The Secret History of the British Garden, The 18th Century

no joke in the 21st century we now embrace wildlife and encourage it into our gun the 300 years ago everything was very very different gardens were cycling to keep nature at bay they were ordered uncontrolled and then came perhaps the greatest revolution in the whole of gardening history the landscape at large was embraced and included on a scale that is almost unheard of my journey through the past 400 years of garden history I've so far looked at the 17th century and discovered the secrets behind the tightly controlled formal gardens created as a display of their owner's wealth and power as well as some hidden messages that revealed their true beliefs I'm now moving into the 18th century which saw a radical transformation of these grander formal gardens we're discovering how and why these new landscapes were created and who was behind them is an artist I guess yeah are they Betty never saw em top layer I'll be getting some hands-on knowledge of the techniques of the centuries most famous gardener capability Brown [Music] I'll celebrate the work of the Maverick William Kent who preceded Brown at the beginning of the century this really doesn't feel like the entrance to one of the greatest gardens in the world physician and the marketing genius of Humphry Repton who followed in Brown's footsteps at the end of the period that is pitching it absolutely right everybody always wants a certain degree of magnificence I believe that gardens are every bit as important as the buildings that we live and work in if we can unearth their secrets and listen to their stories we get a unique insight into our history and what makes us the people that we are today [Music] at the beginning of the 18th century British guards were still locked in a mindset exemplified by Dutch formality our controlling nature everything was straight lines canals clip freeze avenues just to show the man was in charge and all the natural world was seen as potentially wild and unruly and then a generation always was transformed and the landscape was unbounded and the first God to show this in its entirety was crude Court the very first Commission made by lots lot ability [Music] and what is extraordinary looking from above is you can see how the brown with popular resources of 1750 was able to see the landscape as it would become be diverse it water created a river releases the lake looks like a river planted these rings of trees that would become clumps beyond is left beyond the lifetime is children and then these eye captures the church over there and the marvelous Orangery all this incredibly skillfully coordinated from the ground so it appeared but actually took as much skill and as artifice as the most tightly controlled in the mid 18th century croon court set within a 17,000 acre estate in Worcestershire was the seat of the 6th Earl of Coventry he was a young man who wanted a house garden that would be in the most modern design as well as displaying his wealth and status this is the way to good see Gardens to create the URLs Newgarden meant undertaking radical changes and to learn about some of this I'm meeting the local archaeologist Dennis Williams who's making a geophysical survey to get a detailed picture of these changes made to Croom in the second half of the 18th century we've chosen this particular spot because we have some map based and documentary evidence of the parish church for Croom dabit Oh was once situated here and then in the late seventeen 50s as the Earl of Coventry was having the house and the landscape part remodeled the church was demolished and the new church up on the hill was was built what date is this picture that one home the date is unclear but his thoughts have been about 1750s that's the gatehouse is the gatehouse yes was the church again there's the church there Brown demolished all this to make his mark as well as the church foundations presumably the little graveyard here we believe that the tombs of the Earl's were moved to the new church when that was consecrated in 1763 so the Coventry family were all taken up a lot stock and barrel up there it's early deals we don't know where the countess's were all moved us so that's something very unsafe they wouldn't have moved the countess isn't necessarily one would have thought so but the documentary evidence is clearly there to state that that were the case you realize there was a kind of ruthlessness about making this garden and other landscape gardens because a parish church you know this is something that had been there for hundreds of years razed to the ground to make way for grass to the modern sensibility that's how pulling vandalism but it was the brave new world that was the way ahead out with the old in with a landscape [Music] Croom echoes the growing confidence of georgian britain the country have moved away from the politics of its European neighbors with a settled constitutional monarchy and a more liberal philosophy and this was expressed in a style of garden that dispensed with formality and created a romanticized image of the rule Italy - what we see in these landscapes are a series of carefully manipulated idealized views of the countryside as a wealthy educated eighteenth-century nobility wished to portray it I want to find out how Lord Coventry Umbra although from very different backgrounds both young energetic men created this new vision he recruited so I'm meeting the estate manager Michael Forester Smith to look at Browns original plans what days it says the plan was originally drawn up in 1763 and it charts the position of every single one of Browns newly planted trees set out across this new landscape a cream anything which is very clear is it is thick planting that's right and this dissonant boughs of trees almost gives the appearance that there's a