At Home - Bill Bryson [138]
Instead, of course, matters settled down, the West resumed its long expansion, America became the breadbasket of the world, and the British countryside went into a long tailspin from which it has never entirely recovered. That is a story that we shall get to in due course, but meanwhile let’s step into the garden and consider why so much of that landscape was, and indeed remains, so very attractive to be in.
* The Norway rat was often in the past called the brown rat, and the roof rat has been called the black rat. However, the names are misleading—the color of a rat’s fur isn’t a reliable indicator of anything—so rodentologists now nearly always avoid the terms.
• CHAPTER XII •
THE GARDEN
I
In 1730, Queen Caroline of Anspach, the industrious and ever-improving wife of King George II, did a rather daring thing. She ordered the diversion of the little River Westbourne in London to make a large pond in the middle of Hyde Park. The pond, called the Serpentine, is still there and still much admired by visitors, though almost none realize quite how historic a body of water it is.
This was the first manmade pond in the world designed not to look manmade. It is hard to imagine now quite what a radical step this was. Previously, all artificial bodies of water were rigorously geometrical—either boxily rectangular, in the manner of a reflecting pool, or circular, like the Round Pond in neighboring Kensington Gardens, built just two years earlier. Now here was an artificial body of water that was curvilinear and graceful, that meandered beguilingly and looked as if it had been formed, in a moment of careless serendipity, by nature. People were enchanted by the deception and flocked to admire it. The royal family were so pleased that for a time they kept two outsized yachts on the Serpentine even though there was barely space for them to turn without colliding.
For Queen Caroline, it was a rare popular triumph, for her gardening ambitions were often ill-judged. In the same period, she appropriated two hundred acres of Hyde Park for the grounds of Kensington Palace, banishing private citizens from its leafy paths except on Saturdays, and then only for part of the year and only if they looked respectable. This became, not surprisingly, a source of widespread resentment. The queen also toyed with the idea of making the whole of St. James’s Park private, and asked her prime minister, Robert Walpole, how much that would cost. “Only a crown, Madam,” he replied with a thin smile.
So the Serpentine was an immediate success, and the credit for it—certainly for its engineering, probably also for its conception—belongs to a shadowy figure named Charles Bridgeman. Where exactly this man of dashing genius came from has always been a mystery. He appeared, seemingly from out of nowhere, in 1709 with a set of signed drawings of an expert caliber for some proposed landscaping works at Blenheim Palace. Everything about him before this is conjectural: where he was born, the timing and circumstances of his upbringing, where he acquired his considerable skills. Historians can’t even agree whether to spell his name Bridgeman or Bridgman. Yet for the thirty years after he came on the scene he was everywhere that gardening of a high order was needed. He worked with all the leading architects—John Vanbrugh, William Kent, James Gibbs, Henry Flitcroft—on projects all over England. He designed and laid out Stowe, the most celebrated garden of the day. He was appointed royal gardener and managed the gardens at Hampton Court, Windsor, Kew, and all the royal parks throughout the king’s domain. He created Richmond Gardens. He designed the Round Pond and Serpentine. He surveyed and designed for estates all over the south of England. Wherever there was important gardening to be done, Bridgeman was there. No individual portrait of him exists, but he does appear, rather unexpectedly, in the second picture