Transcript of The Secret History of the British Garden, The 18th Century

n come on come on come on in the 21st century we now Embrace wildlife and encourage it into our garden but 300 years ago everything was very very different Gardens were Sanctuary to keep nature at Bay and they were ordered and controlled and then came perhaps the greatest revolution in the whole of gardening history the landscape and at large was embraced and included on a scale that is almost unimaginable on my journey through the past 400 years of garden history I've so far looked at the 17th century discovered the secrets behind the tightly controlled formal Gardens created as a display of their owner's wealth and power as well as some hidden messages that revealed their true beliefs I'm now moving into the 18th century which saw a radical transformation of these Grand formal Gardens and I'll be discovering how and why these new Landscapes were created and who was behind them is an artist I guess yeah although he best never saw himself play that I'll be getting some Hands-On knowledge of the techniques of the Century's most famous Gardener capability Brown go I'll celebrate the work of the Maverick William Kent who preceded Brown at the beginning of the century this really doesn't feel like the entrance to one of the greatest Gardens in the world does it and the marketing Genius of Humphrey Repton who followed in Brown's footsteps at the end of the period is pitching it absolutely right everybody always wants a certain degree of magnificence I believe that Gardens are every bit as important as the buildings that we live and work working and if we can unearth their secrets and listen to their stories we get a unique insight into our history and what makes us the people that we are today [Music] at the beginning of the 18th century British gens were still locked in a mindset exemplified by Dutch formality of controlling nature everything was straight lines canals clip trees Avenues just to show that man was in charge and all the natural world was seen as potentially wild and unruly and then in a generation all this was trans transformed and the landscape was allowed in and the first Garden to show this in its entirety was KC Court the very first commission made by lelot capability [Music] Brown and what is extraordinary looking from above is you can see how that brown with only the resources of 1750 was able to see the landscape as it would become he diverted water created a river or at least it's a lake that looks like a river planted these rings of trees that would become clumps Beyond his lifetime beyond the lifetime of his children and then these eye catchers the church over there and The Marvelous orangery all this incredibly skillfully coordinated from the ground so it appeared completely natural but actually took as much skill and his artifice as the most tightly controlled four-wheel guard in the mid 18th century kro Court set within a 17,000 acre estate in werer was the seat of the sixth Earl of centry he was a young man who wanted a house and garden that would be in the most modern design as well as displaying his wealth and status now this is the way to go and see Gardens to create the Earl's New Garden meant undertaking radical changes and to learn about some of this I'm meeting the local archaeologist Dennis Williams who's making a geophysical survey to get a detailed picture of these changes made to K in the second half of the 18th century we've chosen this particular spot because we have some um map-based and documentary evidence that the Parish church for K dbo was once situ ated here and then in the late 1750s as the Earl of centry was having the house and the landscape part remodeled the church was um demolished and the new church up on the hill was was built what date is this picture that one um the date is unclear but it's thought to have been about 1750s that's a gate house that is the gate house yes with the church and there's the church so Brown demolished all this to make his Park as well as the the church foundations presumably the there graveyard here we believe that the tombs of the ears were moved U to the new church when that was uh consecrated in 1763 so the comry family were all taken up lot of Stock and Barrel up there well certainly the ears we don't know whether the countesses were all moved that's that's something we're very uncertain they wouldn't have moved the countesses not necessarily one would have thought so but the documentary evidence is not clearly there to state that that were the case you realize there was a kind of ruthlessness about making this garden and other landscape Gardens because a Parish Church you know this is something that had been there for hundreds of years raised to the ground to make way for grass to the modern sensibility that's aing vandalism but it was the brave new world it was the way ahead out with the old in with the [Music] landscape kroom Echoes the growing confidence of Georgian Britain the country had moved away from the politics of its European neighbors with a settled constitutional monarchy and a more liberal philosophy and this was expressed in a style of garden that dispensed with form it and created a romanticized image of the rural idle so what we see in these Landscapes are