THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE GARDEN
Miscellanies, while being useful for a pub quiz or to leaf through on the loo, can be taxing. All those bits, those bobs.
This miscellany, however, is of quite another character. Claire Cock-starkey has compiled an anthology of writing, opinion, magazine and newspaper extracts from the golden age of the garden: the 18th and 19th centuries. So we find Rousseau’s take on the English garden, Horace Walpole on William Kent and even Catherine the Great confiding to Voltaire: “I am madly in love with English gardens”. It is a diverting way to approach the subject and the line illustrations and exquisite cover create a charming book.
William Kent, Capability Brown, Repton and Loudon, among others, transformed the formal gardens of the Tudors and Jacobeans to a more natural, English style of landscape gardening, parkland, follies and vistas reflecting the very idea of Englishness, which is celebrated here.