The English Country House Garden

This is the story of the English Country House Garden. Its carefully chosen subjects present captivating partnerships of planting and garden design, but they encapsulate far more. They marry together gardens, houses and landscapes with people and history. In so doing they create atmosphere that, wit [...]
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This is the story of the English Country House Garden. Its carefully chosen subjects present captivating partnerships of planting and garden design, but they encapsulate far more. They marry together gardens, houses and landscapes with people and history. In so doing they create atmosphere that, with visual beauty, is what people are touched by, what becomes the stuff of memories. Author George Plumptre takes 25 of the most charismatic English country house gardens of the 21st century and, across five chapters, uses them to illustrate a rich and vibrant story. He sets the scene for country house gardens assuming lustrous fame with the 'essentials' of Hidcote, Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, examining why they have achieved pre-eminent reputations for more than a century. Next he takes five gardens to illustrate the sweep of history from Elizabethan Montacute to the 18th-century landscape at Rousham, High Victorian principles at Tyntesfield, the Arts & Crafts at Rodmarton, and Folly Farm where an Edwardian masterpiece has been revived for the 21st century. Then he illustrates the 'country house garden ideal' and how a select group of gardens evoke this.Each has an atmosphere, in some a sense of romance in others of long history, that is as significant and memorable as their planting and design. These lead on to 'personal creations' where the garden is an expression of a personality or family. These include Lullingstone Castle where Tom Hart Dyke has made his World Garden; Exbury where Lionel de Rothschild created an unrivalled rhododendron garden; and the contrast of Charleston where the Bells and the others from the Bloomsbury group gardened in bohemian tranquillity. Finally the author turns his attention to contemporary masterpieces and reveals where modern masters excel. In a chapter which shows how the country house garden has provided the stage for some of the most dynamic work by designers today he showcases the work of Piet Oudolf, Tom Stuart-Smith, Dan Pearson, and the partnerships of Alan Gray and Graham Robeson, as well as Julian and Isobel Bannerman, showing how they have rejuvenated historic landscape settings.