a series of carefully manipulated idealized views of the countryside as a wealthy educated 18th century nobility wished to portray it I want to find out how Lord centry and brown although from very different backgrounds both young energetic men created this new vision here at KW so I'm meeting the estate manager Michael forer Smith to look at Brown's original plans aha look at this it's fantastic is what date it is the plan was originally drawn up in 1763 and it charts the position of every single one of Brown's newly planted trees set out across this new landscape at cream and the thing which which is very clear is you know this thick planting that's right so this distant belt of trees almost gives the appearance that there's a vast native Woodland that stretches out Beyond and of course that's an illusion but the shout B makes it seem so so this obviously is the famous picture of brown yeah my reading of brown is it's just practicality very englishing how do we make this work an engineer yeah completely completely so an engineer and in the process an artist I guess yeah although he bet never saw himself like that no Brown was the great landscape improver not only did he make your land more beautiful but it was much more economic to run gone with a fussy and tightly clipped box and U Hedges that required intensive labor and the Sheep did the work for you it was more productive and in fact in the 18th century great Beauty and productivity were seen as being the same thing and there's one letter from Lord Coventry and he talks of creating a Utopia and he doesn't just mean in terms of how this is going to look you know these are Grand Ambitions Brown and coventry's vision for kro was extraordinary and radical but it wasn't holy original there's much more to see and discover about kro and about how Brown and hence the whole landscape movement worked but to explore its Origins I want to visit a garden designed by a man who Brown had previously worked under at Stone and who really pioneered the Revolutionary new con concept of the landscape Garden the garden I want to take you to is Rous it was made only about a dozen years before KW started but really is the door through which kro and I believe all lelot Browns work [Music] past rasham in Oxfordshire is is the work of William Kent whom I consider the great Genius of 18th century garden design and this is his Masterpiece it's still owned by the same family who employed Kent in 1738 to reshape the garden and despite nearly 300 years of changing Fashions and styles rasham has remained practically unaltered since the day it was completed this is one of the great Garden views it's about a kind of gentle embracing of this soft very British landscape but it's manipulated because there's a Folly up there on the hillside that looks like an old medieval ruin in fact it's just a wall a facade designed solely to be seen from this Viewpoint and another way that landscape was manipulated was with a new piece of garden architecture the haa is a beautifully simple and effective device it's a wall designed to keep stock out but it's a wall sunken down in a ditch so from inside the garden it was an unbroken view you didn't see the barrier you didn't see the ditch or the wall all you saw was what you wanted to see which was your prize animals your wonderful trees you were planting rolling out into the landscape and it was incredibly liberating it opened Gardens out from the road you look up to the house and there's this enormous impressive great Avenue of grass in fact most of it is just a steep slope made to look as though it's much bigger than it is but once the scene is set then to go into the garden proper there are a number of different roots and this is this is very typical none of them are Grand it almost doesn't quite look like you're in the right place and they're said to be something like a thousand different Roots around it so let's go this way you see this really doesn't feel like the entrance to one of the greatest Gardens in the world does it [Music] this Garden is green every shade of green is played with the light is green you have this underlayer of Laurel and then you have use and you rise up and have the deciduous trees with the light just shift and falling [Music] through then everywhere at russan there are scenes that are revealed you come out and you find yourself in a [Music] setting of course that's Kent's great genius he was a stage designer really and you become the actor you perform on it and of course what that does is make the garden work entirely in a personal way for you every time is a fresh performance so instead of looking on and admiring it like you're doing so many Gardens you breathe life into it and that's magic that really is special I've got a picture of William Kent and if Brown was someone that everybody admired he was professional he turned up on time amazingly efficient knew what he was talking about Kent was all over the shop he never turned up on time he didn't answer letters he didn't send in invoices uh he drunk too much always said that Kent would come and stay with you drink all your wine probably sleep with your wife and your daughters and charm you and you can't help but love William Kent he's he's one of the great brilliant Rogues of History the