At Home - Bill Bryson [139]
Gardening was already a huge business in England when Bridgeman came along. London’s Brompton Park Nursery, which stood on land now occupied by the mighty museums of South Kensington, covered one hundred acres and produced enormous volumes of shrubbery, exotic plants, and other green things for stately homes up and down the country. But these were gardens of a very different type from those we know today. For one thing, they were luridly colorful: paths were filled with colored gravel, statues were brightly painted, bedding plants were chosen for the intensity of their hues. Nothing was natural or understated. Hedges were shaped into galloping topiary. Paths and borders were kept rigorously straight and lined with fastidiously clipped box or yew. Formality ruled. The grounds of stately homes weren’t so much parks as exercises in geometry.
Charles Bridgeman (fourth from left, holding garden plan) in William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Levee. (photo credit 12.1)
Now quite suddenly all of that order and artificiality was being swept away, and the fashion became to make things look natural. Where this impulse came from isn’t at all easy to say. The early eighteenth century was a time when nearly all young men of privileged bearing traveled through Europe on grand tours. Practically without exception they returned home full of enthusiasm for the formal orders of the classical world and a burning desire to reproduce them in an English setting. Architecturally, they longed for nothing more than to be proudly and unimaginatively derivative. Where the grounds were concerned, however, they rejected rigidity and began to build an entirely new kind of world outdoors. For those who believe the British have gardening genius embedded in their chromosomes, this was the age that seemed to prove it.
One of the heroes of this movement was our old friend Sir John Vanbrugh. Because he was self-taught, he was able to bring a fresh perspective to matters. He considered the setting of his houses as no architect had before, for instance. At Castle Howard, almost the first thing he did was rotate the house 90 degrees on its axis, so that it faced north-south rather than east-west, as it had under earlier plans drawn up by William Talman. This made it impossible to provide the traditional long approach to the house, with glimpsed views across fields as a kind of visual foreplay, but had the compensating virtue that the house sat far more comfortably in the landscape and the occupants enjoyed an infinitely more satisfying outlook on the world beyond. This was a radical reversal of traditional orientation. Before this, houses weren’t built to enjoy a view. They were the view.
To maximize important prospects, Vanbrugh introduced another inspired feature—the folly, a building designed with no other purpose in mind than to complete a view and provide a happy spot for the wandering eye to settle. His Temple of the Four Winds at Castle Howard was the first of its type. To this he added the most ingenious and transformative innovation of all: the ha-ha. A ha-ha is a sunken fence, a kind of palisade designed to separate the private part of an estate from its working parts without the visual intrusion of a conventional fence or hedge. It was an idea adapted from French military fortifications (where Vanbrugh would have first encountered them during his years of imprisonment). Because they were unseen until the last instant, people tended to discover them with a startled cry of “Ha-ha!”—and hence, so it is said, the name. The ha-ha wasn’t simply a practical device for keeping cows off the lawn, but an entirely new way of perceiving the world. Grounds, garden, parkland, estate—all became part of a continuous whole. Suddenly the attractive part of a property