpiece, but he could also stoop so low as to indulge in constant repetition and to alter ground unnecessarily for the sake of performing this fascinating work. To smooth a rocky crag into a bald hummock was his especial delight, and one can only surmise that having observed the magical transformations achieved by levelling and grading, and lacking any satisfactory theory to justify his prodigious activities, this aspect of his work became an obsession with him in the manner of the bottle with the toper. In other words, he was far from being an artist, and his clients suffered for it. We, to whom the work of all eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscapists appears softened by the mossy layers of time, are thankful to Brown and his followers for their tree planting, though even today their remaining overcrowded plantations of ill-assorted specimens bear testimony to a lack of skill in grouping.

      The demand for Brown’s services was enormous, not because he did good work but because improvements were the fashion. His genial manner won him popularity, and the literary and grammatical allusions with which he invariably illustrated his ideas no doubt helped to produce, in a gullible public, the sense of a competence which he was in fact far from possessing.

      The landscape influence was felt in every garden in the land, from the surroundings of the palace to the enclosure of the smallest Thames-side villa. The two-acre estate of Squire Mushroom, the imaginary butt of Francis Coventry’s wit in 1753, perhaps gives no very distorted view of the extremes in which landscaping could be taken:

      “At your first entrance, the eye is saluted with a yellow serpentine river, stagnating through a beautiful valley, which extends near twenty yards in length. Over the rim is thrown a bridge ‘partly in the Chinese manner,’ and a little ship, with sails spread and streamers flying, floats in the middle of it. When you have passed this bridge, you enter into a grove perplexed with errors and crooked walks; where, having trod the same ground over and over again, through a labyrinth of hornbeam hedges, you are led into an old hermitage built with roots of trees, which the squire is pleased to call St. Austin’s cave. Here he desires you to repose yourself, and expects encomiums on his taste: after which a second ramble begins through another maze of walks, and the last error is much worse than the first. At length, when you almost despair of ever seeing daylight any more, you emerge on a sudden in an open and circular area, richly chequered with beds of flowers, and embellished with a little fountain playing in the centre of it. As every folly must have a name, the squire informs you, that ‘by way of whim,’ he has christened this place ‘little Maribon,’ at the upper end of which you are conducted into a pompous, clumsy, and gilded building, said to be a temple, and consecrated to Venus; for no other reason which I could learn, but because the squire riots here sometimes in vulgar love with a couple of orange-wenches, taken from the purlieus of the play-house.”