accusations against Kent and he's not universally admired are that he really just added embellishment to good work that was already in place but the touches that he added transformed and everything that he touched and all his work I think stands Peerless above the the more sober contributions of his [Music] contemporaries William Kent was heavily influenced by a stay of 10 years in Italy where he studied and trained as a painter and absorbed every facet of Art architecture and decoration and although he was the son of a humble Joiner from Bridlington this was the Heyday of The Grand Tour when aristocratic young men would set off in a kind of glorified Gap year to absorb European art and culture so from about 1730 as these Aristocrats returned home and took over their country seats British Gardens gradually began to reject the existing Dutch formality and replace it with these classical influences but Kent a Maverick to the end also added a quirky element to it I love the way that in this Temple of echo called townzen building you have the temple and the pillars in the front and on the side sash window so what you end up with is Rome but Rome with its feet firmly in Oxfordshire [Music] and Kent was more much more than just a garden designer hello hello nice to see you in thank you very much no aspect of design was beyond him and the home of Charles and Angela Cal Dorma is Testament to his extraordinary range through here the dining room right but if we turn this way now this is an extraordinary Kimo every detail of this room from elaborate marble mantle pieces to ornate guilt picture frames decorative swans and intricate coring was all designed by [Music] Kent and Kent did this ceiling did he paint that yes he painted it on canvas and it was trundled down rolled up as on a wagon is it a wonderful decorator designer the color the blues and the Reds absolutely wonderful come on Monty okay uhhuh the General's very Grand library now that is General Dormer is it yes who commissioned the garden and what relation is he to you great great great great not sure how many grades so that the the line has stayed in the family yeah absolutely it does seem I wonder if there are any other examples of rooms looking out onto a garden designed where the building has been designed the plaster workor the furniture all designed by the same man it it is extraordinary did you know if you come did you know oh just see it through there the visitor's doorway that was built by Kent especially so that passes by in the 18th century could visit the gardens a great tradition in this country of places being visited and Clary the head Gardener he got 660 a year in tips which was a great deal of money that's a lot of money it and he was a wonderful chck and she sacked him Jane Caesar right why cuz she didn't like him getting the tips so people have been visiting rasham from the beginning yes yeah the gardens not the house yeah are you I'm any pressure to modernize oh no no what for you can't hurt it if you respect its Spirit it tells you what it likes and what it doesn't rasham brilliantly displays how Kent included the landscape to make an idealized image of the English Countryside Brown was a pupil of Kent and as I return to kro I can see just how much he was influenced by him but he took Kent's ideas a step further to create Gardens that didn't just use the natural landscape as part of the design but embraced it for as far as the eye could see of course Brown was a genius at manipulating the landscape and and creating this harmonious hole but his real contribution that was unique was the park until Brown the park was still really the remnants of a medieval Deer Park an area that was fenced off that deer were kept in that you hunted but Brown took that idea and brought it to the walls of the house now Kent had included it but it was at a distance it was a view and brown brings it without Halt and then filled it with elegant trees so that the space became managed and gardened this is a garden as much as anything else but of course it appears completely relaxed and natural and critically Grand of course Brown knew that as well as being beautiful The Wildflower Meadow also provided valuable hay but cutting this Great Sea of Grass had to be all done by hand using a scythe and this was hard and extremely skillful work although I've often used a sidee over the years I've never really mastered it so I'm hoping that Martin kibber white still siing regularly at 87 years old will be able to share its Secrets it's like a saw you're actually swinging swinging the blade in an arc it's actually following the ark right it not actually you take very little let's see if I can find a bit to do here you don't take more than two or three inches at a time I love the sound the sore action takes less effort so you can keep going for longer where did you learn to side well I first leared when I was 14 or 15 big enough to hold azee and uh then later in my 20s an old man who was in his 70s in the 50s he must have been a grown man in 1900 he showed me the finer points he must have learned in the 19th century there are records of mowers here at kroom being paid one shilling and 10 a day for their mowing plus 28 pints of small beer wow 28 pints so thirsday work they're probably mowing half cut