Bramham

Posted on 07/01/2023 by The Garden History Blog

I’ve always known that late 17th/ early 18thc gardens and landscapes have a special quality about them,  but a visit I made last month proved it beyond doubt.  So to get the New Year off to a flying start let me tell you about Bramham, a Grade 1  listed landscape in Yorkshire, which has hardly changed since work started there in 1698.

Bramham’s entry,    or rather entries, because there are over 20 separate listings for buildings and garden features as well as the house and whole park,   listed by Historic England,   is factual but rather dry. It simply doesn’t convey anything of the mix of grandeur and intimacy, awe, wonder and amusement or the silent but powerful “genius of the place” you encounter when walking around.

Nicholas Pevsner in his Buildings of England  was impressed too: “if ever house and gardens must be regarded as one ensemble, it is here. Bramham is a grand and unusual house, but its gardens are grander and even more unusual.”

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

2022 on the blog…and the Annual Quiz

Posted on 31/12/2022 by The Garden History Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Welcome to the 10th year of the blog.  The numbers reading  have continued to grow apace with about 152,000 hits over the course of the year,  well up on last year’s already record 129,000, 100,000 in 2020 and less than 7,000 in 2014!

The average daily viewing have been well over 350 over the whole year and for a couple of months reached over 500.  There were even 453 views on Christmas Day itself.  

There have been about  93,000 visitors, up from 75,000 last year, 56,000 in 2020 and 26,000 for 2019.

Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is the 468th post which in total scarily contain just over million words,  with posts averaging around 2600 words each. 

As always, thank you  for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep  telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list.  Just  go to the very bottom of any post and  enter an email address and each new post  will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in good time for breakfast.

And now read on to test your memory with the  annual quiz based on this year’s posts.

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Christmas Roses

Posted on 24/12/2022 by The Garden History Blog

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

It’s hard to be original in a  Christmas blog and this is my 9th year of trying. In the past I’ve  looked at poinsettia, mistletoe, ivy, amaryllis, and the Glastonbury Thorn. I’ve even looked at the ghastly xmas lights at Chiswick, and Victorian artificial flower decorations.  Could I bear to look at the history of Christmas trees or Holly ? Actually NO I couldn’t.

Then I thought of having a day off and just referring you a really Christmassy post that came in from the Gardens Trust’s equivalent in New Zealand,  about how a parachuting Santa nearly crashed through the roof of Auckland’s Wintergarden, but while I’d recommend it to you,  that would be a bit of a cop-out.

Finally  it occurred to me that very little has been written about Christmas Roses. Maybe that’s because  they’re not roses and don’t often flower at Christmas. However they were once called the Christe Herbe because of a nativity legend associated with them  so that was a good enough excuse to make them my contribution to the festivities this year.

 

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 6 Comments

London nurseries in the 1690s

Posted on 17/12/2022 by The Garden History Blog

Did you know there were cacti and bananas growing in London at the end of the 17thc?  Or that there were vineyards and commercial winemaking?  Or that the king rarely paid his bills?   Following on from last week’s post about the grander gardens of London that were visited by Sir John Gibson in 1691,  today I’m going to look at the commercial nurseries he visited – and a couple that he didn’t.

Although a few probate inventories detail the contents of a small number of nursery grounds, there are no plans, no accounts and very few letters or other documentary sources about them. Gibson’s descriptions provides some very useful information to form a fuller picture of what they were like, and even suggest that some were quite like modern garden centres, with lots of attractions other than plants.

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A Trip Advisor’s Guide to London Gardens……… in the 1690s

Posted on 10/12/2022 by The Garden History Blog

In the United Kingdom, garden visiting is an extremely popular occupation. In 2021 Kew had 1.25 million visitors  and RHS Wisley  nearly a million, while Westonbirt, Attingham and Edinburgh Botanic Gardens all also featured in top 20 visitor attractions in Britain.  Thousands of gardens open for the National Gardens Scheme and it’s been clear for years that garden tourism is big business. These days its relatively easy to  find information about where to visit but it hasn’t always been so.

That’s why a certain J. Gibson, a Yorkshire landowner who visited London in  December 1691, decided he’d help his friends and acquaintances by writing a “trip advisor” review of the major gardens round London. It wasn’t printed but instead circulated in hand-written form. Then it was lost, except for one copy which about a hundred years later ended up in the hands the Reverend Dr James Hamilton…

And thank goodness it did…

Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment