On Making Money out of a Rock - the Enstone Marvells of Thomas Bushell

Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDBLOG, posted recently about a Times article documenting the trend for London's nouveau riche to burrow underneath their posh Kensington residences (which after all, are only so big, and apparently not big enough) to add baths and tennis courts, parking garages, swimming pools, gyms and private cinemas. A reader posted the follow-up that "When I lived in Los Gatos in the late 80s, my neighbor, Steve Wozniak dug a cave in the hillside in his back yard and held "grotto" parties."

Wozniak et al. are only continuing a long tradition of the underground pleasure palace, or grotto, which traces its lineage back to the mystical nymphaea of Greece and Rome, and where, it seems, the rich have always been inclined to idle away hours in cool subterranean surroundings with perhaps a mechanical fountain or two or three to amuse them.

In the 1630s, the Earl of Pembroke is said to have spent 10,000 pounds on his grotto at Wilton House, the equivalent of around 700,000 pounds today, or at current exchange rates about a million and a half US dollars, for a suite of rooms that though above-ground were nonetheless dotted with artificial stalactites, carved marble bas-reliefs in watery themes, statues that wept and moved, and jets of water to surprise the ladies.

So today, I give you the Enstone Marvells, where in about 1600 Thomas Bushell, formerly secretary to Sir Francis Bacon, found...a rock. And saw his main chance.

The rock was "so wonderfully contrived by Nature herself, that he thought it worthy all imaginable advancement by Art" and so posthaste he added Cisterns, and Pipes, and Mirrors, and a Banqueting House above it, all painted round with biblical scenes relating to water. When it was finished, he invited the King and Queen, as one did when one was in possession of a Wondrous Rock, who visited on August 23rd, 1636 to be greeted by : "a Hermite [who rose] out of the ground, and entertain’d them with a Speech; returning again in the close down to his peaceful Urn. Then was the Rock presented in a Song answer’d by an Echo and after that a banquet presented also in a Sonnet, within the Pillar of the Table".

The Queen graciously consented to allow the rock to be named 'Henrietta', after her most gracious self.

I find this story endlessly entertaining, but the technical prowess of the place, of its waterworks and sound effects and rainbows, shouldn't be ignored. It was a feat of early modern engineering that astonished and amazed its visitors and which, quite frankly, we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. The fountains of the Bellagio would be roundly trounced by the Marvells of Enstone.

Robert Plot's "Natural History of Oxfordshire" of 1677, the main documentary source for the Marvells, is now online (thank you Google books).

For your weekend pleasure, as I won't be able to post again until next week, I've included the pertinent parts of the text (the description of Enstone begins at the top of page 241).

On Having a Personal Landscape

Or, Something there is that doesn't love a wall. R. Frost

I grew up wishing for hills and trees instead of the gently rolling prairie of my upbringing. I toyed with the idea of moving to Asheville, North Carolina. I killed loads of fragile plants and trees trying to grow what I thought was beautiful. But then I nearly cried on the way home from England to see tallgrass waving against barbed wire fences on the in-flight movie, set in the American West.

I had no idea how much I had missed my own landscape. Cattle instead of sheep. Craggy, stunted trees that had scrabbled a hard living out of clay and limestone. Farmponds. Hayfields. And a limitless sky.

There’s nothing like the prairie sky. I still get a thrill now, when I see it. And strangely, it was living in England that taught me that.

Fashionable as is has become in Europe to use prairie grasses that to my native eyes look like just good grazing pasture, they seem bereaved without their sky. (I will never get over seeing switchgrass for sale in a nursery. In a nursery. With a price tag. If I just don’t mow, my acres will grow up all switchgrass.) And it is why my preference is not for the enclosed garden rooms of Sissinghurst or Hidcote, where I felt an urge to tear down the hedges that was unworthy of a garden historian. Give me the vista, the wide view to the sky. Don’t fence me in.

The English landscape is uniquely defined by its (often ancient) enclosures. The landscape of America is defined, largely, by the absence of them.