vast native woodland that stretches out beyond and of course that's an illusion but the shelter bank makes it seem so so this obviously is the famous picture of brown yeah my reading of Brown is that it's just practicality yeah English thing how do we make this work an engineer yeah completely completely so an engineer and in the process an artist I guess yeah although II bet he never saw himself like that no Brown was the great landscape improver not only did he make your land more beautiful but it was much more economic to run gone with a fussy and tightly clipped box and you had jizz that required intensive labor and the Sheep did the work for you was more productive and in fact in the 18th century great beauty and productivity was seen as being the same thing and there's one letter from Lord Coventry and he talks of creating a utopia and he doesn't just mean in terms of how this is going to look you know these are grand ambitions Brown and commentaries vision for crew was extraordinary and radical but it wasn't wholly original there's much more to see and discover about crew and about how Brown and hence the whole landscape movement worked but to explore its origins I want to visit a garden designed by a man who Brown had previously worked under at Stone and who really pioneered the revolutionary new concept of the landscape guard the garden I want to take you to it is the roush it was made only about a dozen years before cream started but really is the door through which Croom and I believe all Lancelot brands work past Russian in Oxfordshire is the work of William Kent whom I consider the great genius of 18th century garden design and this is his masterpiece it's still owned by the same family who employed Kent in 1738 to reshape the garden and despite nearly 300 years of changing fashions and styles Russian has remained practically unaltered since the day it was completed this is one of the great garden views it's about a kind of gentle embracing of this soft very British landscape but it's manipulated because there's a folly up there on the hillside that looks like an old medieval ruin in fact is just a wall a facade designed solely to be seen from this viewpoint and another way that landscape was manipulated was with a new piece of garden architecture the haha is a beautifully simple and effective device it's a wall designed to keep stock out but it's a wall sunken down in a ditch so from inside the garden it was an unbroken view you didn't see the barrier didn't see the ditch or the wall all you saw was what you wanted to see which was your prized animals your wonderful trees you were planting with lolling out into the landscape and it was incredibly liberating he'd open gardens out from the road you look up to the house and this is enormous impressive great Avenue of grass in fact most of it is just a steep slope made to look as though it's much bigger than it is but once the scene is set then to go into the garden proper there are a number of different routes and this is this is very typical none of them are grand it almost doesn't quite look like you're in the right place and I said to be something like a thousand different routes around it so let's go this way you see this really doesn't feel like the entrance to one of the greatest guns in the world does it [Music] this gun is green every shade of green is played with the light is green you have this under layer of Laurel and then you have used and you rise up and have the deciduous trees of the light just shifting and falling through [Music] then everywhere rush there are scenes revealed you come out and you find yourself in a setting [Music] because that's Kent's great genius he was a stage designer and you become the actor you perform on it and of course what that does is make the garden work entirely in a personal way for you every time is a fresh performance so instead of looking on and marring it like you're doing so many guns you breathe life into it and that's magic that really is [Music] I've got a picture of William Kent and if Brown was someone that everybody of mod is professional he turned up on time amazingly efficient knew he was talking about Kent was all over the show he never turned off on time he didn't answer letters he didn't send in invoices he drunk too much so he said that Kent would come and stay with you drink all your wine probably sleep with your wife and your daughters and charm you and you can't help but love William Kent he said he's one of the great brilliant rogues of history the accusations against Kent and he's not universally admired are that he really just added embellishment to good work that was already in place but the touches that he added transformed everything that he touched and all his work I think stands peerless above the the more sober contributions of his contemporaries [Music] William Kent was heavily influenced by a stay of 10 years in Italy where he studied and trained as a painter and absorbed every facet of art architecture and decoration and although he was the son of a humble joiner from Bridlington this was the heyday of the Grand Tour when aristocratic young men would set off in a kind of glorified gappiya to absorb European art and culture so from about 1730 as these aristocrats returned home and took over their country seats British Gardens gradually began to reject the existing Dutch formality and replace it with these classical influences but Kent a maverick to the end also added a quirky element to it I love the way that in this temple of echo called Townsend building you have the temple and the pillars in the front and on the side sash window so what you end up with is Rome but Rome with its feet firmly in Oxfordshire [Music] and Kent was more much more than just a garden designer no aspect of design was beyond him and the home of Charles and Angela