How To Maintain A Designer Garden

Few of the great gardens of the century belonged simply to one phase or the other. In many cases an estate was worked on by a succession of "improvers", each leaving his distinctive mark. At Claremont, Bridgeman was succeeded by Kent and then by Brown, and the same trio worked consecutively at Stowe, while Repton was frequently called in to advise and suggest alterations to Brown's parks.

ENTER THE IMPROVERS
Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, working for wealthy patrons, were the earliest protagonists of the more informal approach — the first to consult Pope's "Genius of the place". Bridgeman, a practitioner rather than a writer, played a crucial role in the transitional period between the geometric layouts and great radial avenues portrayed by Knyff and Kip at the turn of the century and Kent's freer landscapes.

Bridgeman first came to prominence in 1709 while working for George London and Henry Wise. By 1714 he was already involved with Lord Cobham in Cobham's changes to Stowe, where he installed a ha-ha, and by 1720 was also working at Wimpole Hall, in Cambridgeshire, for the Earl of Oxford. After Wise retired in 1728, Bridgeman became royal gardener to George II and Queen Caroline until his death in 1738.
It is to William Kent, however, that Horace Walpole (vocal gardening and architectural commentator and son of the prime minister Robert Walpole) gives the credit for founding the English landscape tradition. In his essay On Modern Gardening, written between 1750 and 1770,Walpole says of Kent:"He leaped the fence and saw all nature was a garden." During the 1720s and 1730s the designs for the main part of a garden retained their structured formality, with curving lines and meandering paths taking the place of the symmetrical "wilderness" that had often been introduced into the outer areas in preceding years. By 1738 at Rousham, Oxfordshire, however, Kent was interpreting Addison's idea of "a whole estate thrown into a kind of garden" and exploited Pope's invitation to call in the surrounding countryside.

By encircling an estate with perimeter woods, he was able to turn a park into a private sanctum with undulating green pastures, contoured land masses, curving lakes or rivers winding through the valleys, and clumps of majestic trees silhouetted against the sky. On an old estate Brown would destroy the traditional gardens around the house and break up the lines of French-style avenues to form groves of trees. Flowers and utilitarian kitchen gardens were banished from sight across the park. In Brown's hands these Arcadian landscapes became such perfect replicas of an ideal that it was almost impossible to distinguish the separate roles of nature and art. Today a surviving 18th-century park fits so easily into the English countryside that the designer's role in "perfecting" nature has almost been extinguished. These pastoral idylls, planned to stress man's relationship and interdependence with nature and to stimulate moods and emotion, are often regarded as the epitome of 18th-century rationalism.