most of the day but they were doing long long hours keep the heel down that's a lot better [Music] attack now we know from the records here at crew that this Meadow was cut by 28 Ms so to maintain Brown's landscape took an army of skilled men and women working long hours for days and days we tend to romanticize the work that was done by the whole landscape movement and the parks that were created but behind a lot of them lay enclosures now enclosures were acts of parliament which enabled a land owner to take land that had otherwise been common and literally enclose it hedge it off and use it for themselves and common land have been a really important resource for villagers people who might have just one cow or half a dozen sheep or just grow a little bit of call a really important part of their survival in many cases so behind these scenes often lies a story of people dispossessed moved and the land that have been used in a certain way for centuries suddenly becoming the property of just one individual given the great human and financial cost attached to making these 18th century Landscapes I want to find out more about the Earl of centry who commissioned and funded the garden at [Music] KW the Earl has been described as a proud argumentative and not altogether attractive figure yet he was clearly a great Patron and collector so I've come to the orangery to meet the Coventry family archist Jill tovi to see what the real man was like so what how you got here because this is this is a lot of stuff very very small part of the KR archive which is huge but we've got some plant bills 25 white raspberries 12 pineapples cantal Loop melon this is a huge plant list yeah which would have all been quite rare and interesting I they're expensive indeed how much did he spend on his garden well on The Garden Alone not really sure but on the whole project it's been being estimated is equivalent to 28 million these days so a lot of money and where did the money come from where did the money come everyone asks but it's not apparent but you would think for such an obsessive collector and recorder of events he would have recorded it but this is the other thing he doesn't keep any of his private letters but he kept he kept receipt exactly but there's no clue as to his private life what little we do know is full of tragedy he was 28 when he inherited the title single man so the first thing he needed was a wife of course so he chose the most beautiful woman in London Mariah gunning the new lady Coventry was already famous for her extraordinary beauty which was said to make grown men faint before her but in keeping with the fashion of the day she wore a heavy layer of lead and Mercury based makeup which caused blood poisoning and began to eat away her skin it's reported that she would only have the light of a tea kettle in her room because she was so devastated by the sight of her face and this is a woman who'd been the most beautiful woman in London so sad marah died at the age of 29 leaving the Earl with four children but his relationships with them was at best fractious he disinherited his eldest daughter for her choice of husband and his son and air George was banished from K when he also married against his father's wishes centry even refusing to speak to him when he was blinded in a hunting accident that says something about this man that we glorify because he did a wonderful thing at KW but at the same time there was a dark side to him it was rigid cruel yeah and yeah you could say that it seems that Coventry had a closer bond with his garden designer than his own kith and kin giving Brown the friendship he was unable to offer his children and it was his work at crew that paved the way for Brown's spectacular career and saw him subsequently work on over 170 different projects across the country the success of crew meant that Brown's Fame quickly spread and one of of the grandest places that he came to was here at [Music] Chatsworth Chatsworth in darbishire has been the seat of the devire family for six centuries for nearly all that period at the Forefront of style and fashion displaying wealth power and Grandeur by 1759 7 years after his work at kro it was already one of the great Gardens of Britain and the perfect setting for brown to add his own distinctive stamp and in true bran onion style he swept away much of the formality widened a river and moved an entire Village he did however preserve one of the country's finest Garden features created 50 years earlier at the beginning of the century the Cascade was part of the extensive formal Garden that surrounded the house here but when capability Brown came here in the middle of the 18th century much of it was swept away and if you look beyond the house you can see a typical brownan landscape and you have that flow from house to park to Countryside Beyond in one unbroken movement like his mentor William Ken the key to all Brown's landscape designs is the creation of spectacular views and Vistas and I've met up with the current Duke of devire who's attempting to restore many of the views that brown originally intended at Chatsworth I've come to learn that the house and the garden and the park are really one work of art and they're all part of the same thing it's not a house with a garden around it which