cultural dormer is testament to his extraordinary range the dining room right but if we turn this way this is an extraordinary KTC mo every detail of this room from elaborate marble mantel pieces torn 8 gilt picture frames decorative swans and intricate corner singh was all designed by Kent and Kent did this on a wagon a wonderful decorator look at color the Blues here it's absolutely wonderful [Music] Oh generals very grand library now that is general dormer is it yes who commissioned the garden and what relation is he to you great-great-great-great and not sure how many greats so that the the line has stayed in the family yeah it does seem I wonder if there are any other examples of rooms looking out onto a garden designed where the building has been designed the plaster work the furniture all designed by the same man it is extraordinary did you know if it come - did you know Oh just see it through there the visitors doorway that was built by Kent especially if say that passes by in the 18th century could visit the gardens a great tradition in this country of places being visited and Clara the head gardener got sixty pounds here and tips which was a great deal of money that's a little religion and here was a wonderful check and she sacked him Jane Caesar right why because she didn't like him getting the tips so people have been visiting around from from the beginning yes the garden it's not the house yeah are you done really pressure to modernize there what for you can't hurt it if you'd respect its spirit it tells you what it likes and what it doesn't rushon brilliantly displays how kent included the landscape to make an idealized image of the english countryside bran was a pupil of kim's and as a return to crew i can see just how much he was influenced by him but he took Kent's ideas a step further to create gardens that didn't just use the natural landscape as part of the design but embraced it for as far as the eye could see of course Brown was a genius of manipulating the landscape and and creating this harmonious whole but his real contribution that was unique was the park until brown the park was still really the remnants of a medieval Deer Park an area that was fenced off that deer were kept him that you hunted but Brown took that idea and brought it to the walls of the house that Kent had included it but it was at a distance was a view and Brown brings it without halt and then filled it with elegant trees so that the space became managed and garden this is unguarded as much as anything else but of course it appears completely relaxed and natural and critically grand of course Brown knew that as well as being beautiful the wildflower meadow also provided valuable hay but cutting this great sea of grass had to be all done by hand using a scythe and this was hard an extremely skillful work although I've often used a scythe over the years I've never really busted it so I'm hoping the Martin kibble White's still siding regularly at 87 years old we'll be able to share its secrets it's like a saw you're actually swinging swinging the blade in an arc it's actually following the arc right it was not actually you take very little see if I can find a bit to do here you don't take more than two or three inches at a time I love the sound the saw action takes less effort so you can keep going for longer where did you learn to sign well I first learnt when I was 14 or 15 big enough to hold a scythe and then later in my twenties an old man who is in his 70s in the 50s he must have been a grown man in 1900 he showed me the finer points he must have learnt in the 19th century the records of Moses here crew being paid one shilling intemperance a day for their mooing plus 28 pints of small beer 28 pint that's too thirsty work they're probably moving half cut most of the day but they were doing long long hours keep the hear of that that's a lot better [Music] now we know from the records here crew that this meadow was cut by 28 MERS so to maintain Browns landscape took an army of skilled men and women working long hours for days and days [Music] we tend to romanticize the work that was done by the whole landscape movement of the parts of creative but behind a lot of them lay enclosures my enclosures wax of parliament which enabled a landowner to take land that had otherwise been common and literally enclose it hedge it off and use it for their themselves and common land have been a really important resource for villages people who might have just one cow or half a dozen sheep or just grow a little bit of core the important part of their survival in many cases so behind these scenes often lies a story of people dispossessed moved and land that have been used in a certain way for centuries suddenly becoming the property of just one individual given the great human and financial cost attached to making these 18th century landscapes I want to find out more about the Earl of Coventry who commissioned and funded the gardener crew [Music] the Earl has been described as a proud argumentative and not all together attractive figure yet he was clearly a great patron and collector so I've come to the Orangery to meet the Coventry family archivist Jill Toby to see what the real man was alike because this is very very small part of the crew market which is huge but we've got some plant bills 25 white raspberries 12 pineapples cantaloupe melon this is a huge plant list yeah which would have all been quite rare and interesting there was indeed how much did he spend on his god well on the garden alone not really sure but on the whole project it's been estimated its equivalent to twenty eight million these days so a lot of money and where did the money come where did the magic everyone asked but it's not a parent which I think it was such an obsessive collector and recorder of events he would have really