English gardens

[sus]

the new landscape designs made even more decisive breaks with continental gardening than did Pope at Twickenham. Gone were the intricate Italian knot motifs and razor-straight French avenues. Instead, designers opted for sinuous paths, expressed a newfound reliance upon trees, and built a succession of architectural novelties.

 

[sus]

NY's Central Park is famously English in design. You can get very legitimately lost in the North Woods; it's full of circuitous routes around reservoirs and baseball diamonds and lagoons. Compare Riverside Park, along the Upper West Side—those crisp French avenues that parallel FDR Drive.

 

[sus]

Apparently Alexander Pope did a lot to influence English gardening

And I was just reading up on Charles Bridgeman's ha-ha innovation, to hide stone walls necessary for segregating livestock (while preserving an unbroken view)

 

[sus]

Pope even had a massive grotto dug on his property, to go along/bring to life the images of his poetry

 

[sus]

ruinlust

 

[jenks]

I think part of this connected to both the reaction to anything too 'continental' particularly anything that might smack of foreign catholic influences but also a much later adoption of Romanticism as a movement. Burke's earlier ideas of the sublime play a large part in there too.
Roy Strong writes well on the English garden and there is an interesting chapter in Romantic Moderns which looks at garden revivals in the thirties - Jekyll and all that lot - Sissinghurst etc. It's the kind of thing my wife knows loads about. I remember a scouse mate of mine claiming that Central Park was based on a park in Birkenhead - i don't know true that might be.

 

[...]

@Simon silverdollarcircle

 

[Murphy]

Just googled MA’s on Garden History. Oooof

Garden and Landscape History

The School of Advanced Study is a unique environment in which to study the humanities. The School strives to reflect the latest developments in thinking across the humanities disciplines it supports and to ensure that its programmes reflect this. We are also aware that the needs of our students...

www.sas.ac.uk

 

[...]

My aunt is an expert on Gertrude Jekyll gardens. In fact, she lives in a house with one.

 

[sus]

I think part of this connected to both the reaction to anything too 'continental' particularly anything that might smack of foreign catholic influences but also a much later adoption of Romanticism as a movement. Burke's earlier ideas of the sublime play a large part in there too.
Roy Strong writes well on the English garden and there is an interesting chapter in Romantic Moderns which looks at garden revivals in the thirties - Jekyll and all that lot - Sissinghurst etc. It's the kind of thing my wife knows loads about. I remember a scouse mate of mine claiming that Central Park was based on a park in Birkenhead - i don't know true that might be.

Yes, that's what I've read, that there was a strong strain of self-congratulatory anti-Catholicism. (Mixed with a fair amount of sincere nostalgia—Pope was a Catholic, for instance, and had designs sponsored by a Catholic patron.)

I think you're right on Birkenhead—Olmstead, the landscape architect who designed it, did a trip there & adored it.

 

[sus]

Just googled MA’s on Garden History. Oooof

Garden and Landscape History

The School of Advanced Study is a unique environment in which to study the humanities. The School strives to reflect the latest developments in thinking across the humanities disciplines it supports and to ensure that its programmes reflect this. We are also aware that the needs of our students...

www.sas.ac.uk

Yeah actually a while back I did a consulting job for Harvard GSD, which is a general leading design/arch school but also sports the leading landscape program—huge hub, and the first school to set it up back in the 19th C, if I remember my research from that time correctly.

 

[sus]

no trees anywhere. not a single tree. just hedgerows and fields, hedgerows and fields. no pavements either so you're always in danger of being flattened by a tractor driver drunk at 6am on a Tuesday

Is it true??

 

[luka]

Yes

 

[sus]

I'm asking other folks I don't trust you I learned about you in journalism class, you're an "unreliable witness"

 

[luka]

the rural British landscape is almost entirely treeless

 

[luka]

What you have to understand is this is a very very small very very densely populated island and it's been inhabited for a very long time. What countryside there is is literally just dirt factories. which is why there are far more birds in cities than in the countryside where the land is blighted with insecticides and there are no trees to roost in

 

[sus]

No one's bothered re-planting?!

 

[version]

the rural British landscape is almost entirely treeless

 

[luka]

Nope. Our gardens are nice though, you're right

 

[luka]

My dad loved gardens. I got taken to all of them as a child. Including this one