William Shenstone and the Leasowes
The English landscape garden in transition, c.1740-1763

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

[start page 8] A circuit of the Leasowes

Note: the figures in round brackets, e.g. (200), in the following section refer to the pages of the ‘Description of the Leasowes’ published in volume II of The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, Esq., in 1764. The bold figures in square brackets, e.g. [10] indicate features within the garden which are numbered 1-41 on the main map of the Leasowes (Map 2).

The Leasowes was conveniently accessibly from the main road that linked Birmingham with the Severn and Stour valleys. Visitors left the road along a curving green lane which descended into a wooded valley, and entered the garden proper at an arch in a ‘ruinated wall’ known as the Priory Gate. Although this was the beginning of the garden tour, those visitors who were to be welcomed at the house before beginning their walk first crossed the lawn on a path which led to the house before returning to rejoin the circuit at a higher point, just south of Virgil’s Grove. In the words of the ‘Description of the Leasowes’, ‘Here it seems, the company should properly begin their walk; but generally chuse [sic] to go up with their horses or equipage to the house; from whence returning, they descend back into the valley’ (200). Once they had commenced their garden walk proper, the visitors would encounter first a small hermitage or house made of tree-roots [1], containing a tablet upon which was inscribed a poem of four stanzas, signed by ‘Oberon’, which set an appropriately whimsical and rustic tone - ‘Here in cool grot, and mossy cell / We rural fays and fairies dwell’ - before ending with some basic rules of conduct for visitors to the garden to follow:

And tread with awe these favour’d bowers,
Nor wound the shrubs, nor bruise the flowers;
So may your path with sweets abound!
So may your couch with rest be crown’d!
But harm betide the wayward swain,
Who dares our hallow’d haunts profane! (200-1)

There were many inscriptions at the Leasowes, and the comments of the ‘Description’ illuminate the role which they played in provoking and sustaining a mood appropriate for the character of the landscape through which the visitors were passing: ‘These sentiments correspond as well as possible with the ideas we form of the abode of fairies; and appearing deep in this romantic valley, serve to keep alive such enthusiastic images while this sort of scene continues’ (201).

The landscape here was characterized by ‘tall trees, high irregular ground, and rugged scars’ with the stream on the right, overlooked by a bench [2] inscribed with lines from Virgil, forming ‘perhaps, the most natural, if not the most striking, of the many cascades here found’; in the centre, ‘a pretty circular landskip’ (202) appeared through the trees, one of a number of views which contrived to make a feature of Halesowen church steeple. A seat [3] was positioned to signify that here was a particularly pleasing view; such ‘extempore benches’ being ‘chiefly intended as hints to spectators, lest in passing cursorily thro’ the farm they might suffer any of that immense variety the place furnishes, to escape their notice’ (202). The landscape gradually opened out to present [end page 8] a wider prospect as the valley descended and the path curved around the feature known as the Priory or priory ruin [4], which visitors were warned ‘was not meant for an object here’ (203), and skirted the edge of a large pool which Shenstone sometimes called his ‘lake’. This area of water, formed from one of the fish-ponds of Halesowen Abbey (the fabric of which apparently also furnished Shenstone with his ‘ruinated priory’[1]), was an attractive feature from close up but was also of visual importance as the middle-ground of the view ‘from Mr. Shenstone’s house, where it is seen to great advantage’ (203).

Beyond the Priory, the path passed a bench [5] offering a view over the lake: ‘the back Ground of this scene is very beautiful, and exhibits a picture of villages and varied ground, finely held up to the eye’ (202). Next came a seat beneath a spreading canopy of oaks [6], inscribed with lines from Virgil’s Eclogues, carefully chosen to establish in the mind of the visitor the arcadian image of the Leasowes as an idealized pastoral world in which Shenstone, identified with the poetic shepherds of the Eclogues, lived in rustic retirement with his fields and his flocks:

Huc ades, O Meliboee! caper tibit salvus et hoedi [sic];
Et si quid cessare potes, requiesce sub umbra.