because the other thing he doesn't keep any of his private letters but he kept receipts exactly but there's no clue as to his private life what little we do know is full of tragedy he was 28 when he inherited the title single man so the first thing he needed was a wife of course so he chose the most beautiful woman in London Mariah gunning the new lady Coventry was already famous for her extraordinary beauty which was said to make grown men faint before her but in keeping with the fashion of the day she wore a heavy layer of lead and Mercury based makeup which caused blood poisoning and began to eat away her skin it's reported that she would only have the light of a teakettle in her room because she was so devastated by the sight of her face and this is a woman who'd been the most beautiful woman in London so sad Mariah died at the age of 29 leaving the Earl with four children but his relationships with them was at best fractious he disinherited his oldest daughter for her choice of husband and his son and heir George was banished from Croom when he also married against his father's wishes Coventry even refusing to speak to him when he was blinded in a hunting accident that's just something about this man that we glorify because he did a wonderful thing that crew but at the same time there was a dark side to Richard hmm it seems that Coventry had a closer bond with his garden designer than his own kith and kin giving Browne the friendship he was unable to offer his children and it was his workroom and paved the way for Brown's spectacular career and saw him subsequently work on over a hundred and seventy different projects across the country the success of Cru meant that Browns Fame quickly spread and one of the grandest places that he came to at Chatsworth [Music] chatsworth in Derbyshire has been the seat of the debenture family for six centuries for nearly all their period at the forefront of style and fashion displaying wealth power and grandeur by 1759 seven years after his workroom it was already one of the great gardens of Britain and the perfect setting for Brown to add his own distinctive stamp and in true browner Indian style he swept away much of the formality widened a river and moved an entire village he did however preserve one of the country's finest garden features created fifty years earlier at the beginning of the century the Cascade was part of the extensive formal garden that surrounded the house here but we're in capability Brown came here in the middle of the 18th century much of it was swept away and if you look beyond the house you can see a typical Brownian landscape and you have that flow from house to park to countryside beyond in one unbroken like his mentor William Kent the key to all Browns landscape designs is the creation of spectacular views and vistas and I've met up with a current Duke of Devonshire's who's attempting to restore many of the views the brown originally intended at Chatsworth I've come to learn that the house and the garden and the park are really one work of art and they're all part of the same thing is not a house with a garden around it which happens to have a park outside it and actually the part was getting a bit cluttered up people have planted understandably lovely trees because they felt there's an empty space and it's a natural thing to do and we decided about her and I decided to take it back to the middle of the 18th century as best we could today the Duke is having an oak tree cut down to reveal a long lost view it's a lovely tree in the wrong place the views into the house and out from the house need to be opened up the house was built purely to show off the owners wanted to be seen to have a great big house if you want to surrounded by trees don't ever touch it that's why it's always been open to visitors yeah you know they welcome people to come and look up this wonderful thing they've created I think you would yes so so you're freeing out the views from the house and you're bringing out the views - absolutely [Music] there yeah absolutely it completely transforms it I think this is so important this landscape and the house garden apart being one land art really it's traumatic it is drying it is dramatic financed by growing colonial trade and industrial development by the 1760s any self-respecting landed gentry were creating their own landscape guard [Music] complete with classically inspired buildings statues and I caches often set miles from the house perhaps the most extraordinary of these follies is at pains Hill in Surrey the brainchild of the painter designer and politician Charles Hamilton he had a grotto built using hundreds of thousands of crystals including gypsum from the Atlas Mountains Hamilton had been inspired by his own grand tour to Italy when the ornate grottoes were a key feature of every Renaissance Garden [Music] but for all its ornate and intricate craftsmanship the grotto was just one element of the hundred and fifty-eight acre garden which took over 30 years to construct but in the end Hamilton was forced to sell his estate one of the many wealthy aristocrats to have bankrupted themselves in their endeavor to create landscape art the sheer scale of maintaining these vast gardens meant that in time many were turned back to farmland and this is what happened to browns garden a croon court until the National Trust came to the rescue in 1997 and overseeing its restoration is the head gardener Katherine Alka I guess running a garden like this is a very different matter to running a more conventionally for the road well that's always some similarities but also quite a few differences so this naturalistic style of gardening you could argue is even harder to attain there was wiser because you battling against nature constantly creamer war was originally called segi mia and it was a marsh and that marsh