The Gardens of English Heritage

by Mawrey, Gillian; Groves, Linden

• ISBN13: 9780711227712
• ISBN10: 0711227713
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-24
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Summary

The magnificent parks and gardens owned by English Heritage are far less well-known than its evocative medieval abbeys or Victorian mansions. Yet these remarkable places offer a wide-ranging variety of gardening pleasures. Some have stunning designs, while others are important for their history or their plants. A surprising number are brand new and a few of the best are tiny. All have marvellously atmospheric surroundings.From the formality of Wrest Park and Chiswick House to the rolling parkland slopes around Kenwood House; from Queen Victoria's garden at Osborne, complete with charming vegetable plots for the royal children, to the exotic Quarry Garden at Belsay Hall and the modern restraint of the Contemporary Heritage Scheme, here are gardens from every corner of England and almost every century.These essays tell the story of how each was created and of the sometimes eccentric families who owned them. The decay their trees, fountains and statues so often fell into is described - and the way they have been restored and survive to delight us today.

Excerpts

] Introduction We are accustomed in England to living against a glorious backdrop of buildings, monuments, landscapes and, of course, gardens, a heritage accumulated over many hundreds of years. As Man has always had a tendency to crave the new, the exciting, and the convenient, that these treasures have survived is quite remarkable. It has not, however, been a happy accident, but rather due to national pride, and the hard work of owners and organisations dedicated to looking after England''s historic environment. English Heritage - officially The Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England - came into being through Act of Parliament in 1983, having evolved over several decades from being first a part of the Ministry of Works, then of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, and finally of the Department of the Environment. In the following year, 1984, it began to manage the hundreds of state-owned properties which had been in the care of these bodies. Although a few places, such as Osborne House, were important tourist attractions which contained valuable collections and were surrounded by significant gardens, far more representative of English Heritage''s inheritance were the Scheduled Monuments: archaeological sites from the distant past (of which Stonehenge is the best-known and arguably the most problematic) and the assorted medieval ruins of both religious buildings which had been pillaged, for their stone as well as their contents, after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries from 1536-41, and of the castles which were ''slighted'' or demolished during the Civil War just over a century later. These two events were catastrophic for many of England''s historic buildings, but they are not the reason why so few gardens survive from before 1700. It was the 18th century fashion for informal picturesque landscapes which swept away almost all our earlier formal lay-outs, with ''Capability'' Brown being the best-known but certainly not the only villain. Indeed, even when English Heritage was set up in the 1980s, historic gardens were not widely recognised as being the important cultural assets that they are, and the fledgling EH had no garden specialists on its staff, a far cry from today when it employs landscape architects, landscape managers and specialist gardeners, in order to preserve the nation''s historic designed landscapes effectively. English Heritage also instituted the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. This record of the history and current state of the most important designed green spaces in the country was started in the 1980s and, initially, was the work of a single person, Dr Christopher Thacker, who carried out almost all the research and visits unaided. Today, the list contains just over 1600 sites - not just parks and gardens but other ornamental or recreational landscapes, such as cemeteries, hospital grounds and town squares - all deemed to be of national or even international significance. They are ranked Grade II, Grade II* or Grade I - with fewer than 10% being worthy of this highest status. Most of us would recognise English Heritage''s insignia, a red portcullis design, but what does it do? If we are looking for an easy description, then it is probably best to say that English Heritage busies itself with three kinds of activity: it encourages the research and understanding of our heritage; it is actively involved in conservation to enable the historic environment to survive the demands of the modern world; and it owns and manages historic properties for the benefit of the nation, their gardens being the subject of this book. As part of its research-oriented role, English Heritage is responsible for the National Monuments Record, an archive, open to all, of over 10 million photographs, plans, architectural and archaeological reports and other items, many of them related to historic parks or gardens. In 1998, for instance, the gardener and garden-writer Christoph