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Stourhead and the Danesfield House Hotel, England LONDON IS SURROUNDED BY EXQUISITE ESTATES where the countryside has been landscaped to include towering trees, rhododendron in profusion, and lakes that mirror the sky and temples. We were lucky to find the best of these, Stourhead, for a walk in an ideal setting during May. From the Italian Renaissance, Western preferences in gardens have generally leaned to the formal, carefully designed and balanced parterres radiating from the central axis of the manor house or castle. Even the grandest British herbaceous borders , at Levens Hall and Culzean, for example, are based on mathematical and geometric models of balance, which they share in common with the gardens of the Italian Renaissance. The primary difference is that the great British formal gardens rely on a rash of color from annuals and perennials to evoke the sense of satisfaction and pleasure achieved in the Italian Renaissance with statuary, fountains, pools and manicured shrubs such as boxwood or yew. The British landscape garden or park offers a competing model to the Italian Renaissance formal garden with different aesthetic postulates and principles. Stourhead is an iconic example of the British landscape garden. The landscape garden is a gently idealized version of nature which incorporates the fields, hills, forests and streams of the wider countryside. The model of the landscape garden was landscape painting, and the task of the gardener was to compose picturesque garden views with all of the freedom of the landscape painter. The forty-acre landscape park at Stourhead was begun in 1741 by the banker Henry Hoar II in (1705–1785). Hoar’s masterstroke was the dam across the western end of the valley, which turned a series of fishponds into a single sheet of water. He conceived a counterclockwise circuit walk around the new lake, thus linking garden buildings and picturesque views in a carefully contrived sequence. Stourhead had been occupied since William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066, and Henry Hoar tore down the nearby castle that had belonged to the Stourton family to make way for his manor house. The house is an elegant Palladian masterpiece filled with collections of paintings and statues from Italy. We meandered through the park, which was ablaze with crimson, pink, and yellow hybrid rhododendron. We walked across the Palladian bridge and marveled at the domed Pantheon (1753) on the far shore of the lake. The grass-covered bridge had a quacking family of ducks. We walked through the Temple of Flora built above the Church of St. Peter. But our greatest delight was Henry Flitcroft’s Stourhead and the Danesfield House Hotel 89 (1697–1769) Temple of Apollo (1765) derived from a Roman original at Baalbec in Syria. Lovely grass walks alternated with gravel, leading us to discover the beauty of images and reflections off the lake, as well as a dozen or more exquisitely framed views. How could we complain? What was not to like about this magnificent estate ? As Horace Walpole said in 1762 of the Pantheon, “Few buildings exceed the magnificence, taste, and beauty of this temple.” Our destination for the evening was London by the M3, M25, and finally the ninth exit at Maidenhead to Marlowe and the Danesfield House Hotel. Sitting in the Chiltern Hills overlooking the Thames, this magnificent private home, now a hotel, sits on sixty-five acres of glorious gardens. Our room, the Victoria, overlooked a seventeenth-century knot garden of boxwood enclosed by yew topiary. The Thames that Sunday was full of canoes and yachts and, across from us, on the opposite shore, people walking and dogs swimming. I asked an attendant about going down for a swim. He seemed appalled and said that it was strictly prohibited to swim in the weirs. I assured him that I would keep my swimming to the Danesfield’s Spa with its lovely enclosed indoor swimming pool that was “ozone” filtered. We relaxed in the sun and marveled that the English countryside was so unspoiled. If you go: Stourhead in located in Wiltshire, and is 3 miles NW of Mere by the A303 and B3092. Danesfield House Hotel is located in Marlow, www.danesfieldhouse.co.uk. ...

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