Hither, O Meliboeus! bend thy way;
Thy herds, thy goats, secure from harm repose;
If happy leisure serve awhile to stay,
Here rest thy limbs beneath these shady bows.[2]

[end page 9] Shenstone was an enthusiastic admirer of Virgil, and the Roman poet’s pastoral works are well represented at the Leasowes, with five inscribed passages from the Eclogues contributing to the rustic imagery of the garden. The more down-to-earth Georgics were represented in only one inscription. In addition, the aesthetic and poetic climax of the Leasowes was the grove dedicated to Virgil, which Shenstone believed to be his finest scene and which had been the first area of the garden to receive his attention. This invocation through text and imaginative association of a celebrated classical conception of the pastoral was as important a part of the image the Leasowes as the visual invocation of natural rural tranquillity which Shenstone offered his visitors in the carefully composed views from his walks, inwards across his property and outwards across the surrounding countryside.

The next feature was a second small root-house [7] dedicated to the Earl of Stamford (who owned an estate at nearby Enville). This structure[3] contained a seat positioned to look out upon a cascade which was one of the most celebrated sights at the Leasowes, ‘a fairy vision’ according to the ‘Description’, albeit one on a rather restricted scale:

consisting of an irregular and romantic fall of water, very unusual, one hundred and fifty yards in continuity, and a very striking scene it affords. Other cascades may possibly have the advantage of a greater descent, and a larger torrent, but a more wild and romantic appearance of water, and at the same time strictly natural, is what I never saw in any place whatsoever. (204-5)

[end page 10] This cascade was an entirely artificial creation, fed through sluices from a reservoir pool; the path of the water was impeded by stone flags to create romantically irregular splashing.[4] Unfortunately, water was not particularly plentiful at the Leasowes, and - as with all Shenstone’s waterworks - this cascade had a regrettable tendency to dry up.

Beyond the cascade the path entered another wooded valley, a rougher landscape than that encountered previously: ‘a confused mixture of savage and uncultivated ground, held up to the eye, and forming a landskip fit for the pencil of Salvator Rosa’ (206). As the route curved between thickets and groves of trees, it passed among a number of carefully sited features. An urn, dedicated to William Somerville, stood in a glade [8]; Somerville was a friend and near neighbour of Shenstone’s, and himself a minor rural poet. Nearby, apparently attached to one of the trees, was an inscription to Shenstone’s friend and publisher Robert Dodsley [9]; and, glimpsed through the trees above the path was a ‘happily situated’ lead statue of a piping faun [10] ‘which not only embellishes this scene, but is also seen from the court before the house, and from other places’ (206). A bench [11], encountered just as the path was leaving the wooded area, offered ‘the first, but not the most striking, view of the Priory’ (206), while the next seat [12] offered a ‘more advantageous’ view of the structure,

to which the eye is led down a green slope, through a scenery of tall oaks, in a most agreeable manner; the grove we have just past on one side, and a hill of trees and thicket on the other; conducting the eye to a narrow opening through which it appears. (207)

[end page 11] This seat bore a pastoral inscription from Horace: ‘Me gelidum nemus / Nympharumque leves cum satyris chori / Securnunt populo’ (Be mine, amid the breezy grove, / In sacred solitude to rove; / To see the nymphs and satyrs bound, / Light dancing through the mazy ground).[5] Shenstone added this inscription ‘to supply what he thought some want of life in this part of the farm, and to keep the spectator’s attention till he came to scale the hill beyond’ (207). An urn [13] bearing a dedication to Joseph Shenstone, the poet’s brother, was also located in this area. Ascending the hill, the path passed two more seats, the first [14] unadorned but the second [15] of ‘gothic form’ and bearing a lengthy inscription composed by Shenstone which began ‘Shepherd, would’st thou here obtain / Pleasure unalloyed with pain?’ At the top of the hill stood a remarkable feature, a giant stone goblet set upon an octagonal seat [16]. The goblet was inscribed ‘To all friends round the Wrekin!’, that hill being visible from the spot, weather permitting. Shenstone set this seat within a ring of slender firs which divided the view ‘into several components, each answering to the octagonal seat in the centre’, thus creating a series of distinct views, ‘to each of which is allotted a competent number of objects to make a complete picture’ (210).

