The politics of the plot

The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden
by Tim Richardson

The man ‘of Polite Imagination’, according to Joseph Addison, was able to delight in things lesser mortals might fail to appreciate, particularly the landscape. ‘It gives him indeed a kind of Property in everything he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his pleasure.’ If an Englishman’s home used to be his castle — the basis of his liberty — his garden was a blank canvas on which to express his originality and freedom. This book ends with the arrival of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the 1740s, and Tim Richardson regards his work as creatively conservative and formulaic. He prefers the age of the amateur experimentalist, which began with the Glorious Revolution, when England’s gardens were rich in symbolism and creative energy.

Richardson’s prose is engaging and witty. His interest is deeply personal; the tours he takes us on of England’s landscape gardens — extant, mutilated or long lost — are wonderfully engaging. This is important, for Richardson’s aim is to recreate the most important aspect of these gardens, the personality of the creator. He interweaves biographies of his ‘arcadian friends’ (and enemies) into his analysis of the gardens. Indeed, he sees them as autobiographies in themselves, their symbolism directed by philosophical, political, artistic or erotic interests, by memories of the Grand Tour or family bereavement.

Stowe, with its temples to ancient virtue, monuments to ‘true’ Whig ideals and visual satires on corruption, was garden politics writ large, an estate-sized protest that expressed Lord Cobham’s hatred of Walpole. By the 1730s it was a harmless gesture. For the preceding generation garden fashions were more subtle. Sir William Temple’s project at Moor Park in Surrey, begun in the 1680s and borrowed from Dutch techniques, was a homage to William of Orange.