A highly original study of eccentric English garden-makers and their
extraordinary gardens
In English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and
historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan reveals a series of obscure and
eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and
early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic
gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious
antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as
well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who
created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse
anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature
mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves,
and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their
gardens in a way that was often thought excessive.
With quirky and compelling illustrations and chapters including "Lady
Broughton's 'Miniature copy of the Swiss Glaciers, '" "Topiary on a
Gargantuan Scale: The Clipped 'Yew-trees' at Four Ancient London
Churchyards," and "The Burrowing Duke at Harcourt House," English
Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with
cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is
about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric
and focusses on an area of garden history that has scarcely been
explored: gardens seen as expressions of the singular character of their
makers, and therefore functioning, in effect, as a form of
autobiography.
This lively and accessible book calls on gardeners today to learn from
example and dare to be eccentric.
Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
