At Home - Bill Bryson [141]
For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for £100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised £50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwelling on his estate without cutting his hair or toenails or talking to another person. Someone took up the offer and actually lasted four years before deciding he could take no more; whether he was given at least a partial pension for his efforts is sadly unknown. Queen Caroline—she of the Serpentine in Hyde Park—had the architect William Kent build for her a hermitage at Richmond into which she installed a poet named Stephen Duck, but that was not a success either, for Duck decided he didn’t like the silence or being looked at by strangers, so he quit. Somewhat improbably, he went on to become the rector of a church at Byfleet in Surrey. Unfortunately, he appears not to have been happy there—he appears not to have been happy anywhere—and drowned himself in the Thames.
The ultimate expression of folly building was surely at Chiswick, then a village west of London, where the third Earl of Burlington (and yet another Kit-Cat member) built Chiswick House, which was not a house at all and never intended to be lived in, but a place to look at art and listen to music, a kind of glorified summer house, built on a literally palatial scale. This was the property from which, you may just recall, the eighth Duke of Devonshire stepped out and had his happy first encounter with Joseph Paxton.
Meanwhile, Charles Bridgeman and his successors were extensively reworking whole landscapes. At his masterpiece grounds, Stowe in Buckinghamshire, everything was done on a monumental scale. One of the ha-has stretched for four miles. Hills were reshaped, valleys flooded, temples of marbled magnificence strewn about almost carelessly. Stowe was unlike anything that had ever been built before. For one thing, it was one of the world’s first true tourist attractions. It was the first garden in Britain to attract sightseers and the first to have its own guidebook. It became so popular that in 1717 Lord Cobham, its owner, had to buy a neighboring inn to accommodate visitors.
In 1738, Bridgeman died and soon after was succeeded by a person so youthful that he hadn’t even been born when Bridgeman began work on Stowe. The young man’s name was Lancelot Brown, and he was exactly the man the landscape movement needed.
Brown’s life story closely recalls that of Joseph Paxton. Both were the sons of yeoman farmers, both were exceptionally bright and hardworking, both went into gardening as boys, and both distinguished themselves swiftly in the employ of rich men. In Brown’s case, the story began in Northumberland, in the far north of England, where his father was a tenant farmer on an estate called Kirkharle. Brown was apprenticed as a gardener there at fourteen and served the full seven years, but then left Northumberland and moved south, possibly looking for a better climate for his asthma. What he did for the next period of his life is unknown, but he must have distinguished himself, for soon after the death of Charles Bridgeman Lord Cobham selected him to be the new head gardener at Stowe. He was just twenty-four years old.
Brown found himself in charge of a staff of forty, serving as paymaster as well as head gardener. Gradually, he took on the management of the whole estate, building projects as well as