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CHAPTER FOUR PUSEY HOUSE The second English garden I explored that first summer was Pusey. It lay only a mile south of Buckland. Taking less than an hour to reach by footpath through the fields from Buckland , it was even quicker to visit by bicycle. In recent times most visitors have come to see the remarkable garden of flowering shrubs, perennials, herbs, and exotic trees created in this century within the grounds of an older park by a pair of superb gardeners, Michael and Nicole Hornby. Beginning in 1935, with the assistance of landscape architect Geoffrey Jellicoe, they rescued the estate from decline. The principal elements of an eighteenth-century park remain, providing an excellent miniature example ofa Brownian park reduced to its essential parts. The entry faces a large tree-studded meadow backed by a screen of trees to the north; a driveway curves up to the door and away again into the grounds. The south front of the house, possibly designed by John Wood the Younger of Bath, looks out across a serpentine ofwater and a meadow flanked on either side by woods to a distant cornfield that has several carefully placed dumps of elms and oaks, and beyond to a valley and the distant chalk escarpment of Uffington. Despite what seem like natural shapes, there is a firm underlying geometry. Diagonally to the right, at the end ofa long, curving wall replete with aedicules and classical busts that hides the kitchen garden and a stable block, is a small domed temple providing a seat at the head of the long, curvilinear pond. From here one can look back to the house on the left, to the nearby wood across the water on the right, or straight ahead down the length·of the entire pond past a tree-dad island to a lovely Chinese bridge. This handsome piece of Chinoiserie is the product of the flurry of exotica let loose into the gardening world after William Chambers, Batty Langley, and others began writing about Oriental gardens and pavilions. The taste for things distant, strange, and somehow picturesque, which began with an appreciation of wild or unique sites and artifacts in the seventeenth century and was reinforced by the work of Kent and Chambers, led to the widespread production of garden structures such as this Chippendale Chinese bridge. Other gardens of the period sprouted Turkish tents, pagodas, and Gothic temples with little ofthe literary meaning found in the best work ofthe previous generation. The bridge at Pusey is among the best surviving examples of the genre. Long, low, and delicate, its intricate white wood raiiing arches across the pond just before the water turns and disappears into the wood to the east of the house. Placed symmetrically opposite the temple seat and diagonally related to the south facade of the house, it provides a focal point for several views and a link to the circuitous walk that lies across the lake from the house. This distant 106. Plan ofPusey House and garden. 292 t N ... e··. '::·.· ,·.· •, ' '.' .'·:· ~.....' . :.: ~.. . : 107- The Chippendale Chinese bridge at Pusey House, one ofmany exotic garden features introduced in the early decades ofthe eighteenth century. 108. This border at Pusey, like many ofthose developed in England between 1900 and 1950, while lovely and original when created, looks quite modest today, as we have become overwhelmedby the vast quantity delivered month after month in popular garden books and magazines. Bigger and more florid, at one estate and garden or another in France, England, Italy, and the United States, derivative and repetitive herbaceous borders have become cliche today. By comparison, this thoughtful display against the curved wall, with its niches and classical busts leading to the garden seat, remains a delight. CHAPTER FOUR path connects a small church, All Saints, built by John Allen Pusey in 1743, to a small cluster of farms that lie hidden behind the plantations to the southeast and southwest. A road linking these farms together into a dispersed village passes across an open vista to the distant valley. It has been lowered from sight and thus acts as a ha-ha between the meadow within the park and the fields beyond. Each element of the ensemble is of a size and position to work with the others. There is a controlled and gradual shift in textures from the fine lawn at the house to the rougher meadow across the lake, and finally to the fields beyond the road. Whoever besides the owner may have...

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