Monthly Archives: October 2017

Huphry Repton, the Schlosspark Klein-Glienicke and landscape architecture

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The garden court at Schlosspark Klein-Glienicke has a distinctly Reptonian character

The garden court at Schlosspark Klein-Glienicke has a distinctly Reptonian character

Humphry Repton’s influenced landscape and garden design outside as well as inside the UK. I see his books as England’s most important contribution to the theory of garden design and landscape architecture. They were lavishly produced, opulently published and sought after by collectors. Foreign travel was enormously hard in his lifetime, not least because of the Napoleonic wars, and many people found out about the English style of making gardens from books. Among them was Peter Joseph Lenné.

The Klein-Glienicke garden has a domain of art near the house, a Brownian park and distant views of lakes and forests

The Klein-Glienicke garden has a domain of art near the house, a Brownian park and distant views of lakes and forests

The Schlosspark Klein-Glienicke in Potsdam Berlin was designed by Lenné with help from Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau.  The latter invited Humphry’s son,  John Adey Repton, to Potsdam. Though remembered as an architect, and not known to have helped with the Glienicke design, John was familiar with his father’s theories.  The Glienicke layout shows clear evidence of Repton’s Landscape Style.

The Lion Fountain

The Lion Fountain

Glienicke was planned with a Beautiful area near the house and a transition to a Picturesque park (in the Serpentine Style) and a Sublime background (the Potsdam lakes and forests).

After their republication by John Claudius London, Humphry Repton’s works had a wide influence on the English-speaking world and were a starting point for Frederick Law Olmsted’s practice and the development of landscape architecture as an organised profession. Repton also influenced UK town and country planning with the principles that:

  • cities should be compact
  • agricultural land should be protected from urban sprawl
  • national parks and natural parks should be protected from development

The Wallenstein Garden was made by one of Europe’s greatest military commanders

The Wallenstein Garden

The Wallenstein Garden

The garden is beautiful and secluded. But the Wallenstein Garden in the Czech Republic was made by  a cold, egotistical and autocratic man. In his plays about Albrecht von Wallenstein, Friedrich Schiller wrote that

  • Life is earnest, art is gay.
  • Posterity weaves no garlands for imitators.

The design style of the garden is somewhere between Early and High Baroque on our Garden History Style Chart.


wallenstein_garden

Wanstead Park proposed regeneration, restoration and Ghost

This Wanstead Park footpath suggests an easy way of marking the lines of the old axial lines on the forest floor

This Wanstead Park footpath suggests an easy way of marking the lines of the old axial lines on the forest floor

Wanstead Park used to be one of the greatest late-Baroque gardens in England. It survives with half the land used as a golf course and the other hand cared for by the City Corporation, which merits its great reputation as a benevolent land owner and manager. Wanstead was purchased as part of Epping Forest in the 1880s. It is now managed as what might be called a forest park. Could it restored? Should it be restored? The Friends of Wanstead Park have a good answer: ‘In recent years the Friends of Wanstead Parklands and the City of London Corporation have formed a partnership to reveal the ancient landscape and make the park more accessible to the local communities and those from further afield’.

The Ghost of Wanstead Park

The Ghost of Wanstead Park

But what would this involve? With no great house, a different use, no significant resources and only half the site, it can’t go back to the early 18th century? My suggestion is to celebrate The Ghost of Wanstead Park. This is how she might look. Her face is gone forever. Her shadow sleeps on the forest floor.

To give her life, I suggest:

  1. placing a structure at both ends of the main axis, to give her eyes
  2. sharpening the edges of the main axis, which is formed by trees and by the edges of the canal
  3. placing logs on the forest floor to mark the positions of the old axes

The two plans, below, show the Wanstead Park in its prime and Wanstead Park with a Ghost sleeping on the forest floor for the curious to meet.

Plans of Wanstead Park with proposed Ghost

Plans of Wanstead Park with proposed Ghost

Stourhead is a great English landscape garden


Stourhead Landscape Garden has a good claim to being ‘England’s greatest landscape garden’. Though changed, as all gardens must change, it retains much of its eighteenth century character. Tour operators are right to make it a priority in English garden tours.

Henry Hoare’s aim was to recreate the landscape of antiquity. Not having too clear an idea of what it looked like, he turned to the great  landscape painters of Italy, including Claude Lorrain and Nicholas Poussin.

In the Great Gardens postcard, below and at the start of the video, the plan of Stourhead is on the left and the garden design style diagram it represents is on the right. The Gardenvisit.com style chart shows this style in its historic position. Stourhead owes much to Augustan ideas.

Great English Garden postcard of Stourhead, showing the garden plan and the garden design style

Great English Garden postcard of Stourhead, showing the garden plan and the garden design style

English lawns in 1964

Lawn and Adirondak Chair (Guardian, 1964)

Lawn and Adirondack Chair (Guardian, 1964)

The Guardian has just reprinted a 1964 article on lawns by Moira Savonius, who also wrote books on fungi and on flowers. She sees lawns as a ‘cult’. My impression is that grass cutting has declined in public parks and stately homes but that the area they occupy in private gardens is but slightly diminished – and maybe not at all if you allow for fact that motor mowers were , relatively, much  more expensive in 1964 and so many more people ‘neglected’ their grass in the suburbs. A curious feature of the black and white photo accompanying the article is the Adirondack Chair – I believe they were most uncommon in 1960s Britain.

The Promenade Plantee predates the Highline

The Promenade Plantee is older than the Highline and is spatially more varied

The Promenade Plantee is older than the Highline and is spatially more varied

I wonder why the Highline in New York City has become much more famous than its older predecessor, the Promenade Plantee in Paris. I don’t think it’s a consequence of the design, the location or the scenic quality.  Could the explanation be an application of triumphal American marketing to the Highline?  Or does the Highline have more oomph? Paris is fast becoming a cycling city and the Promenade offers a great ride.

See also: Garden Tours in France