ORNAMENTAL WILDERNESS IN THE ENGLISH GARDEN

The English formal garden of the late 17th and early 18th centuries reinvented the Ornamental Wilderness with its ornamental grove. In its mature form, the wilderness constituted mostly of the garden, shady and private, a place for retreat as well as social activity, with a seeming naturalness achieved through artifice. James Bartos celebrates the layout at Wrest Park, Chiswick and Stowe and many more besides. He begins with groves and trees in the English imagination, the Druids and patriotic plantations, he looks at design, hedges and planting, cabinets and open spaces for entertainment and continental precedents in Italy, France and Holland. He looks at the wilderness in England with its maze of hedges, simple geometry, complex geometry, the English Bosco, block planting, curves, the Artinatural, forest gardens and the shrubbery. There is the domed building of Chiswick Pavilion, alleyways and precise architecture as an arbiter of taste with Burlington and his attempt to imitate the Classical Roman world, Palladio and Jones. We meander into dead ends and walk on to other wildernesses along a serpentine river, an elm grove, an amphitheatre or a woodland at Castle Howard in Yorkshire; Vanbrugh with his first country house commission, London garden makers to the nobility and gentry and even Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736), who designed the rockwork, caves, cascades and watercourses within Wray Wood. Then of course there is the splendour of Hampton Court Palace and the walkways and mazes. This heavyweight beautiful publication is packed with colour photographs and examples throughout focussing on design manuals and individual gardens and landscapes with a wealth in engraved prints, maps and present-day photographs. Bartos considers the making, planting and maintenance of wildernesses, their continental precedents and thematic resonances - Classical, Biblical, Druidic, Patriotic - and their inevitable demise. Engagingly written and visually very pleasing. 296 large pages, 19 x 24.8cm. Satin pagemarker.