Today’s post is quite long but needs just a very short introduction…
What do the thousands of white roses at Queen Victoria’s wedding have in common with mediaeval nuns, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s head, what your great-aunt Agatha probably had on her mantelpiece…
…and this small metal box in the V&A?
Read on to find out!
“Morenia Pöppigiana”
from von Martius Historia naturalis palmarum [1824-1850]
Burchell had returned to Britain from South Africa in 1815 still aged only 35 and was feted by all the leading botanists of the day, including William Hooker, then the first Professor of Botany at Glasgow University and later the first director of Kew. He couldn’t have run the family nursery, even had he wanted to, because his father had leased the land and business to another nurseryman. What was he to do?
It took him ten years to decide, and it was to lead to another extraordinary journey and an even greater collection of botanical and natural history specimens than he had made in South Africa. The Dictionary of National Biography is laudatory: “His work as a Naturalist has never been equalled … his objective, detailed annotation and brilliant appreciation of nature set science a goal seldom achieved.”
detail from Liberty, Equality, Fraternity 2012
Last week’s post looked at the history of the chateau at Chaumont-sur-Loire, now home to the famous international garden festival. This week’s is going to look at some of the inspirational, if sometimes [ok often] quirky, gardens that have been hosted there over the last twenty years or so that I’ve been going.
your author captured in a garden of distorting mirrors
In keeping with the silly season that seem to affect the press every year this is perhaps not my most serious piece of well-researched garden history, but it does show that gardens can be humorous too!
I’ve just come back from visiting the garden festival at Chaumont-sur-Loire. The great Renaissance chateau there has had a very chequered history, but for the last 28 years has been home to a wonderful celebration of gardens unlike any other that I know.
To start with the festival lasts for months, and combines permanent planting and installations with dozens of temporary ones. It attracts designers and artists from round the world. It values innovation and sustainability more than most, and recycles materials and plants from year to year. It’s also open access, relatively inexpensive and surprisingly uncrowded. Bits of it can be brilliant, others wild and wacky, and sometimes there are miserable failures or a complete mess but thats part of the fun and excitement of going. You never know what you’re going to find!
detail of Beaudesert from Repton’s Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1816
Beaudesert is/was an enormous estate in Staffordshire’, its name probably coming from the French for the surrounding landscape – “beautiful wilderness”. It has a reasonably well recorded architectural and contents history up to the demolition of the great Elizabethan mansion in 1937 but the story of its gardens and grounds is much less well known.
I started this post last year during the Repton celebration because the great man had prepared a magnificent set of designs for the grounds in a Red Book presented to the owner in January 1814. However as I began to research further I discovered that very little definite seems to be known about his impact so abandoned the effort because there were other things to do. BUT a little more time has meant that I could a little bit more research so read on to find more …
The Garden History Blog 
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