STOURHEAD: HENRY HOARE’S PARADISE REVISITED by Dudley Dodd

Head of Zeus, £40 ISBN 978-1788543620

Dodd displays his deep knowledge of a property he has studied over decades, in this entertaining account of one of our greatest landscape gardens. Reviewer Ambra Edwards is an author and garden historian.

There was a time when you could sit in a kind of rotating barrel overlooking the lake at Stourhead, pressing a foot pedal to change your view. You might take tea in a Turkish tent, or shelter from the sun in a shady hermitage ‘lined inside & out with Old Gouty nobby oaks’. On such a hot summer’s day, the owner and creator of the garden, Henry Hoare, known as ‘Henry the Magnificent’, might be found wallowing in a cold bath in his grotto to the sound of a small band. Art historian Dudley Dodd, who has written so many invaluable guidebooks to National Trust properties, brings both house and garden vividly to life as he traces their changing fortunes from the summer retreat of a charitable 18th-century banker to ‘knockout’ visitor attraction – albeit, we discover, in many ways diminished from its former glory (although looking at the glorious photographs of Marianne Majerus, that can be hard to credit).

It makes for a gripping family saga, with heroes, starting with ‘Good’ Henry, who built the original Palladian house, and villains (the wicked 5th Baronet, who abandoned Stourhead for a gambler’s life in Paris) and those in between, such as the austere antiquarian Richard

Colt Hoare, who destroyed so many of his grandfather’s delightful follies.

What is wonderful about this book is its range. Every one of the many illustrations is relevant and illuminating. Dodd draws on myriad accounts of the garden, from breathless teenage diaries to the narratives of grumpy visiting clergy. (The appendix with brief descriptions of these sources is a resource for which anyone interested in garden history will be thankful.) And Dodd is especially good at setting the garden in context, showing the connections between the Hoares and other garden makers, and similar features in contemporary gardens. A magnificent achievement.