Today’s post is a look at what has become more trendily known as “aquascaping” rather than the rather the more mundane sounding “underwater gardening” which I wrote about last week.
If I’m honest I’d never heard of “aquascaping” until recently, and my ignorance was revealed when I discovered there were lots of recent books and websites dedicated to it. I thought it must be a modern invention but as I started researching I discovered that the story begins quite a bit earlier ….
I’m writing this as the rain lashes down outside – again – but it’s not, as the title might suggest, a post about how to manage a flooded garden, instead it’s another one about water gardens, but water gardens with a difference.
While there’s a long history of water gardens in virtually every country across the globe virtually all of them were, until quite recently, outside in the open air.
If you think about indoor water gardens you probably imagine fountains, basins and goldfish, perhaps in a Victorian conservatory or a Georgian grotto. I bet you didnt think much about water plants and what place they might have, so today’s post is going to look at aquatic plants indoors in what might be called the dawning of the age of aquaria…
Last week’s post looked at the creation of the picturesque landscape at Piercefield, near Chepstow.
Today I’m going to look at the decline and fall of the estate and how all the conservation and heritage protections in the world still haven’t managed to save a Grade II* listed building and Grade 1 listed landscape from dereliction.
The early part of the decline is sad, but the later part is more than sad – it is shocking.
These days Garden visiting is a popular pastime but actually it has been so since at least the 18thc and one of the earliest estates to become a tourist attraction in its own right is Piercefield, which stands above the river Wye near Chepstow in Monmouthshire. Largely dating from the mid-18thc century and often described a “picturesque” or “sublime” landscape it’s had a very chequered ownership and history but featured in all the early guide books as a must-see site. As a result visitors flocked to visit, and they still do even though the house is now in a state of complete ruin and the grounds a shadow of their former selves…
I found a copy of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett when sorting out some old books recently and flicked through it again – hence this post. I suspect you probably have read it yourself, read it to children, or seen one of the film or TV versions. But what did you think of the story?
It always strikes me as a bit of a Marmite book. Seen by many as a children’s classic, full of charm which tells of redemption and the ultimate “niceness” of people. But it can also be read as saccharine, sentimental even mawkish, or even, alternatively, as one critic put it, as “a story about neglect, remiss parenting and mental illness; a book that, for all its light, is underpinned by darkness”.
There’s no doubting its popularity though, so I wondered where Burnett found the idea for the story? Her son said she was workaholic who “wanted to be in the land of make-believe as often and as long as possible” , but did she just make it all up or was there really a Secret Garden with “ beautiful old walls ” which ‘bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles”
The Garden History Blog 
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