You don’t have to be the slightest bit interested in fishing to be attracted to some of the buildings associated with it. Because of their settings, many are delightful places to spend time in: after all what’s nicer than sitting by water and watching the world go by.
Way back in 2016 I wrote a couple of posts about fishing lodges and temples. The first was on the earliest surviving ones, from the mediaeval and early modern periods, then a second about early 18thc ones. But I kept finding more so today’s post is a brief look at 3 more historic sites, associated with angling and dating from the later 18thc.
It was just about the last thing I expected on a short visit to Montreal last October: a Chinese Garden. In Europe we’ve been used to Chinoiserie for over 300 years but while some examples are genuine imitations [if that makes sense] most are really just, at best, bastardised forms of Chinese architecture and design, whilst at worst they are comical misuses of the form and details…. and none of them are gardens.
I should say at the outset too that I knew nothing about Chinese gardens, and even now I still only know next to nothing. After all, while we have plenty of Japanese gardens in Britain I can’t think of a single Chinese one.
The very word Sissinghurst conjures up the glories of the English garden. It must be the most photographed and written about garden in the country and it’s certainly the most popular of the National Trust’s gardens. In fact it’s been talked about almost since the day Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West bought the remains of the Tudor castle and began their transformation. As John Sales, the former head of Gardens for the National Trust noted “no garden had greater influence in the second half of the twentieth century.”
The Garden History Blog 
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