This evening’s “Drink with the Idler” guest (6-7pm) Tim Richardson on England’s historic landscape gardens and the coded messages they contained

What, exactly, is an English landscape garden? The term refers to a naturalistic garden style that in the first decades of the eighteenth century evolved out of the formal baroque tradition of ornamental parterres near the house comprising statuary, topiary and fountains, and avenues of trees defining rides striking out across parkland.

Such formal features were not wholly swept away – instead, a certain looseness was imparted to woodland areas, where serpentine walks increasingly took the place of straight path systems, and topiary especially was removed from existing parterres. Over time, a far greater emphasis was laid on a site’s natural characteristics by means of avenues of trees, glades and architectural episodes that were inspired in part by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and others, and especially by the poetry of ancient Roman writers such as Virgil and Ovid.

Even more than ‘naturalness’, the concept of variety was celebrated in the landscape garden. The idea of moving from one contrasting episode to the next came to be privileged above all else, as landowners sought to express their ambitions and ideals by means of this eminently malleable medium.

It was only in the second half of the century, when Lancelot Brown was able to exert almost a monopoly over English aristocratic landscape-making, that the familiar pastoral vision came to the fore: smooth pasture, serpentine rivers or lakes, and clumps of trees presenting an idealized version of the English countryside apparently in its primordial state.

In the last quarter of the century, the fashion for the Picturesque emerged: landscapes that celebrated nature in the raw, often set in wooded valleys and including waterfalls, cascades and cliff faces designed to offer intrepid visitors a vision of the natural world that was both sublimely dangerous and unforgettably beautiful.

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The meaning of a garden was communicated in different registers to the different sorts of people who visited: royalty, aristocracy, social peers, allies and friends, neighbours in the county and casual tourists – in that order of importance to the landowner.

Family members had the most intimate relationship with the place, understanding its secrets and codes better than others. A political narrative would probably be fully ‘readable’ only by a relatively small group of people: another reason why such matters are not often mentioned in the journals and letters of casual visitors.

Most landowners explicitly did not want the symbolism of their gardens to be made available to tourists (the kind of people who wrote up their journals in the evening after a hard day of garden visiting). Why else would the many guidebooks to Stowe make no reference to politics? It was not because the politics was not there – it indisputably was. Rather, those kinds of messages were intended for the eyes and ears of family and close friends only, or perhaps for those political allies who could understand, and would in any case not need anything to be explained.

Written evidence of symbolism is only rarely available in surviving correspondence because private letters could not be trusted as a way of conveying such meanings. Servants had a habit of reading correspondence, sometimes with an eye to the opportunity for blackmail. In some cases, it could be unwise or even dangerous to articulate in writing the concealed meaning of a feature, as this could potentially cause political embarrassment or in extreme situations be deemed treasonous.

The above are extracts from The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia (Frances Lincoln, £40) by Tim Richardson.

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A Drink with the Idler

Art critic and garden historian Tim Richardson is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this evening, when he’ll be talking to Tom Hodgkinson about how humans have shaped landscapes throughout history.

Tim is also our tutor on The Idler Gardens of Florence Retreat in September.

“A Drink with the Idler”, Thursday 11 June, 6pm-7pm.

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