DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16633#0349
Tendencies of Garden Art in the Nineteenth Century
329
The first attempts to reform the garden were made by two artists, and were started
from different directions; but every attempt aimed at the same thing: to make a more
worthy home in the garden for all the plants that now arrived m such numbers. In the
forties and fifties of the nineteenth century the eyes of architects, especially Englishmen,
had been turned once more to Italy. Sir Charles Barry, the English architect, travelled
in the South, and especially in Italy when a young man. He took back with him to England
a knowledge of Italian art as treated more or less from the historical point of view, and
FIG. 607. TRENTHAM CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE—GENERAL VIEW OF THE DUCAL GARDEN
applied it in a series of country places, sometimes entirely new, sometimes only altered and
restored. The buildings which he designed show a strong likeness to Roman suburban
villas, such as Villa Borghese and Villa Dona Pamfili. We feel the resemblance to the
parterre of the Doria Pamfili when we walk through an "Italian garden" at an English
country seat. Almost all Barry's work was done between 1840 and i860. A piece was
cut out of the picturesque garden, generally close to the house and as a rule only on one
side of it, and was then laid out as a sunk parterre. The beds were edged with box, and
here the treasures of the greenhouse were "bedded out," to be changed several times in
the course of the year. There were fuchsias, lobelias, heliotrope, shrubby calceolarias, and
m particular different kinds of zonal pelargoniums. Somewhat later there were begonias.
These, with many others, formed a brilliantly coloured carpet of flowers. The corners of the
329
The first attempts to reform the garden were made by two artists, and were started
from different directions; but every attempt aimed at the same thing: to make a more
worthy home in the garden for all the plants that now arrived m such numbers. In the
forties and fifties of the nineteenth century the eyes of architects, especially Englishmen,
had been turned once more to Italy. Sir Charles Barry, the English architect, travelled
in the South, and especially in Italy when a young man. He took back with him to England
a knowledge of Italian art as treated more or less from the historical point of view, and
FIG. 607. TRENTHAM CASTLE, STAFFORDSHIRE—GENERAL VIEW OF THE DUCAL GARDEN
applied it in a series of country places, sometimes entirely new, sometimes only altered and
restored. The buildings which he designed show a strong likeness to Roman suburban
villas, such as Villa Borghese and Villa Dona Pamfili. We feel the resemblance to the
parterre of the Doria Pamfili when we walk through an "Italian garden" at an English
country seat. Almost all Barry's work was done between 1840 and i860. A piece was
cut out of the picturesque garden, generally close to the house and as a rule only on one
side of it, and was then laid out as a sunk parterre. The beds were edged with box, and
here the treasures of the greenhouse were "bedded out," to be changed several times in
the course of the year. There were fuchsias, lobelias, heliotrope, shrubby calceolarias, and
m particular different kinds of zonal pelargoniums. Somewhat later there were begonias.
These, with many others, formed a brilliantly coloured carpet of flowers. The corners of the