is constantly trying to return and on a day like today it's probably partly achieving that the Earl of Coventry once described his estate as the most hopeless spot in all the land Browns answer was to create a network of underground drainage culverts the channelled water from the sodden ground into a mile and a half long lake he designed to look like a curving River however this meant massive earthworks all of course dug by hand but Brown did have a clever way of easing the workload so when you're looking down the river from the house the bits that you see are deliberately wide and the wish to cross in front of you which which are not in the views from the house are much narrower so he's obviously thinking of the work work person that's where Brown is this is very practical man yeah [Music] so far I've admired this huge undertaking from the distance of history I want to get inside the practical reality of creating an artificial landscape like this so Katherine is taking me to a site where she's planning to plant a tree that was in Browns original plans how do we know that the work there were trees up on this this rise we've got a watercolor by Bernie 1784 and he was doing watercolors of worcestershire for a guidebook and this water here yeah so using this watercolor and the other documents we know that there was a clump of trees at the top here located quite near the church right if this is the site that's great and we can get at it and that's good now amplify the tree where's the tree okay out in the parkland I think we've got an option Corners go okay most of the trees here would have been planted from seed or as saplings but Brown was well known for planting mature trees for a spectacular instant effect [Music] it's nice and low yeah it's little until you have to move I think it's quite an exciting job I think that is a chance is a real challenge yeah oh I mean it's one thing to move it and another to keep it alive so I think that's a big challenge and I cannot believe the capability Brown would have tried things much bigger with the equipment he had we can't move the tree until autumn when the growth stops and it goes into winter dormancy and this gives us a little time to prepare the equipment that we'll need so I'm meeting up with Russell stringer whose students at the Wooster design and Technology College are going to build me a horse-drawn cart based on images of the equipment that Brown himself would have used this one here moving really quite a large tree and we can see from the figures and the horses the size I actually think it's quite fanciful because those roots if you had that much bare root in the tree would die yeah I think I've exaggerated exactly evil and I think this is a much more type of thing a much more the scale yeah it tips up and is held and there it is being moved it's not a complicated piece of machinery I mean the wheels are gonna be the sort of the main problem you've got to bear in mind the way to the tree two inch wheels to take - - boy it's ruined two wheels straighten your wheels that's important so that's that's the sort of thing we need to sort of bear in mind the size of the wheels okay I saw the tree okay for all the manpower and ingenuity involved transforming the landscape of chrome took a generation Brown never lived to see his vision completed he died in a May first Street in 1783 apparently having just met his old friend be out of Coventry by then the Industrial Revolution was rapidly gaining ground bringing with it new wealth right across Britain which in turn was invariably expressed in new grand houses and gardens the Earl of Coventry lived on a Croom well into the 19th century and even in his old age commissioned new sculpture for the house and garden using a technique that had become all the rage in Georgian high society and they included these statues guarding the entrance to the house designed by one of my own ancestors the architect James Wyatt one of watts contributions to Crewe was this pair of sphinxes and that they were very fashionable they're made out of code stone which became hugely popular amongst landowners at the end of the 18th century and the whole point about code stone is it's not stone at all it's clay mixed in with various ingredients to make it exceptionally durable so this hasn't been carved it's been modeled the cast code stone added a new dimension and sophistication to garden sculpture and architecture and left his stamp on a surprising number of our finest buildings and landscapes [Music] I'm fascinated by this code production some of the Wiltshire where the recipe for code stone has been rediscovered the original workshop ceased production in 1837 hello and it took years of trial and error for the sculptor Stephen Pettifer now Steve Steve to uncover the secret of the code formula and technique is this all repairing stuff that was made in the heyday of cotton no it's a mixture of some repair work and some new pieces so this is this is a restoration job here hammers making new pieces and then this is a bracket off a building in London which building Buckingham Palace right is there a lot of code of bucking but unhuman all that's written on there and that's the original piece of graffiti from physically made it says foolish or foolish Barnett who and Barnett was the bloke who made it was it presumably there but maybe there were two people working on it foolish buy it how fantastic so that must have been hidden from when it was done to when you took it off yeah first people to see that [Music] code sculpture was made using molds which is both much faster than carving a block of stone and also meant that the mold could be reused many times however the main advantage of code of a carve stone lay in the extreme fine detail and the quality of Crossman ship that could be applied to the clay if I wanted to order a