New book: Kitchen Garden Estate

A copy of Kitchen Garden Estate with the vegetable garden of the National Trust’s central office in the background. ©Emile de Bruijn

Helene Gammack, a historic gardens consultant who has worked with the National Trust on a variety of projects, has just published a book called Kitchen Garden Estate, about traditional kitchen garden techniques and how they are relevant to gardeners today.

View of Charlecote Park, Warwickshire, c. 1696, showing the livestock and ponds that contributed to the economic activity on the estate. ©National Trust Images/Derrick E. Witty

The book describes and illustrates traditional methods of the growing of fruit against walls and the raising of vegetables on sloping beds. It explains how fruit, vegetables and herbs were used to produce food, drink and medicine for a large household, and how the various techniques and practices changed over time.

View of Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire, by John Griffier the Elder, c.1690, with fruit trees trained along walls. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

Other aspects of kitchen gardens that Helene investigates include the keeping of livestock, chickens, doves and bees. She also shows how fish ponds and deer parks were integrated into the social and economic structures of country house estates.

Francis Popham angling in a garden pond, by Arthur Devis (1711-1787). ©National Trust Images/Angelo Hornak

The book is beautifully illustrated with a variety of photographs as well as reproductions of paintings, prints, books and documents.

View of Clandon Park, Surrey, by Leendert Knyff (1650-1722), including the deer park near the house as well as trained fruit trees. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

With its inclusion of recipes and explanations of traditional gardening methods this is a practical book for the modern gardener as well as a fascinating guide for visitors to historic kitchen gardens.

View of Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire, by Johannes Kip, 1710. Perry, the pear version of cider, is once again being made from the old varieties of pear in the orchard behind the church at Dyrham. ©National Trust Images

Kitchen Garden Estate can be ordered from the National Trust online shop (or via Amazon).

Lady linchpin

Portrait of Lady Mary Booth, by an unknown hand. ©National Trust Images/Fraser Marr

I recently came upon this portrait of Lady Mary Booth (1704-1772) and was struck by her lively and open expression.

Bird’s eye view of Dunham from the south-west by John Harris, ca 1750. ©National Trust Images/Angelo Hornak

Lady Mary was the heiress to the Dunham Massey estate. Unusually for the time, her father, the 2nd Earl of Warrington, wanted his only daughter to have full control of her property. He left it in trust for her benefit, rather than leaving it to her outright, so that when she married it wouldn’t automatically be transferred to her husband.

Portrait of Harry Grey, 4th Earl of Stamford, by an unknown hand. ©National Trust Images/Fraser Marr

When she did marry in 1736, at the relatively late age of 32, it was to the much younger Harry, Lord Grey of Groby, later 4th Earl of Stamford. She was the linchpin that brought the Booth and Grey family estates (at Dunham Massey and Enville Hall, respectively), together.

The Library at Dunham. ©National Trust Images/Andreas von Einsiedel

Although it was probably an arranged marriage it seems to have been a succesful one. The Countess of Stamford was highly educated and intellectual, and the books with her bookplate in the Dunham library include natural history, poetry, plays and religious topics.

View of the Brownian planting in the New Park at Dunham, by Anthony Devis, 1767. ©National Trust

She also developed the New Park at Dunham, where she may have employed Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to create one of the newly fashionable landscape gardens.

A garden of reason at Ham House

One of the figures in 'eight ſculptures' by Alan Kane and Simon Periton in the Wilderness at Ham. Courtesy the artists and Sadie Coles HQ and Ancient and Modern/Jamie Woodley

Ham House will be hosting a contemporary art exhibition called Garden of Reason between 28 April and 23 September 2012. Nine artists have been invited to create work inspired by the seventeenth-century garden of Ham House.

The south front of Ham House seen from the Wilderness, c. 1675-1679, by Henry Danckerts. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

The title of the exhibition refers to the ‘age of reason’, the development of new philosophical systems in Europe in the seventeenth century based on strictly rational analysis and scientific research. The artists have been given access to the seventeenth-century archives relating to Ham and its owner, the feisty Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale.

Portrait of Elizabeth Murray, later Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale, by Sir Peter Lely. ©National Trust Images/John Hammond

‘Eight ſculptures’ by Alan Kane and Simon Periton is an imaginative recreation of the sculptures (or ‘ſculptures’, as it was written at the time – with thanks to the helpful commenter below) that used to grace the Wilderness garden at Ham. Those sculptures were copies of famous Renaissance and antique works, and Kane and Periton are investigating issues of cultural plunder, copying and disappearance.