Beyond the goblet-seat, the path descended the other side of the hill into a shadowy valley, passing two more seats. The first was in the form of a ‘gothic alcove’ [17], and bore an inscription in medieval black-letter script extolling the virtues of a retired rural life, while the second [18] was inscribed with lines from Horace’s Satires:

Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus,
Hortus ubi, et tecto vicinus jugis aquae fons,
Et paulum sylvae super his foret.
Auctius atque Dii Melius fecere

[end page 12] This was my wish - an humble spot of ground
A garden well dispos’d and fenc’d around;
A bubbling fountain to my dwelling nigh,
With crystal treasures stored, and never dry;
The whole defended by a modest wood -
This was my wish - my wish the gods allow’d
And e’en beyond that wish indulgently bestow’d.[6]

The landscape now became enclosed as rough grassy hills shut out wider views, before the path turned westwards and began to climb once again, widening into a tree-edged ‘Lovers’ Walk’. Three more seats were encountered: one was a small bench [19] from which a view over the lower reaches of the garden was obtainable; a seat at a bend in the path [20] offered a view of Clent Hill and Halesowen church steeple, framed by the trees at the lower end of the garden; and the third, situated by a clump of trees, bore a dedication to Shenstone’s friend Joseph Spence [21]. Beyond Spence’s seat the walk led to the upper pool, which ‘though not large, is so agreeably shaped, and has its bounds so well concealed, that the beholder may receive less pleasure from many lakes of greater extent’ (214). Beside the pool stood another inscribed bench, known as the ‘Assignation Seat’ [22]. A wide prospect was spread before this seat; the spectator’s eye

passes first over some rough furzy ground, then over water to the large swelling lawn, in the centre of which the house is discovered among trees and thickets. This forms the fore ground. Beyond this appears a swell of waste furzy land, diversified with a cottage and a road that winds back behind a farm-house, and a fine clump of trees. The back scene of all is a semicircular range of [end page 13] hills diversified with wood, scenes of cultivation and enclosures . . . (217)

From the Assignation Seat with its Virgilian inscription,[7] the path climbed towards the wooded ridge, alongside a small stream. At a bend in the path, set back among the trees, stood an urn erected by Shenstone to commemorate his beloved niece, Maria Dolman, who had died of smallpox at the age of twenty-four [23].

Continuing to ascend, zigzagging among the trees, the path passed a seat [24] bearing the line ‘Divine oblivion of low-thoughted care!’ from Alexander Pope’s ‘Eloisa to Abelard’,[8] and another bench [25] inscribed with lines from Virgil’s Georgics,[9] before changing its character from a rambling woodland path into an evidently formal avenue, ‘a long straight lined walk in the wood, arched over with tall trees . . . Though the walk, as I said, be straight lined, yet the base rises and falls so agreeably, as leaves no room to censure its formality’ (217). This avenue was provided with a lofty gothic seat halfway along [26], and ended at a ‘small rustic building’ which Shenstone called his Temple of Pan [27]. This building had a rustic seat inside, bore a carved frieze of pipes and masks, and carried an inscription from Virgil’s second Eclogue:

Pan primus calamos cera conjugere plures
Edocuit; Pan curat oves, oviumque magistros [sic passim].

