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.