happens to have a park outside it and actually the park was getting a bit cluttered up people had planted understandably lovely trees uh because they felt there was an empty space and it's a natural thing to do and we decided amand and I decided to take it back to the middle of the 18th century as best we could today the Duke is having an oak tree cut down to reveal a long lost view it's a lovely tree in the wrong place the views into the house and out from the house need to be opened up the house was built purely to show off the owners wanted to be seen to have a great big house they didn't want to surround it by trees and they no to can see that's why it's always been open to visitors you know they welcome people to come and look at this wonderful thing they created as you would yes so so you're you're freeing out the views from the house and you're freeing out the views to the house absolutely [Music] there you go do you see what I mean absolutely completely transforms it I think this is so important this landscape and the house of garden apart being one Land art really it's dramatic it is dramatic it is dramatic financed by growing colonial trade and industrial development by the 1760s any self-respecting landed gentry were creating their own landscape [Music] Garden complete with classically inspired buildings statues and eye catches often set miles from the house perhaps the most extraordinary of these Follies is at Payne's Hill in Su the brainchild of the painter designer and politician Charles Hamilton he had a grotto built using hundreds of thousands of crystals including gypsum from the Atlas Mountains Hamilton had been inspired by his own Grand Tour to Italy where the ornate grottos were a key feature of every Renaissance [Music] Garden but for all its ornate and intricate cmhip The Grotto was just one element of the 158 acre Garden which took over 30 years to construct but in the end Hamilton was forced to sell his estate one of the many wealthy Aristocrats to have bankrupted themselves in their Endeavor to create landscape [Music] art the sheer scale of maintaining these vast Gardens meant that in time many were turned back to farmland and this is what happened to Brown's Garden at kro court until the National Trust came to the rescue in 1997 and overseeing its restoration is the head Gardener Katherine ala I guess running a garden like this is a very different matter to running a more conventionally formal Garden well there's probably some similarities but also Al quite a few differences so um this naturalistic style of gardening You could argue is even harder to attain why is that why is that because you battling against nature constantly cre was originally called seim Mia and it was a marsh um and that Marsh is constantly trying to return and on a day like today it's probably partly achieving that the the ear of centry once described his estate as the most hopeless spot in all the land Brown's answer was to create a network of underground drainage culs that channeled water from the sodn ground into a mile and a half Long Lake he designed to look like a curving River however this meant massive Earthworks all of course dug by hand but Brown did have a clever way of easing the workload so when you're looking down the river from the house the bits that you see are deliberately wide and the which cross in front of you which which are not in the views from the house are much narrower so was obviously thinking of the work workers that's where Brown is just this very practical man isn't [Music] he so far I've admired this huge undertaking from the distance of history but I want to get inside the Practical reality of creating an artificial landscape like this so Katherine is taking me to a site where she's planning to plant a tree that was in Brown's original plans it's a nice spot isn't it it's not bad it's not bad say how do we know that there were there were trees up on this this rise uh we've got a watercolor by Bernie 1784 and he was doing uh watercolors of werer for a guide book and this Whopper here yeah so using this watercolor and the other documents we know that there was a clump of trees at the top here located quite near the church right if this is the site that's great and we can get at it and that's good now we have to find the tree where's the tree okay out in the Parkland I think we've got an option come on let's go have a look okay most of the trees here would have been planted from seed or as saplings but Brown was well known for planting mature trees for a spectacular instant effect [Music] it's a nicer look isn't it yeah it's little until you have to move it yes I think it's quite an exciting challenge I think that is a Challen it is a real challenge yeah if I mean it's one thing to move it and another to keep it alive so I think that's a big Challenge and I cannot believe that capability Brown would have tried things much bigger with the equipment he had we can't move the tree until Autumn when the growth stops and it goes into winter dorcy and this gives us a little time to prepare the equipment that we'll need so I'm meeting up with Russell Stringer whose students at the Worcester design and Technology College are going to build me a hor drawn cart based on images of the equipment that brown himself