Part of 'Weight of air' by Ruth Proctor in the front colonnade of Ham House. ©National Trust

Ruth Proctor has inserted large helium balloons into the Wilderness and also into the front collonade of the house, as part of her work ‘Weight of air’. Proctor was inspired by Galileo’s investigations into the weight and speed of falling objects and the developing knowledge about atmospheric pressure.

Part of 'Weight of air' by Ruth Proctor, in the Wilderness at Ham. ©National Trust

The Garden of Reason project has its own blog where team members are posting updates, background information and images.

Place and non-place

Dovecote at Chastleton House, Oxfordshire. ©Emile de Bruijn

I have just returned from a fascinating conference at the University of Northampton about ‘consuming the country house’, which I mentioned earlier. ‘Consumption’ turned out to be a really useful theme to frame discussions about the social, economic, political and artistic aspects of country houses.

Detail in the garden at Great Chalfield Manor, Wiltshire. ©Emile de Bruijn

One of the speakers, Ruth Gill, who works for Historic Royal Palaces, mentioned a book by anthropologist Marc Augé entitled Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (1995). Augé analyses transient places like airports, stations and supermarkets in which myriad human transactions are processed but which do not encourage feelings of connection or belonging.

Door of the gazebo at Great Chalfield. ©Emile de Bruijn

Ruth warned against the dangers of historic houses becoming too much like non-places. Sometimes the measures taken to preserve the historic fabric of a place can have the unintended consequence of making the visitor feel that he or she does not belong there.

Vista at Hidcote Manor, Gloucestershire. ©Emile de Bruijn

We probably all know the feeling of being in a place that is objectively beautiful but feels somehow alien. Equally we can all remember those moments when a small detail in a painting, the smell of a tapestry or of polished wood, the proportion of a piece of furniture or a doorframe, an intellectual insight or a surprise vista in a landscape suddenly connected us to a place.

Detail in the garden at Hidcote. ©Emile de Bruijn

I agree with Ruth that enabling those moments of connection – between ourselves and the world, between the past and the present – is essentially what heritage is all about.

Inn side story

The Corinthian Arch at Stowe. ©National Trust/John Millar

The eighteenth- century gardens of Stowe in Buckinghamshire were effectively one of the Britain’s first public theme parks. Visitors flocked from near and far (and even from abroad) to see the temples, monuments and scenery created by Baron Cobham and his successor Earl Temple.

A view of the New Inn by Jean-Claude Nattes, 1809, in Buckinghamshire County Museum

Such were the visitor numbers that Lord Cobham built an inn at the main Bell Gate entrance to the park, called the New Inn, to provide accomodation for some of them.

The New Inn following its restoration. ©National Trust/Brian Cleckner

The building later became a farm and had recently fallen into decay. It was bought by the National Trust in 2005 and has now been restored and turned into a visitor centre.

Eighteenth-century graffiti at the New Inn. ©National Trust/John Millar

The 75-strong building team and over 250 volunteers restored as much of the original building as possible, studying  historic documents and images and using materials and construction methods of the period. Appropriate period furniture was introduced whenever possible.

The Parlour, with a draught-excluding settle next to the fireplace. ©National Trust/Brian Cleckner

The National Trust has created additional visitor facilities on the footprint of the farm and stable block, including a cafe, shop and conference centre, using larch wood sourced from the nearby Ashridge estate.

The Tap Room. ©National Trust/Brian Cleckner

The Heritage Lottery Fund provided a £1.5 million grant towards the £9 million cost of the project, which was also supported by other fundraising initiatives and donations.

The courtyard seen from above, showing the layout of a traditional inn. ©National Trust/John Millar

The reinstatement of the New Inn as the entrance to Stowe also means that visitors can now begin their walk around the gardens from the same spot as their eighteenth-century predecessors did, which should help to make the experience more authentic and enjoyable.  

Clumber: a lost house, a flourishing garden

Part of the two-mile-long lime tree avenue at Clumber Park. ©NTPL/Andrew Butler

We have just purchased a 1937-1938 auction catalogue for the contents of Clumber Park, Nottinghamshire, annotated by the original owner, from Patrick King Rare Books.

Nineteenth-century view of the house at Clumber by W. Watkins after Thomas Allom. ©NTPL/John Hammond

The house at Clumber was pulled down in 1938 and the collections dispersed. The National Trust will never be able to reassemble those collections, but it is useful to know what was there.