pair of tigers what would it cost me sixteen thousand for the pair eight thousand each wow this is not a poor man's done no they were held in high high regard by the architects at that time you actually in clay we can we can really push the detail and the undercuts and yeah be really extravagant with in resin stone it's harder so Brazil say take this here this Keystone yeah that would be really difficult if you look at the detail in here will be very tricky instead wouldn't it exactly yeah you wouldn't do that in lon limestone it Stephen explained to me some of the secrets of this extraordinary versatile and durable material this is um a clay we have lots of different blends okay this is a secret by the way oh yeah let's do you want to give away the blend I'm not that secretive about it because ultimately it's the it's the sculpting that's that's difficult that makes it hard top juice so let me look at that so I can see they're little bits and little white bits and what you're looking at there is this which is called grog code is a mixture of fired up ceramic grid powdered glass sand and ground Flint but then you treat it like clay yes you model it like clay you fire it like clay yeah and then it goes through it but or whether and lasts much better than normal terracotta yes some stone oh yeah I mean lasts a lot longer than any lime stones and marble longer than marble she's a lay person that longer that is an incredible forever be hard material producing these finished works is highly skilled but to get a feel for the process I'm gonna help make a gorge in Keystone right so this this is these all part of the same mold yeah this completes one mold so that that's ready to receive the clay the code clay so just take handfuls and pushing it yeah yeah basically what basically means politely no well yeah we need to be careful so I'd have to identify the fact that the nose is quite deep and undercuts you need to make sure initially did we get clay into there is this first bit just pressured him in your thumb make sure it gets right into the bottom we can maybe just use two fingers to go into that forehead you've got to get into the corners there sometimes quite difficult you need to actually make real attention okay to that corner of course it's absolute joy working clay you know it's it's a lovely material you're doing very well today definitely give you a job the success of code is remarkable for the fact that in an age dominated by men it was the brainchild of a woman ellen:oh code who was a brilliant businesswoman and quickly made her company a household name [Music] right work will wait and then hopefully I'll be able to take it a bit yeah [Music] mrs. code was obviously a business genius but she was lucky because by 1770 there was a lot of new money and this money was generated by industry until about 1750 most of the money being spent on houses and gardens was essentially old landed gentry but by the end of the 18th century all this new wealth developed from the Industrial Revolution expressed itself in new houses new gardens new ornaments and code supplied it superbly because it was a little bit cheaper a little bit more accessible and could be produced at home in a very efficient manner so she got everything right and the thing that was most right of all was her timing [Music] yeah that's a bug yeah take one half of and then Allah won't damage it you might drag a bit but no [Music] in its heyday codes work be found in almost all the stately homes and gardens of georgian britain but its success was short-lived there's an i looking at me ellen our code died in 1821 leaving no natural successor and poor management and changing fashions led to the company's swift demise however there is still no better material for producing high-quality durable outdoor sculpture right we're now faced with tidying this up and and adding all the detail generally because ultimately what we're trying to get to this that is much more detailed almost every aspect of it than that remember the reason people really like code and why it's a revered is it is this stage now the addition of all this detail will really lift it and bring it to life and that's what code was so good at great well that's beyond my skill anymore you can't work on that just as code profited from the building boom of the late 1700s the next generation of designers tailored the English landscape garden to the broader tastes of the industrious and the businessman who are pouring their new money into Country Estates by the end of the 18th century the whole landscape movement was evolving and changing and from these changes one dominant figure emerged and his name was Humphry Repton Repton had tried his hand at many ventures before he spotted a gap in the landscape industry and adroitly filled it so I've come to Paris in Wales to visit one of the surviving examples of his work the privately owned stanitch Park and although Repton didn't have the sublime artistry of William Kent the innate practicality of capability Brown his great talent was recognising the demands of a new clientele and brilliantly marketing his designs to them Jonathan Coleman Rogers ancestor Charles Rogers was among the hundreds of wealthy aristocrats who commissioned her Upton and each was presented with what became his famous trademark a red book there it is in pride of place bright red apparently written considering he was supposed to have written these in a carriage on the way home beautiful it's very rare to find one of these books still in the house and garden the Repton designed Humphry Repton there's a picture of him here was a self-made landscape designer which was a term he coined he had tried and not done very well in trade in his thirties applied himself to the study of plants and of design and set up a business and quite systematically marketed his services