would have [Music] used this one here moving really quite a large tree and we can see from the figures and and the horses the size I actually think it's quite fanciful because those roots if you had that much bare root the tree would die yeah I think they've exaggerated that exactly little and I think this is much more the type of thing and much more the scale yeah it tips up and is held and there it is being moved it's not a complicated um piece of Machinery I mean the wheels are going to be the sort of the main problem but you've got to bear in mind the weight of the tree 2 inch wheels will take two ton three inch wheels three ton four inch wheels four ton so that's that that's a sort of um thing we need to sort of Bear in mind the size of the wheels to take the size of the tree okay for all the manpow and Ingenuity involved transforming the landscape at kroom took a generation Brown never lived to see his vision completed he died in a May 1 Street in 1783 apparently having just met his old friend the ear of [Music] Coventry by then the Industrial Revolution was rapidly gaining ground bringing with it New Wealth right across Britain which in turn was invariably expressed in new grand houses and [Music] Gardens the Earl of Coventry lived on at kro well into the 19th century and even in his old age commissioned new SC Ure for the house and garden using a technique that had become all the rage in Georgian high society and they included these statues guarding the entrance to the house designed by one of my own ancestors the architect James wart one of W's contributions to KW was this pair of sphinxes and they were very fashionable they're made out of code Stone which became hugely popular amongst landowners at the end of the 18 century and the whole point about code stone is it's not stone at all it's Clay mixed in with various ingredients to make it exceptionally durable so this hasn't been carved it's been modeled been cast Cod Stone added a new dimension and sophistication to Garden sculpture and architecture and left it stamp on a surprising number of our finest buildings and landscapes [Music] I'm fascinated by this code production so I'm off to Wilshire where the recipe for code Stone has been rediscovered the original Workshop ceased production in [Music] 1837 hello and it took years of trial and error for the sculptor Steven Peter I'm Steve Steve very nice to meet you to uncover the secret of the code formula and technique is this all repairing stuff that was made in the heyo of Co no it's a mixture of of some repair work and some new new pieces so this this is this is a restoration job here Hannah's making new pieces and then this is a bracket um off a building in London which building Buckingham Palace right is there a lot of code at Buckingham Palace a huge amount oh oh that's written on there oh that's the original piece of graffiti from who made it says foolish or foolish Barnet who and Barnet was the bloke who made it was it presumably there were maybe there were two people working on it or foolish Barnet how fantastic so that must have been hidden from when it was done to when you took it off yeah first people to see [Music] that code sculpture was made using mold which is both much faster than carving a block of stone and also meant that the mold could be reused many times however the main advantage of code over carved Stone lay in the extreme fine detail and the quality of crossmon that could be applied to the clay if I wanted to order a pair of tigers what would it cost me 16,000 for the pair 8,000 each wow this is not a poor man Stone no they were held in high high regard by The Architects of that time you actually in clay we can we can really push the detail and the undercuts and be really extravagant with it whereas in stone it's harder so presumbly say take this here this Keystone yeah that would be really difficult if if you look at the the detail in here would be very tricky in stone wouldn't it exactly yeah you wouldn't do that in Li lime St it Steven explained to me some of the secrets of this extraordinary versatile and durable material this is um the clay we have lots of different blends okay is this a secret by the way are we allowed do you want to give away the blend I'm I'm I'm not that secretive about it cuz ultimately it's it's the it's the sculpting that's right that's difficult makes it hard to produce so let me have a look at that so I can see the little bits in it little white bits and what you're looking at there is this which is called Grog code is a mixture of fired up ceramic grit powdered glass sand and ground Flint but then you treat it like clay yes you model it like clay you fire it like clay yeah and and it goes through but it will weather and last much better than normal terra cotta and some Stone oh lot yeah I mean last a lot longer than any limestones right and marble really longer than marble yeah see to the lay person a lot longer that is an incredible fact incredibly hard material producing these finished works is highly skilled but to get a feel for the process I'm going to help make a Georgian Keystone right so this this is are these all part of the same mold yeah this completes one mold so that's ready to receive clay the code clay so we just take handfuls and push it in yeah