The Garden History Blog

In New York Botanical Garden

It’s that time of the year again when, in most parts of the western world, shops have been piled high with pumpkins.  I confess Halloween is not a celebration I particularly like but  even so I’ve often wondered why a big orange fruit from North America should have anything to do with All Saints Eve, so  I thought I’d investigate a bit further.

What I discovered is that although man’s association with pumpkins and squash of all kinds goes back more than 10,000 years their association with Halloween is much much more recent and, of course, is really nothing to do with pumpkins at all!

PS If you think you’ve seen a giant pumpkin just take a look at this  article in today’s Independent about the new world champion!

Chromolithograph postcard, ca. 1910.

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Hand-coloured copy of an engraving in The Lady’s Magazine, 1778

It’s rare that I think any garden is worth writing about in more than one post, and exceptionally rare for it to be more than two. But Oatlands breaks the rule – not so much for what remains but for what has been lost.

Apart from the Tudor palace  which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the biggest loss is undoubtedly the two-storey grotto which was designed and constructed in the 1760s and which must rank as one of the most  important and unusual  ever built in Britain.  Sadly its  miserable fate came  just after better protection for  historic buildings had been introduced with the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 and which was conveniently “overlooked” by the District Surveyor who organised its demolition. It became a symbol of precisely what the new system was intended to prevent. Continue reading →

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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