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LANDSCAPE GARDENS AND PARKS ITALIAN MOODS, PALLADIANS, AND THE LANDSCAPE Twenty-five years ago there was only a handful of scholarly books on English gardens. Since then landscape and garden history has emerged as a rich field ofscholarship, loosing a torrent ofwork, some by cultural historians, some by art or architectural historians, and some as well by geographers and literary scholars. An information lacuna similar to that of the so-called DarkAges has now been filled by a spate ofarticles and books detailing developments in English gardening of every period, style, and century. One hardly needs to turn to such literature, however, to discover that, just as in other social and economic endeavors discussed above, southern Wiltshire and the area around Loughridge Deverill was in the thick ofdevelopments in gardening from medieval times on. One has only to look about to see considerable evidence. Even so, some of the earliest and transitional works have been altered or have disappeared. John Aubrey, writing in the latter half of the sixteenth century in The Natural History ofWiltshire, gives us a glimpse ofan earlytransitional garden and its builder, Sir John Danvers: The garden at Lavington in this country [Wiltshire] and that at Chelsey in Middlesex [near London ], as likewise the house there, doe remaine monuments of his ingenuity. The garden at Lavington is full of irregularities, both natural and artificial~ so, elevations and depressions. Through the length of it there runneth a fine clear trout stream; walled with brick on each side, to hinder the earth from mouldring down. In this stream are placed several statues. At the west end is an admirable place for a grotto, where the great arch is, over which now is the market roade. Among several others, there is a very pleasant elevation on the south side of the garden, which steales, arising almost insensibly, that is, before one is aware, and gives you a view over the spacious corn-fields there, and so to East Lavington: where, being landed on a fine levell, letteth you descend again with the like easinesse; each side is flanked with laurells. It is almost impossible to describe this garden, it is so full of variety and unevenesse; nay it would be a difficult matter for a good artist to make a draft of it. Although Italians had been working in England since the time of Henry VIII, Aubrey's description is the first of a full garden and park with all ofthe elements that were to be developed into the landscape manner. Construction continued or was resumed at Danvers's garden twenty miles to the north of Longbridge about 1686 when the earl of Abingdon, who had acquired the property through marriage, "built a noble portico, full of waterworks, which is on the north side of the garden, and faceth the South. It is a portico and grott, and was designed by [a] Mr. Rose, of Oxfordshire:' By then architectural features FOLLOWING PAGE: 81. An aged American black locust in Page's north garden at Longleat. 233 CHAPTER FOUR of Italian influence and associated with villas near Rome and Florence, such as terraces, levels and walls, pools, basins, and fountains, were becoming common enough throughout southern Britain at fashionable estates. It is now known that long before the eighteenth-century work of neo-Palladian amateurs and Whigs, experimentation in the creation of parklike spaces had begun. Views of country houses in the seventeenth century, especially those by Kip and Knyff, frequently indicate a combination of older houses with recent classical additions, of walled terraces and gardens embracing or overlooking adjacent parks and natural features. Gardening and landscape appreciation had become important aspects of cultivated life by the beginning of the seventeenth century and by the end of it were almost ubiquitous, appearing in drama , painting, literature, and the lives of the upper middle class as well as the leaders of society. Among the many verses inspired by the subject, Andrew Marvell, in a poem simply titled "The Garden;' writing far from London and urban life just after the English Civil War, set down the following justly famous lines that refer to the ancient Roman tradition of retirement to the country for moral and aesthetic reasons: How vainly men themselves amaze To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes; And their uncessant Labours see Crown'd from some single Herb or Tree.... Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasures less, Withdrawn into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does straight its...

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