The lake at Clumber. ©NTPL/David Levenson

The park, as created by successive Dukes of Newcastle from about 1760, survives and thrives. There is a Brown-style serpentine lake, probably created on the advice of Joseph Spence and a series of meandering views and walks.

The chapel, epitomising the high Victorian period at Clumber. ©NTPL/Jerry Harpur

The garden designer W.S. Gilpin planted the lime avenue in the 1830s for the 4th Duke of Newcastle, to provide interest and grandeur in the flat landscape. Gilpin also created the areas of picturesque and formal planting, with conifers, rhododendrons and specimen Mediterranean trees.

The central conservatory and palm house in the walled garden at Clumber. ©NTPL/Stephen Robson

In the late 1880s G.F. Bodley built the splendid chapel. The stable block and the walled garden with its range of glasshouses are also still there, and one could easily forget that there is no longer a ’big house’ at the centre of all of this.

Claude: from canvas to garden

Claude Lorrain, The Father of Psyche Sacrificing at the Temple of Apollo, at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. ©NTPL/John Hammond

Over the weekend I visited the Claude Lorrain exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The show focuses on bringing together the paintings of the seventeenth-century master with his drawings and prints.

Claude Lorrain, The Landing of Aeneas at Palanteum, at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. ©NTPL/John Hammond

It is fascinating to see Claude playing with different landscape motifs and trying out all sorts of combinations. In spite – or perhaps because of – this his paintings exude an air of timeless serenity.

Claude Lorrain, Jacob with Laban and his Daughters, at Petworth, West Sussex. ©NTPL/Derrick E. Witty

Claude’s pictures were hugely popular in Britain, so much so that, as the exhibition catalogue states, nearly all of them have been in British collections at some point, or are still there today.

John Constable, The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, at Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire. ©NTPL/Christopher Hurst

Claude’s work inspired a number of British painters, such as Constable, Cozens and Turner.

Watercolour of Stourhead by by Coplestone Warre Bampflyde, at Stourhead, Wiltshire. ©NTPL

Claude also influenced the development of the English landscape garden, and nowhere is this more obvious than at Stourhead, in Wiltshire.

Stourhead today. ©NTPL/Nick Daly

There are other strands of meaning at Stourhead as well, of course, including an awareness of the various local springs, references to antiquity and subtle political symbolism. But the compositional language that brings it all together is very much that of Claude.

Pagodas please

The park at Shugborough, with its pagoda (centre right) erected in the early 1750s. Watercolour by Nicholas Dall, at Shugborough. ©National Trust.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to join a panel discussion at Christie’s Education in London last week on the subject of chinoiserie. As I was assembling some images of chinoiserie decoration for that event I noticed how the motif of the pagoda kept coming back in different guises.

Satinwood writing and dressing table with 'pagoda' decoration, possibly made by the Chippendale workshop and originally at Longford Castle, now at Clandon Park (Gubbay collection). ©NTPL/Nadia Mackenzie

One of the first images of a pagoda to appear in the west must be the one of the so-called Porcelain Pagoda of Nanjing (named after the ceramic materials used to decorate it) included in Johan Nieuhof’s 1665 book about China.

Illustration of a pagoda seen by William Chambers, in his 1757 book Designs of Chinese Buildings. ©NTPL/John Hammond

Pagodas became one of the motifs that exemplified the wondrous exoticism of China in western eyes.

Model of a pagoda made of mother-of-pearl by Betty Ratcliffe, a servant at Erddig, in 1767. ©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel

The distinction between Chinese pavilions, mansions and pagodas was generally rather vague in the western mind. European imitation-Chinese or chinoiserie pavilions often sprouted several stacked miniature roofs or turrets, as if they were poised to mutate into mature pagodas.

Doorcase of the Chinese Room at Claydon House, created by the craftsman Luke Lightfoot for the 2nd Earl Verney in the 1760s. ©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel

The motif was used right across the decorative arts and appeared in decorative wall surfaces and plasterwork as well as in furniture and as garden pavilions.

Regency cabinet with a 'pagoda' roof at Castle Coole, Co. Fermanagh. ©NTPL/Andreas von Einsiedel

The heyday of pagodas in England was the middle of the eighteenth century, when chinoiserie garden pavilions popped up everywhere and William Chambers, who had actually been to China, built his full-size (and still extant) pagoda at Kew.