It’s right, I think, to honor your personal landscape. Much as I love them, I will not be making an enclosed English garden on my prairie plot.

Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom
Plenty of air and plenty of room
Plenty of room to swing a rope
Plenty of heart and plenty of hope...
...where the winds come sweeping o'er the plains

Platinum Garden Prints by Beth Dow

In checking a few facts for the Sissinghurst post, I came upon the garden photography of Beth Dow. And caught my breath in delight.

"The shape and mystery of these places are a natural draw for me as they offer glimpses of the rich traditions of garden making. I am interested in garden history and historical concepts of paradise, and aim for pictures that have a meditative quality to reflect the spiritual urges that inspired the earliest gardens some six thousand years ago. My images are not depictive. I use the land before me as a jumping off point, implying light or shadow where perhaps there was none, as a way to create my own path through the garden. In fact, by positioning the lens, cropping my prints, and using burning and dodging to guide the viewer's eye through a picture, I feel that I too am a gardener in a sense. I am after that "slant of curious light" that is the genius of a place."

And she succeeds, beautifully so.

The photos are printed in platinum-palladium by her master-printmaker husband (lucky girl!). She informs me that due to the recent dramatic increases in precious metal prices, her own prices have had to increase as well, to $1800 per print.

I shall start saving immediately.

Above: the White Garden at Sissinghurst; Trees, Hidcote; and Terrace, Powis Castle, Wales.

Friday Feature Garden - the walls of Sissinghurst

And when one thinks of garden rooms, one thinks of Sissinghurst. One of the great English gardens that I think of as the big S-es, the others being Stourhead, Stowe, and Studley Royal.

The concept of the 'garden room', is, of course, an ancient one, with roots in the giardino segreto and the medieval cloister. It reflects the idea of nature as something to be tamed (see previous post), and extends the house--emblematic of civilization and a constructed safety--into the garden, creating an area that though outdoors is demonstrably separate from the dangerous wilderness. The concept has waxed and waned, repeatedly being discarded and revived, and held a natural attraction for Sackville-West (whose family seat was a Tudor house) and her husband Harold Nicholson, after they purchased Sissinghurst in 1930. Though Vita initially knew little about gardening, the landscape was open to the public by 1938. A fact which, as I begin my own large-scale garden, I find inspiring.

Harold laid out the gardens, with strong axes based around a remaining sixteenth century tower. Note on the plan that a large area is wisely kept open, however, for relief from and contrast with, the enclosed rooms. Compression--and the Sissinghurst gardens are very dense--always needs release. Vita added the luxuriant plantings, and thanks to her garden columns for the Observer, her planting choices are well known and have been maintained.

The carefully-colored planting arrangements of the rooms, most famously the White Garden, are well discussed elsewhere. But I'm more interested in the walls.

A parterre is traditionally composed of short 'walls' surrounding floral plantings which are designed to be looked over and down upon. At Sissinghurst, I felt as though I was *in* the parterre, with its walls grown up tall around me, like Alice after drinking the potion. Cursorily--and this is non-scholarly speculation--it seems to me that the fashion has swung towards tall walls and secluded garden rooms in times of uncertainty and fear, and turned again to low-profile designs, invisible boundaries and long vistas in times of confidence and prosperity. At least in English gardens...as we shall see later the American landscape has really never left the open park. Your thoughts?

[Images from the wiki as I couldn't locate my own...much, much more information about Sissinghurst on what can only be described as a 'fan site' by Dave Parker.]

A Roof in the Sky

by Etienne Meneau

Both of these posts make me think about the oft-used but poorly-defined term 'garden room'; and new ways of creating it. Here, the simple addition of the roof turns path into place.

A Window into the Sky

A Window into the Sky

made of plastic tape by oloop design of Ljubljana, Slovenija.

"concept: the basic building element is thread, which spread between the sky and the earth, constructs a rotating wall creating space within space. its walls are transparent, flexible, but impassable. they emit sound and radiate light. they invite the visitor in, to touch them and respond."

