Landscape and Identity: Baby Talk at the Leasowes, 1760

Building a Road to Happiness

I have lost my road to happiness, I confess; and, instead of pursuing the way to the fine lawns and venerable oaks which distinguish the region of it, I am got into the pitiful parterre-garden of amusement, and view the nobler scenes at a distance. I think I can see the road too that leads the better way, and can shew it others; but I have many miles to measure back before I can get into it myself, and no kind of resolution to take a single step. My chief amusements at present are the same they have long been, and lie scattered about my farm. The French have what they call a parque ornée; I suppose, approaching about as near to a garden as the park at Hagley. I give my place the title of a ferme ornée; though, if I had money, I should hardly confine myself to such decorations as that name requires. I have made great improvements; and the consequence is, that I long to have you see them.

—William Shenstone, Works

Very well; now go on Zattoo—why the Eminence now is somewhat narrow & steep. O! take ou Tare, Zattoo, don't ou falls, Take hold of Masser's arm—dat's a dood Zattoo!—bess ou, bess ou!

—Thomas Hull, "Shenstone's Walks"

Only a few years into the project that would occupy him another decade and a half until his death in 1763, poet William Shenstone penned the above lament to his close friend Richard Graves in 1748. ¹ But in contrast to his closing plea, Shenstone soon did not want for visitors to the landscape garden he was constructing adjacent to his house at the Leasowes, an 89-acre estate about six miles west of Birmingham in the English Midlands. By the 1750s the Leasowes had become a place of some renown, attracting visitors from home and abroad. Soon after Shenstone's death numerous guidebooks were published in response to the demands of tourists, both ambulatory and armchair, for aid in appreciating the site.

Visitors' accounts naturally extolled the natural and architectural beauties of the Leasowes, but they also suggest that the site was more than just the simple aesthetic object of regard that a modern-day visitor might seek, or a stage set for theatrical display of the owner's tastes and allegiances of the sort that prevailed on aristocratic estates in the decades before Shenstone's time. Joseph Heely, author of several guidebook accounts of the Leasowes, instead portrayed perambulation of the circuit walk as a private, necessarily autonomous experience, at one point characterizing it as a "solitary maze." Shenstone's friend Richard Graves similarly referred to the Leasowes as well suited to a hermit. ² Equally telling is the midcentury love letter excerpted above. ³ Written circa 1760 by Thomas Hull, a friend of Shenstone, it employed the landscape of the Leasowes as a site on which he played out the course of an intimate encounter with the woman to whom the letter was addressed. Shepherding his love from one point to another along the circuit walk, assisting her over ostensibly treacherous ground, displaying a masterful knowledge of literature, history, and art, addressing her in language that predicated intimacy through baby talk, and ultimately proposing a suggestively private rest in a cozy bower, Hull's epistolary persona openly exploited the landscape as a means for engaging and exciting deep-seated passions. Heely, Graves, and Hull all expressed confidence in a new instrumentality for landscape: its capacity to serve as a site for private engagement with matters of personal and intimate concern.

The Leasowes has achieved comparable renown among modern historians of landscape, though a propensity to focus on matters of iconography, style, and typology—cued in part by Shenstone's own reference to a ferme ornée—has left a host of other considerations comparatively neglected. One such concern is anticipated in...