The Garden History Blog

The Gothic Bower

A few weeks ago, purely by chance,  I came across an illustrated guide written in 1816 for  a garden called Whiteknights which was in its day probably the most famous garden in the country.  The guide was so intriguing that since the estate is just a couple of miles from the centre of Reading I decided to pay a visit  and see what, if anything was left.

Purchased in 1798 for George Spencer-Churchill, the Marquis of Blandford and heir to the Dukedom of Marlborough,  Whiteknights became the site of reckless extravagance and outrageous entertainment. George was a magpie, collecting art, furniture, books, wine and rare plants and laying out magnificent gardens.

As you might remember from this earlier post he was so renowned a plantaholic that he had a family of Australian plants named in his honour.    Unfortunately  he was also such a spendthrift that he went bankrupt in 1819 and was forced to retire to Blenheim Palace [what a hardship!].  Whiteknights was later sold, and the house soon demolished with the ground divided up and developed. It’s  now  the campus of Reading University but hidden away there are still a few traces of the Park’s past splendour.

detail of A View of Whiteknights across the Lake, by Thomas Christopher Hofland, 1816
Image credit: University of Reading Art Collection

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The Maharaja

When was the last time you needed a passport to visit a garden?  Or indeed had to walk past heavily armed  police to go in? We ran into that problem on my recent visit to south India, although luckily the passports  weren’t locked in the safe in our hotel as recommended but in the car, or we’d have been refused admittance.

The garden we were visiting was Brindavan, a huge formal garden on the outskirts of Mysore, that was laid out between 1924 and 1932. Like us, you might be wondering why we needed passports , but perhaps a look at some of the long distance views of the garden later in this post will give you a clue.

Mysore is, unlike all the other Indian cities I’ve visited, amazingly green. It has tree-lined streets, broad avenues with wide shrub filled verges and several gardens in the city centre. Like Brindavan much of this is due to the foresight of a reforming maharaja and his chief ministers, and the trust they placed in a Kew-trained German-born gardener and planner I’d never heard of but who, I’ve since discovered,  is probably the most influential European gardener ever to work in India.

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© The Tabley House Collection Trust

There can’t be many great landscape gardeners who, as a young man,  fought against Napoleon in the Peninsular War or against the Americans in the War of 1812. Yet one who did both went on to become a well-known artist and then  one of the leading garden designers of the 19thc,  with over 250 sites including some of the most important  in the country under his belt by the time he died in 1881.

He was William Andrews Nesfield usually mainly remembered for his complicated colourful geometric parterres but who was  actually a far more nuanced and sophisticated designer than he is often given credit for.

Mamhead Park by Nesfield , from the Nesfield Archive in Australia scanned from Country Life 8th April 1993

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One of the highlights of my recent trip to southern India was  to  visit the botanic gardens  in a place known now as Udhagamandalam, (officially  at least) although I didn’t hear anyone anywhere call it that.  Instead they all talked about Ooty.

This is the  popular abbreviation for Ootacamund,  the “Queen of Hill Stations”, which sits  about 7,500 feet up  in the Nilgiri Hills. During the days of the British Raj   it was where Europeans could go to escape the intense summer heat on the plains below. And of course, as elsewhere throughout the empire, wherever the British went, they constructed gardens including the one that I had read about and was keen to see…

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I’ve just returned from a trip to southern India where one of the most amusing incidents was being taken to Banana Street, a narrow alleyway that led off the main fruit and vegetable market in  Madurai.

The 40 or so stalls that lined both sides of this little thoroughfare only sold bananas and the guide said very proudly, there were 16 varieties on sale all grown locally.

I love bananas but I’d have been hard-pressed too distinguish more than 3 or 4 different sorts on display and  none of them were that much like the ones we in Britain see on our supermarket or greengrocers shelves.

So of course I had to find out more about bananas and their history if not in our gardens then at least in our conservatories and supermarket shelves…

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