First full biography of Richard Woods, the landscape designer, examining
his work and restoring him to the attention he merits.
A contemporary of the famous landscape designer "Capability" Brown,
Richard Woods has never received the recognition he deserves: in
contrast to Brown, he emphasised the pleasure ground and kitchen garden,
with a more pronounced use of flowers than was general among the
landscape improvers of his time. He liked variety and incident in his
plans and, where he was employed on a larger scale, the encroachment of
the pleasure ground into the park created the Woodsian "pleasure
park".
In this important work of detection and biography, Fiona Cowell analyses
his designs, and explores his activities as a plantsman, a determined
amateur architect and a farmer. In particular, she showsthe difficulties
he found as a Catholic living in penal times, examining the difficulties
encountered by both Woods and his Catholic patrons, and placing the man
and his work in their wider social and economic context. Unjustly
neglected in the past, he is here given his rightful place among the
creators of the English landscape style.