The Garden History Blog

What garden event  is actually only 36 years old but had already acquired the appearance and  feeling of a long-standing tradition? The answer is, as I’m sure you guessed from the title of this post,  National Apple Day. It was deliberately invented in 1990,  by the arts and environmental charity  Common Ground and takes place every October 21st.

The group had been founded in the early 1980s and one of their central ideas was what they called “local distinctiveness”.  That meant more than just conserving famous landscapes or rare wildlife, but instead celebrating and enhancing the ordinary things that give individual places their particular character—local foods, customs, buildings, names, trees and varieties of plants. They have set up a whole range of projects to do this but with  Apple Day Common Ground hoped do something rather different. They aimed to create a new annual calendar custom, rather than revive an existing one, with  Apple Day consciously designed to become a bit of modern folklore…and there’s no doubt they have succeeded.

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detail of a board game dating from 1800 dedicated to the Duchess of York and Oatlands

Last week’s post looked at the history of Oatlands Palace up to its complete demolition in 1653. Today’s is going to look at the mansions that replaced it, and their amazing gardens especially those created by the Earl of Lincoln and his son the Duke of Newcastle in the 18th century. Their grandeur and then decline make a good story, especially when coupled with the antics of the Duke and Duchess of York [no not the modern ones but their Georgian forebears]

I thought it might have been some difficulty to fill a second post about Oatlands but how wrong could I  be as you will find out if you read on…

Oatlands House built c1725 

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Where was this unusual looking palace?

I was recently reading the war-time diary of James Lees-Milne, the brains behind the National Trust’s acquisition of so many country houses in the middle of the last century, when I came across this entry for 12th March 1944.  It was the day he visited a former royal palace. Can you guess where he’s talking about?

“Spent the afternoon in the sun looking at the grounds and then the grotto. The present house is a huge, ugly shapeless pile, chiefly of 1860 though incorporating earlier work. There is a square Osborne-like tower at one corner. The grounds laid out by Kent between 1740 and 1748 have a long, steep terrace down to a serpentine lake. There are many Palladian urns along the terrace and two stone gate-piers at the drive entrance, not very fine in design and somewhat top heavy. The grotto however is fascinating. It must have been constructed about 1795 by a Duke of Newcastle…”

So where was he?

The Inner Courtyard of the palace, 1559

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Artist’s  impression of Kuhikugu, the central part of a large pre-Columbian “garden city” located in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. 

Say Amazon and most of us probably think of the on-line shopping monster, then maybe of the  South American river or one of the planet’s last great pristine wildernesses, inhabited a few “primitive” indigenous tribes. However, despite the legends of El Dorado,  I bet few of us really think of it as the home of  ancient and long-lost civilisations. But then most of us aren’t archeologists equipped with modern technology.

Although until recently material evidence has been scarce it’s now thought that what we think of as primordial dense forest and jungle was in fact covered by a large network of settlements, lived in by large numbers of people with deep knowledge of earthmoving, river management, and plant and animal ecology,  who were able to manage and alter their surroundings  to create complex domesticated landscapes with gardens, forest-orchards and fisheries all run sustainably…

from Theodore de Bry’s collections of travel accounts Grandes Voyages or America, 1597

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