but yeah basically what I would do is basically means politely no well you yeah we need to be careful so i' identify the fact that the nose is quite deep and undercut so you need to make sure initially that we get clay into there okay so that's the first bit just push it in with your thumb make sure it gets right into the bottom you can maybe just use two fingers to go into that forehead you got to get into the corners there sometimes quite difficult you need to actually make real attention okay to that corner of course it's absolute Joy working clay you know it's it's it's a lovely material you're doing very well mon definitely give you a job the success of code is remarkable for the fact that in an age dominated by men it was the brainchild of a woman Elena code who was a brilliant businesswoman and quickly made her company a household name [Music] right well well wait and then hopefully I'll be able to take a [Music] bit Mrs code was obviously a business genius but she was lucky because by 1770 there was a lot of new money and this money was generated by IND industry until about 1750 most of the money being spent on houses and Gardens was essentially old landed gentry but by the end of the 18th century all this New Wealth developed from the Industrial Revolution expressed itself in new houses new Gardens new ornaments and code supplied it superbly because it was a little bit cheaper little bit more accessible and could be produced us at home in a very efficient manner so she got everything right and the thing that was most right of all was her [Music] timing yeah can I just yeah take one half of and then and I won't damage it you might drag a bit but no okay in its Heyday cod's work could be found in almost all the stately Homes and Gardens of Georgian Britain but its success was shortlived therez and I looking at me Elena Cod died in 1821 leaving no natural successor and poor management and changing Fashions led to the company's Swift demise however there is still no better materal material for producing highquality durable outdoor sculpture right we're now faced with tidying this up and and adding all the detail generally because ultimately what we're trying to get to is this that is much more detailed almost every aspect of it than that the reason people really like code and why it's so revered is is it is this stage now the addition of all this detailed will really lift it and bring it to life and that's what code was so good at great well that's beyond my skill anymore can't work on that just as code profited from the building boom of the late 1700s the next generation of designers tailored the English landscape Garden to the broader tastes of the industrialists and the businessmen who were pouring their new money into Country Estates by the end of the 18th century the whole landscape movement was evolving and changing and from these changes one dominant figure emerged and his name was Humphrey Repton Repton had tried his hand at many Ventures before he spotted a gap in the landscape industry and adroitly filled so I've come to Paris and Wales to visit one of the surviving examples of his work the privately owned stannage Park and although Repton didn't have the sublime Artistry of William Kent or the innate practicality of capability Brown his great talent was recognizing the demands of a new CLE onel and brilliantly marketing his designs to them good morning mty how are you I'm very well nice to Jonathan Colman Rogers ancestor Charles Rogers was was among the hundreds of wealthy Aristocrats who commissioned Repton and each was presented with what became his famous trademark a red book there it is in Pride of place bright red brilliantly written considering he was supposed to have written these in a carriage on the way home beautiful it's very rare to find one of these books still in the house and garden that Repton designed Humphrey rton and there's a picture of him here was a self-made Landscape designer which was a term he coined he had tried and not done very well in trade in his 30s applied himself to the study of plants and of design and set up in business and quite systematically marketed his Services unlike Brown who would oversee the creation of almost every aspect of his designs Repton simply offered his clients clear instructions and plans in their red book and then they could execute them when and how they pleased he also devised a clever trick to show what his plans would look like he did these pretty little drawings of the site as it was but you lift up a flap and that is what he's proposing so immediately you could see the change and here a house across lift that up and there's a lake and a new house and the cattle and the deer grazing the other aspect of these red books which was new and fascinating was that it was geared as much to the women of the household as to the men the men would still be paying for it but the women would pay a very important part of it so there's an awful lot of reference to Domesticity to flowers to convenience the watercolors are prettyy and the changes are delightful and that's a much more feminine approach and what I love is the three following principles economy convenience and a certain degree of magnificence is perfectly pitching it absolutely right everybody wants to save