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The steps by which the Augustan Style evolved into the Serpentine Style constitute a fascinating episode in the history of taste. It has occupied the attention of many historians and is best chronicled by Christopher Hussey in English Gardens and Landscapes 1700-1750. One of the most celebrated steps in the progression was the retention of Wray Wood and Henderskelf Lane at Castle Howard. Hussey comments that the low hill on which they lie is 'historic ground, since it became the turning-point of garden design not only at Castle Howard but in England'. He could have added 'and the world'.

Castle Howard: the approach

Castle Howard: the garden front and the path to Wray Wood (or Ray Wood)

Castle Howard: from Henderskelf Lane

Castle Howard: the Temple of Four Winds from the Mausoleum

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The low hill was occupied by an extremely fine stand of mature beech trees. Wray Wood lies immediately to the east the new house which Vanburgh and Hawksmoor designed between 1699 and 1712. George London advised on the layout of the grounds until his death in 1714 and his apprentice, Stephen Switzer, is assumed to have advised Lord Carlisle after London's death. London wished to drive an avenue from the north front of the house up the hill and into Wray Wood. He planned to carve out a network of intersecting avenues inside the beechwood. Switzer wrote in 1718 that London's proposal 'would have spoil'd the Wood, but that his Lordship's superlative genius prevented it'. Wray Wood was retained and furnished with waterworks and labyrinthine paths to make what Switzer judged an 'incomparable Wood the highest pitch that Natural and Polite Gardening can possibly ever arrive to'. Hussey suggests that since Switzer was both a modest man and an expert in waterworks it may in fact have been he, rather than Lord Carlisle, who had the idea of conserving Wray Wood. Today the waterworks have gone and the beechwood is recovering from being clear-felled in 1940. It is being managed as a woodland garden in the Picturesque Style.

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Henderskelf Lane survives intact as the path which skirts the southern flank of Wray Wood and joins Castle Howard to the Temple of the Four Winds. The lane was an ancient track which should have been eliminated or straightened according to the logic of George London's layout. In fact it was retained and made into a broad meandering grassy walk which commands a heroic prospect of the landscape. It resembles the grass terrace at nearby Duncombe but it is not known which of the two terraces was the first to be made. A visual comparison of the two terraces leads one to think that Henderskelf is the prototype and Duncombe the second version. Thomas Duncombe married a Howard and planned to extend the serpentine walk for three miles along the hillside to Rievaulx in the 1740s. Had the project been implemented it would surely have become the most splendid serpentine promenade in the land.

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Some of the other well-known steps in the evolution of the Serpentine style are as follows: Vanburgh's suggestion that £1,000 could be saved by keeping Old Woodstock Manor in Blenheim Park as a picturesque feature in the view; the acceptance of site irregularities at Bramham Park so that the garden has an axis of its own and is not dependent on the axis of the house; the formation of the irregular grove at Melbourne which Hussey describes as 'the classic example in England of the first movement away from an entirely regular conception of garden-design which eventually led to landscape' (as at Bramham the axis of the garden was not related to the axis of the house); the use of the accidental diagonal provided by an old lane at Stowe to form the 'Great Cross Lime Walk'(it crosses at 70 degrees instead of the usual 90degrees) the extensive use of a ha-ha (sunk fence) at Stowe to bring the view of the countryside into the garden; and Charles Bridgeman's design for joining up a series of small ponds in Hyde Park to form the large lake which is now known, appropriately, as The Serpentine.

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Each of these evolutionary steps, which were taken between 1709 and 1748, marks a slight swing of the pendulum from rationalism to empiricism, from geometrical symmetry and regularity to asymmetry and the use of serpentine curves. Some of the finest eighteenth century gardens were made when the pendulum reached a mid-point between the two poles. Duncombe (1713-50), Studley Royal (1715-30), Rousham (1726-39), and Stourhead (1726-39) are brilliant examples of the way in which a disciplined and imaginative design concept can be developed from an intuitive response to the prevailing genius of the place. But it is not sufficient to analyse the first phase of the Serpentine style in geometrical terms alone: it was rich in symbolism, allusion and allegory.

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The maturity of the Serpentine style was heralded by the start of Lancelot Brown 's career as a freelance designer. By 1751 he had been head gardener at Stowe for ten years and had seen great works done there under the overall direction of William Kent. They probably worked together on the design of the Grecian Vale. It had classical overtones but was executed with more feeling for the abstract composition of landform and woods than most of Kent's work. The serpentine shapes became Brown's hallmark. He was not averse to including the occasional temple when it improved the composition but there is no reason to think he had any taste for allegory, symbolism or the landscape of ancient Greece and Rome.

Stowe: the Grecian Vale, by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown

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During the 32 years of his career as an independent designer Brown's style hardly changed and can be represented easily on the Serpentine Style diagram. It should be thought of as an estate of perhaps 1,000 hectares. The most characteristic features of his style are the circular clumps of trees, the grassy meadow in front of the mansion house, the serpentine lake, the enclosing treebelt and the encircling carriage drive. Hussey remarked that Brown was a practical man in the grip of a theory. The diagram shows the theory. The World, with its finger on the pulse of the nation's taste, was quick to recognise Brown's interest in serpentine shapes and drew a comparison between Hogarth's line of beauty, the profile of a woman's body and a Brownian park. In 1753 the editor wrote that 'a young lady of the most graceful figure I ever beheld' had come to London:

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This illustration from Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty shows serpentine lines applied to chair legs and women's stays.

