Jane Austen's Landscapes

Wooburn

This year is the bicentenary of Humphry Repton's death, and several events are planned: visit http://thegardenstrust.org/events-archive/tags/repton/. 

My latest feature for Jane Austen's Regency World magazine (Mar/April issue) is on the way Austen uses landscapes in her novels. 

Jane Austen grew up during the great age of the ‘improvers’ like Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton. Austen loved William Cowper's poetry. In his poem The Task, Cowper deplores the rage for 'improvement' which swept away the past:

Capability Brown

Improvement too, the idol of the age,

Is fed with many a victim.  Lo! he comes—

The omnipotent magician, Brown, appears.

Down falls the venerable pile, the abode

Of our forefathers, a grave whiskered race,

But tasteless…

He speaks.  The lake in front becomes a lawn,

Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise,

And streams, as if created for his use,

Pursue the track of his directed wand

Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow,

Now murmuring soft, now roaring in cascades,

Even as he bids.  The enraptured owner smiles.

’Tis finished.

This tension between the old and new is explored by Jane Austen in her last, unfinished novel, Sanditon. The enthusiastic Mr Parker has built a new home at the seaside: ‘Trafalgar House, on the most elevated spot on the down’. It is a 'light, elegant building, standing in a small lawn with a very young plantation round it’ 

He pours scorn on his wife's fondness for their old home, in a ‘little contracted nook, without air or view’. 

Mrs Parker, more practical, reminds him 'It was always a very comfortable house'. Parker ripostes that ‘We have all the grandeur of the storm’ at Trafalgar House.  His wife still longs for their old garden, however: ‘a nice place for the children to run about in. So shady in summer!' 

Images from the author's collection:

Wooburn (Woburn) in Surrey, the seat of Philip Southcote. He designed it as a ‘ferme ornee’ (ornamental farm garden). The Universal Magazine c.1770. 

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore & Legend, Walter Scott, 1889

The Birth of Landscape Gardening

Rousham Park.

Temple of Echo.

Last weekend we enjoyed a visit to Rousham in Oxfordshire. The House and its beautiful gardens were designed by William Kent (1685–1748). Rousham has been the home of the Dormer family since the mid-1630s.

Kent’s design for the garden, begun c.1738, and those at Stowe, are thought to herald the beginning of the landscape garden movement in Britain. Kent was greatly influenced by Palladio. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown worked under Kent at Stowe and was later a famous landscape gardener in his own right – perhaps the most famous of all. 

  

Exploring Rousham is rather like stepping into a landscape painting. Not far from the house, longhorn cattle graze peacefully in a large field, safely curtailed by a ha-ha (shades of Mansfield Park). As you stroll further into the park, you encounter classical statues amidst its shady groves.  

Eighteenth century visitors were particularly pleased by the Temple of Echo and the Praeneste terrace. The river Cherwell wends its way around the bottom of the garden in a stately fashion, adding to the atmosphere of tranquillity.

Memorial to Ringwood above the cascade.

Praeneste terrace.

Like Elizabeth Bennet at Pemberley, I ‘saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view’. I particularly liked the memorial and poem dedicated to Ringwood, ‘an otter-hound of extraordinary sagacity’.

There’s also a wonderful walled garden with trained apple trees, a pigeon house, and spectacular herbaceous borders.

Pigeon House. It still has a ladder inside.

Dormer monument in the church.

We found time to explore the thirteenth century church, which has many monuments to the Dormer family. 

All photos © Sue Wilkes.