Gardenvisit.com The Garden Guide

Book: Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 1816
Chapter: Fragment Xi. Beaudesert.

Beaudesert view south

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VIEW TO THE SOUTH. This view is confined to the private front of the mansion, and is appropriated to the family apartments. To those who despise everything they call old fashioned, and who, supposing the perfection of gardening to consist in waving lines, are apt to shrink from everything straight or formal, this part of the plan for Beaudesert may give offence; but the venerable dignity of this place is not to be measured by the scale of a villa, or the spruce modern seat of sudden affluence, be-belted and be-clumped in the newest style of the modern taste of landscape gardening-no-rather let us go back to former times, when the lofty terraces of the privy garden gave protection and seclusion to the noble persons who, with "retired leisure, In trim gardens took their pleasure." To this may be added, the modern luxury of hot-houses and conservatories, with all the agremens, which excite interest in the cultivation of every species of flower that can delight the eye by its colours, or gratify the smell by its perfumes: and it is no small satisfaction to have discovered, from old labourers on the premises, that, in the line of the terrace, and other parts of this artificial and architectural garden, we are restoring the place to what they remember it in the beginning of the last century.