The comparison between serpentine lines and women's stays comes from Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, first published in 1753. Hogarth commented that 'there is an elegant degree of plumpness to the skin of the softer sex', and drew diagrams to show how the the ideal stay resembled the line of beauty. The beautiful Lady Luxborough borrowed William Shenstone's copy of the book and envied the shape of the letter with which his name began. She wrote in 1754 that she was 'sorry I have not now an S in my name to claim any share in it'. Shenstone's own park at The Leasowes attracted many famous visitors and prevented him from visiting Lady Luxborough as often as she would have liked.

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Prior Park

Dorothy Stroud attributes 211 designs for English parks to Brown and a surprising number remain in good condition , often because they have adapted well to modern use as public parks, farms, golf courses and schools. The best of them are magnificent, probably more so today than when seen by Brown's critics in the 1790s. My own favourites are the arcadian glade at Prior Park, the Grecian valley at Stowe, the lakes at Luton Hoo and Blenheim Park, the embankment outside Alnwick Castle, the riverside scenery at Chatsworth and the grand views at Petworth and Harewood which J M W Turner painted.  

Some of Brown's other designs are so 'natural' and 'English' that it is difficult to appreciate them without a survey of the site as it was and a plan of the works executed by Brown. His lakes lie in comfortable depressions, his woods clothe hills which would resist the plough and his green pastures roll to the rhythm of the English countryside. A large collection of Brown's professional papers, which might have provided more information on what he actually did, was given to Repton by Brown's son and have since disappeared. The paucity of documentation on so many sites makes Bowood a park of special interest. Here the plan and the estate survive in good condition. There is even a small palladian temple designed by Brown on the edge of the lake.

Bowood: the serpentine plan

Bowood: the lake and temple

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A varient of the Serpentine style, known as the ferme ornee, is of particular interest to historians of the rural retirement theme. Maren-Sofie Rostvig comments that 'Instead of penning yet another version of Horace's second epode, Southcote translated the literary ideal into a living reality' at Woburn Farm near Chertsey (c1735). It was a working farm ornamented with trees, shrubs and temples, and is usually described as a ferm ornee despite the fact that Switzer did not invent the term until 1742. 'ornee' does not convey adequately the fact that these farms were intended to satisfy the widest possible range of human needs and aspirations. An 'ideal farm' would be a better description. The term ferm ornee was first applied to The Leasowes in 1746 but it is significant that Shenstone did not include it in the threefold classification of types of gardening which he made in 1764 (kitchen-gardening, parterre-gardening, and landskip-gardening ). He refers to Burke in the following paragraph and it may be that Burke's empiricist aesthetics discouraged Shenstone from using the term. Burke believed there was no connection between use and beauty, and pointed out that the wedge-like snout of a pig and the bared teeth of a wolf are useful but not beautiful. Shenstone may have thought the utility of his farm would be judged a detraction from its beauty.  

In practice use was combined with beauty on many estates laid out in the Serpentine style. They were run as ideal farms whatever the aesthetic beliefs of their owners and designers. This fact was apparent to the French observer R L Girardin whose Essay on Landscape or, on the means of improving and embellishing the country round our habitations of 1783 became popular in England. He greatly admired The Leasowes and wrote that  

Loudon's design for the ferm ornee at Great Tew in Oxfordshire

J C Loudon took these remarks to heart and at the begining of the nineteenth century he redesigned a farm at Great Tew in Oxfordshire. On completing the project he believed that 'time alone is requisite to render Tew Lodge the most magnificent ferme ornee in England'. He must have thought his belief well justified when he sold the lease, after four years work, and made the magnificent profit of £15,000. Like The Leasowes it survives in good condition and deserves to be fully restored as a monument to the fact that farmers need not sacrifice beauty to profit. Loudon drained the land, improved the shapes of the fields, made new roads, planted new hedgerows, and strengthened the old tree-belt on the skyline to create a delightfully secluded valley.

 Flowering plants were an important component of the ferme ornee and, as John Harris has pointed out, they were not excluded from the Serpentine style to the degree which has been supposed. A main feature of Woburn Farm was a walk planted with broom, roses, lilac, columbine, paeonies and sweet william, which wound its way through the fields. Similarly Shenstone wrote to Lady Luxborough that he had a copy of Philip Miller's Gardener's Dictionary and that 'if there arrive a flowering shrub; it is a day of rejoicing with me'. Loudon had an enormous collection of flowering plants at Tew Lodge and there is a superficial resemblence between his drawings of the garden and the paintings by Thomas Robbins which Harris has used to establish the presence of flower gardens in eighteenth century estates.  

The astonishing degree to which the Serpentine style was adopted between 1740 and 1780 can be seen by comparing the engravings in Kip and Knyff's Britannia Illustrata with those in Watts' Seats of the Nobility and Gentry. Kip and Knyff show every house surrounded by walled gardens with no forest trees in the enclosures. Watts shows every house in a grazed field with forest trees approaching the house and framing the view. The popularity of the Serpentine style reached fever pitch in the 1780s. Its creators believed their style to be completely natural but the next generation disagreed. A further move to empiricism brought thoughts of a new style.

An engraving from Watt's Seats of the Nobility and Gentry, 1782. Like most of  Watts' illustrations it shows a house surrounded by grass and trees with no signs of any terraces, avenues or paterres of the type which adorn Kip and Knyff's illustrations.