Garden Hist 32 (1)

Article on the diary of Nicholas Blundell from 1702 to 1727, which records plants grown in his kitchen and pleasure gardens at Crosby Hall, Lancashire, and the cycle of maintenance through the year. The article also describes a database of entries relating to the gardens and the insights given into horticultural practice in the early-eighteenth century.

Study assessing the results of a geophysical survey to explore the site of the former Great Parterre at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, and demonstrating the potential of resistivity testing as an investigative rather than purely prospective technique. Detailed archival information is used to assist the interpretation of the findings. Includes

transcription of a copy of a contract for making the Great Parterre at Chatsworth, 1694

Archaeological investigation has recorded the remains of an early-nineteenth-century garden at Basingill which incorporated gunpowder mills as a feature in its layout. Its creator, Isabella Wakefield, was the daughter of the mills' owner. A wider category of garden designs including industrial remains is noted, and the roots of Basingill's conception in the contemporary aesthetics of the sublime and the picturesque are explored. A second garden made by Wakefield at Dingle Bank, near Liverpool, is shown to have similar preoccupations, including effects based on sound as well as sight.

The paper attempts a definition of the Palladian garden with reference to Chiswick House, Middlesex. Exploring the influence upon Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, and Moor Park, Surrey, of Roman ideals, it discusses the role of Castle Howard's principal architect, John Vanbrugh; the development of his own gardens at Chargate, Surrey; and their evolution into William Kent's Claremont, as Chargate was then known. It concludes that Chiswick is more distinctly a Roman than a Palladian garden.