unlike Brown who would oversee the creation of almost every aspect of his designs Repton simply offered his clients clear instructions and plans in their red book and then they could execute them when and how they pleased he also devised a clever trick to show what his plans would look like he did these pretty little drawings of the site as it was but you lift up a flap and that is what he's proposing so immediately you could see the change and here the house across if that up and there's a lake and the new house and the cattle and the deer grazing the other aspect of these red books which was new and fascinating was that he was geared as much to the women of the household as to the men the men would still be paying for it but the women would pay a very important part so there's an awful lot of reference to da masticity to flowers to convenience the watercolors are pretty and the changes are delightful and that's a much more feminine approach and what I love is the three following principles economy convenience and a certain degree of magnificence that is perfectly pitching it absolutely right everybody wants to save money increasingly people wanting to be able to live with a degree of comfort but everybody always wants a certain degree of magnificence Repton success lay in his ability to appeal to a growing landed gentry but late 18th century wanted a little less of the landscape and a little more of the garden [Music] capability Brown had parkland coming right up to the house almost like a sea lapping at the door what Repton did was hold the park at bay and established a kind of base relating to the house so the house sat on a level area of gods with straight lines lawns pars and then the park would be approached and you can see here that the the wall is visible it's not a haha there are markers there's mown grass as a real delineation between garden and park Repton was the last of the great landscape designers of the 18th century it was an age that a witness garden building on a scale that exceeded anything before it in this country and has never been equaled since but before I leave this century I'm returning to crumb court for one last visit it's now autumn and helped by a small team were attempting to replant an oak tree to complete capability Brown's original designs using only the methods and technology that were available to him in the 1750s Randy cook is supplying the Minnesota and Anastasia and this is fantastic looking yeah Pasiphae built for this purpose and these wheels are really substantial but I guess they're just quite a weight it's gonna take will they be up to it do you think hopefully they'll do the job before the horses can be put to work we need to dig out the tree whilst preserving as much of the root as we can but the soil is heavy and compacted and it's proving to be a really difficult job you can see we're using pickaxes we've there's lots of people the roots have been slashed and now left like this the speed a minimum gauge is really before removing any more soil and damaging the roots further we decide to try and use the cart as a lever to prise the tree from the ground using the horses at this stage will be too risky because if the tree suddenly comes away it could scare them and make them bolt so we have to resort to manpower that's give it a go [Laughter] something like that pulling the top the bottom is going in what's happened here is that you see there's a a branch gone through there you've got a shake and a fork and it's split at that point and in fact a split right the way down back down to another big not there so this is a useless piece of wood and that actually illustrates a point because what they would have done I would have known that would have valued importance so they were chosen are really fine with a wood okay we really need to get this tree out of the ground before the roots dry out completely so having lashed the shaft together we're giving it one last try we just rope and brute force to be honest I genuinely thought we were gonna have to give up and put a vehicle on okay so if we now get it back up right get the machine on strap it in and put it out let's have some manpower obviously the roots exposed like this is not good I mean this is this goes against all good advice but on the other hand move your tree like this is his sort of emergency treatment now all these problems you can only learn how to do it by doing it by doing it badly and my guess is that to learn how to do this they probably failed on 1015 treats before they really go and we're just having to make it up as you [Music] if nothing else today has increased my respect but the amount of work in making these landscapes this is a modest tree moving it has taken about a dozen of us all day with lots of trials and tribulations and the chances success are fairly sweet yet this was a tiny aspect of making these landscapes Lakes were done rivers dammed and moved land was really shocked and formed another fact they dotted around a few mature trees really didn't amount to much when you'd had to do all it really does go beyond anything that we experience today left alone without any machinery of anything a little bit more very good [Music] [Music] well don't [Music] the landscape movement was based upon the fashion for an idealized countryside but by the end of the 18th century it was going out of fashion because the world had changed big new technological developments big news cities new ideas demanded new styles of gardening but that is another story [Music]

Channel: Arquitectura Paisaje y Patrimonio

Views: 228,366

Rating: 4.8938742 out of 5

Keywords: Monty Don, Britain's garden history, landscape garden, 'Capability' Brown's, Worcestershire, gardening revolution.

Id: nx8CvzaPlgw

Length: 59min 7sec (3547 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 07 2016