The Garden History Blog

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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A modern Kalighat painting of a woman harvesting aubergines

We have got  a bumper crop of aubergines in the garden this year because they were  only thing that loved the intense heat and I’ve just finished cooking and freezing some of the surplus.  They seemed very exotic when I was growing up and I don’t think I ever saw one when I was a child. Certainly my grandfather didn’t grow them on his allotment, and probably wouldn’t have known what they were, but in fact they’ve been grown in Britain since the 16thc.

Aubergines are in the same family (the Solanaceae) as potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but also tobacco and deadly nightshade. That might help explain why, like potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, they took a long time to enter our  diet and were probably first grown as ornamentals.

But do you know where they originated or how they have evolved?  I thought I knew but actually, as so often, I was way off track.

from Shirley Hibberd’s Floral World, 1874

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