money increasingly people wanted to be able to live with a degree of comfort but everybody always wants a certain degree of magnificence repon success lay in his ability to appealed to a growing landed gentry by the late 18th century wanted a little less of the landscape and a little more of the [Music] garden capability Brown had Parkland coming right up to the house almost like a sea lapping at the door what Repton did was hold the park at Bay and established a kind of Base relating to the house so the house sat on a level area of gardens with straight lines Lawns paths and then the park would be approached and you can see here that the the wall is visible it's not a haha there are markers there's moan grass there's a real delineation between garden and park Repton was the last of the great landscape designers of the 18th century it was an age that had witness Garden building on a scale that exceeded anything before it in this country and has never been equaled since but before I leave this Century I'm returning to K court for one last visit it's now Autumn and help our small team we're attempting to replant an oak tree to complete capability Brown's original designs using only the methods and technology that were available to him in the 1750s gently there gently gently gently steady Randy hiscock is supplying the horow who it is they're wonderful what are their names this is uh Minnesota and Anastasia and this is fantastic looking yeah specifically built for the the purpose and these wheels are really substantial but I guess it is quite a weight it's going to take will they be up to it do you think well hopefully they'll do the job well we find I'm in trouble we okay de walk on there walk on good girl walk on walk on there gently gently steady steady before the horses can be put to work we need to dig out the tree whilst preserving as much of the root boards we can but the soil is heavy and compacted and it's proving to be a real really difficult job you can see we're using pickaxes we're using those sorts of people The Roots have been slash broken and now left like this it would die without any question so speed and minimum damage is really what we're after before removing any more soil and damaging The Roots further we decide to try and use the cart as a lever to priz the tree from the ground very nice beautiful job okay start lowering it one hold the Rope that's it someone else someone else go on the road pull it back a bit your wheel back that side B yeah that's it now push push push okay using the horses at this stage would be too risky because if the tree suddenly comes away it could scare them and make them Bolt so we have to resort to manow of truth let's give it a go two [Laughter] go yeah exactly why we would not do it with the horses cuz what happens it something like that might happen right the Bottom's pulling the top the Bottom's going in what's happened here is that you see there's a a branch that's going through there you've got a shake and a fult and it's split at that point and in fact is split right the way down back down to another big knot there so this is a useless piece of wood and that actually illustrates a point because what they would have done is they would have known they would have valued the importance so they would have chosen a really fine bit of wood however you learn okay we really need to get this tree out of the ground before the roots dry out completely so having lashed the shaft together we're giving it one last try with just rope and Brute Force there is movement yeah yeah now he's coming there we are to be honest I genuinely thought we were going to have to give up and put a vehicle on it okay so if we now get it back uppr right get the machine on strap it on and put it up let's have some man part this way this way this way obviously the roots exposed like this is not good I mean this is this goes against all good advice but on the other hand moving a tree like this is is sort of emergency treatment now all these problems you can only learn how to do it by doing it by doing it badly and my guess is that to learn how to do this they probably failed on 10 15 trees before they really got the back and we're just having to make it up as we go along right gently come on there walk on good girl walk on steady there gently good girl walk [Music] onady if nothing else today has increased my respect but the amount of work in making these Landscapes this is a modest tree moving it has taken about a dozen of us all day with lots of trials and tribulations and the Chan of success after fairly slim yet this was a tiny aspect of making these Landscapes Lakes were dug Rivers damned and moved land was reshaped and formed and the fact they dotted around a few mature trees really didn't amount to much when you'd had to do all that massive amount of work it really does go beyond anything that we experience today let Al without any Machinery of any kind little bit more very [Music] [Music] good there [Music] done the land Cape movement was based upon the fashion for an idealized Countryside but by the end of the 18th century it was going out of fashion because the world had changed big new technological developments big new cities new ideas demanded new styles of gardening but that is another story [Music]