I would love to see this in a sylvan setting...

The Before and After Landscapes of Humphrey Repton

Long before cable TV popularized instant makeovers of houses, gardens, wardrobes, bodies and souls, Humphrey Repton knew the power of the 'before' and 'after'. His famous Red Books were presentation sketches for his potential clients; lovingly detailed watercolors with flaps that lifted or swept to the side to show in turn the existing landscape and how he proposed to improve it. They are still treasured in museums, national and municipal properties, and private homes across England.

There's a marketing lesson here...Repton's Red Books proved to be a poor strategy for economic success because they gave the client enough information to simply carry out the project themselves. Capability Brown, who preceded him, merely rode over the ground with clients, waving his arms to indicate the placement of vast lakes and and planting stakes where the clumps of trees would go. Meanwhile, his trusty and unjustly forgotten assistant Samuel Lapidge followed closely by, straining to hear the discussion between the great man and his clients and taking copious notes for the landscape that he would largely be the one to execute.

But the Red Books did ensure Repton's historical reputation...no other pre-19th century landscape designer left so complete a record of his approach to the landscape, his realized projects, and his unrealized imaginations. They ensured that he remained within the easy reach of historians, when even the great Capability faded from the scene and had to be re-discovered in the 1950s.

Repton summarized his approach in "Sketches and hints on landscape gardening : collected from designs and observations now in the possession of the different noblemen and gentlemen, for whose use they were originally made : the whole tending to establish fixed principles in the art of laying out ground" (gotta love those wordy 18th c. titles, description and scraping obeisance all in one), published in 1794.

I am pleased to find that it has been digitized in full color at the University of Wisconsin, the source of these images. Beautifully done; the image quality of their digital collection is one of the finest I've seen.

Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth Helphand

Re my earlier post on the meaning of gardens: few gardens are so meaningful as those made under the most difficult of circumstances. The compression of time, place and emotion, the sense of imminent mortality of both the space and its makers, gives them an intensity beyond any analysis of layouts or plantings. My scholarly pursuits are mostly about the 'place' of gardens. But this book has made me think far more deeply about the 'act' of gardens.

"Defiant gardens accentuate the essential questions of garden meaning and the relationship between humans and the natural world. Gardens are always defined by their context...perhaps the more difficult the context, the more accentuated their meaning becomes. In war — the antithesis of the beautiful...the common garden may become the highest form of art. Such gardens promise beauty where there is none, hope over despair, optimism over pessimism, and finally life in the face of death. In trenches, ghettoes and camps, defiant gardens have attempted to create normalcy in the midst of madness, and order out of chaos"

Defiant Gardens has received numerous awards, and its author, Kenneth Helphand (lovely name, that) is continually updating defiantgardens.com with more resources and finds.

Read more in an article at the npr website.

images via pruned...captions from top to bottom:

(Photo by Simon Norfolk which appeared in David Rieff, “Displaced Places,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 September 2003. At a camp in Ingushetia, Russia housing thousands of refugees from Chechnya, Mailia Huseeinova “built a makeshift garden with white stones and two summers ago she planted sunflowers that grew to drape over the roof of the tent. She says that though others in the camp think she's odd for doing so, she likes to surround herself with beautiful things.”)

(Army Warrant Officer Brook Turner trims his lawn with scissors in a camp north of Baghdad, Iraq.)

(A soldier poses in his trench garden at Ploegsteert Wood in the Ypres Salient, the scene of many horrific WWI battles. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)

(A bomb crater in 1942 London becomes host to a kitchen garden. Photo courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.)

Apologies for the sparse posting due to travels...I've arrived back in the US and the lecture was well attended and well received, thank you to all who asked. There is an upcoming magazine article and I'll be reprising the talk soon in my hometown...will post details when available. This might be a good time to mention that I do sometimes give lectures to garden clubs, historical societies and etc., schedule permitting. Please email if you have a specific event or topic you'd like to discuss.