The Chinese Temple at Biddulph Grange, Staffordshire, where a 'China' garden was created in the 1840s. ©NTPL/Ian Shaw

The pagoda continued to be used as a decorative motif through the Regency and Victorian periods, and it is still popular in chinoiserie wallpapers and fabrics produced today. A few years ago I advised garden designer Todd-Longstaffe Gowan on the decoration of a splendid pagoda-roofed chicken run, and recently I spotted a similarly sumptuous chinoiserie dog bed. Pagodas seems to be an enduring symbol of China as a fairytale realm, a pleasant dream-world detached from the flow of history.

The Pagoda in the garden at Cliveden, originally made for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, a copy of a pavilion at Romainville, which was in turn based on an illustration in Chambers's book. It was acquired by the Marquess of Hertford for his Paris residence Bagatelle, and then bought by Viscount Astor and brought to Cliveden in 1900. ©National Trust

But now I see that the original Porcelain Pagoda of Nanjing, which was destroyed in 1856 during the Taiping Rebellion, is to be rebuilt as a proud symbol of a newly resurgent China – perhaps opening a new chapter in the semantic history of the pagoda.

Brown was here

Newton House, Dinefwr Park, as seen from the newly reopened Brown Walk. ©National Trust

The team on the Dinefwr Park estate, Carmarthenshire, has just opened up one of the historic park walks originally created by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. The walk was officially reopened by Lord Dynevor on 22 October, the first day of the National Trust’s Walking Festival.

Newton House in its Brownian landscape. ©NTPL/David Noton

There had been guided tours along the walk before, but National Trust warden Wyn Davies has made it more accessible to the public, marking the route clearly and commissioning tree surgeons to remove potentially unsafe branches.

Dinefwr Park in an 1822 print after J.P. Neale, showing the maturing of Brown's planting scheme.

Capability Brown was invited to Dinefwr by George Rice, whose marriage to heiress Cecil Talbot enabled him to make improvements to the estate.

Evidence of recent replanting work at Dinefwr Park. ©NTPL/David Noton

Brown first visited Dinefwr in 1775 and continued to advise on the park until 1783. He generally worked as what we would now call a ‘consultant’, assessing the ‘capabilities’ of a landscape, advising the owner and recommending local contractors capable of carrying out the work.

The east front of Newton House, with its deliberately designed backdrop of trees. ©NTPL/John Hammond

A record of ‘Mr Brown’s Directions’, dated May 1776, has recently been rediscovered in Lord Dynevor’s archive. The walk, which is just over a mile in length, was designed as a circular route around Newton House, with carefully composed planting and framed views.

Previous posts about Dinefwr Park and its owners can be seen here.

Croome’s Home Shrubbery coming to life

Croome Court, set in its Capability Brown Park. ©NTPL/David Noton

There is good news from Croome Court, Worcestershire, where this autumn the Home Shrubbery has been opened up, so that visitors can now walk up to the Rotunda.

The Rotunda, also designed by Brown, its roof and external stonework restored. ©National Trust

In 2008 the Rotunda was near collapse (an image of it pre-restoration can be seen in this post), but through extensive restoration work its roof and external stonework have now been repaired. The work was funded by substantial donations and grants from members of the public, from a legacy and from Natural England and the Wolfson Foundation.

Croome property manager Michael Smith contemplates what still needs to be done on the interior of the Rotunda. ©National Trust

The team at Croome hopes to be able to start restoring the delicate plasterwork decoration on the inside in 2012, allowing visitors a close-up view of the ongoing work. There are also plans to recreate the original exotic planting in the Home Shrubbery, as soon as funds allow.

The Temple Greenhouse. ©NTPL/Andrew Butler

Another improvement has been the reinstatement of the large sash windows of the Temple Greenhouse. This will allow it once again to be used to grow exotic and tender plants, as in the time of the 6th Earl of Coventry in the eighteenth century.

The steps on the north front, photographed before their recent restoration, with a view towards the Temple Greenhouse. ©NTPL/Andrew Butler

The restoration of the steps on the north side of the house has now also been completed, once again thanks to a generous legacy.

One of Capability Brown's drainage culverts in the park at Croome, still in situ but in need of restoration. ©NTPL/Andrew Butler

However, much remains to be done at Croome, including the restoration of the interior of the Rotunda, but that all depends on further fundraising. Donations towards the conservation work can be made through the Croome webpages.