[end page 14] Pan, god of shepherds, first inspir’d our swains
Their pipes to frame, and tune their rural strains,
Pan from impending harm the fold defends,
And Pan the master of the fold befriends.[10]

Beyond the temple, a path took visitors to the brow of Mucklow Hill, where a seat [28] was placed, inscribed ‘Divini gloria ruris!’ (‘O glory of the rural scene divine!’), to enable them to enjoy a view which took in the Clee Hills, the Wrekin, and the distant mountains of Wales. Visitors then returned to the temple, this time passing in front of it and making their way down towards the wooded valley past an elevated seat [29] along an undulating path that offered further attractive views. In the corner of a field between the path and the road stood a gothic screen [30] which served as an eyecatcher. The path gradually descended into the valley, passing two more seats [31] [32], in order to reach the climax of the garden tour, Virgil’s Grove. The entrance to the grove was marked by an obelisk announcing that it was dedicated to Virgil: ‘P. Virgilio Maroni: Lapis iste cum luco sacer esto’ [33].

Virgil’s Grove was the area of the Leasowes upon which Shenstone had lavished most attention, perfecting the waterfall and cascades, setting out seats, laying and relaying paths, positioning islands in the stream, and carrying out extensive planting in order to give the grove a sequestered, poetic and pensive air. Particularly admired by visitors was the way in which the grove worked by ‘surprize’ and revealed its charms only gradually. According to the ‘Description’, ‘one of the most beautiful cascades imaginable is seen by way of incident, through a kind of vista, or glade, falling down a precipice over-arched with trees, and strikes us with surprize’ (222). The paths and streams were artfully devised to contribute to this effect, so that ‘Farther on we lose all sight of water, and only hear [end page 15] the noise, without having the appearance; a kind of effect which the Chinese are fond of producing in what they call their scenes of enchantment’ (224). The grove succeeded not only through being delightful in itself, but through its contrast with what visitors had experienced before, for ‘it so well contrasts with the terrace and with some other scenes, that one cannot wish them ever to be divided’ (223). Seats were placed in the grove, ensuring that visitors could linger and enjoy the full effect; one stood near the obelisk [34] and another, next to the upper pool, bore an inscription to Shenstone’s friend, the poet James Thomson [35].

An inscribed seat [36] was provided on the edge of Virgil’s Grove, and between the grove and the house were two more seats dedicated to Shenstone’s friends Richard Jago [37] and Richard Graves [38]. From Virgil’s Grove the visitors could, if they wished, make their way along the stream to an inscribed seat [39] next to a chalybeate spring [40] and grotto, all appropriately inscribed, and then, returning to the grove, walk towards the house along the path through the shrubbery. In the shrubbery stood the garden’s last major features, a basin of goldfish and a statue reproducing the Venus de Medici [41]. Shenstone provided the verses, written on a piece of wood and placed beside the statue, dedicated to this ‘semi-reducta Venus’ whose half-concealed, half-revealed charms echoed those of nature in Shenstone’s artfully managed garden: ‘Let sweet concealment’s magic art / Your mazy bounds invest; / And while sight unveils a part, / Let fancy paint the rest . . .’ (225).

Having paid their respects to Venus, the visitors either returned to the house or made their way to the gate and back to the road, with their circuit of the Leasowes completed. [end page 16]

The circuit path and the guided tour

The planned circuit, designed to conduct visitors through a garden on a particular carefully considered route, has a long history in garden design. It was a feature of many notable eighteenth-century English gardens; published guides and descriptions of Hagley, Rousham, Stourhead, Stowe and other gardens all contain standard routes for visitors to follow. Such circuits were not rigidly prescriptive,[11] but they enabled visitors to make a rewarding tour of the garden in which they could see all the important features from recommended viewpoints within a limited time, and gave garden proprietors some degree of control over those passing through their grounds. Their significance was more than just practical and aesthetic, however; the path through the garden could be imbued with philosophical, religious, dynastic or political symbolism, or combinations of some or all of these elements.[12] Even where such layers of meaning were not present, the circuit walk was not merely an addition to the garden but was an indispensable element in its conception, planning, and ultimate physical form.

The path along which visitors made their way through the Leasowes was an anti-clockwise circuit walk (see Map 3) that took the form sometimes known as a ‘garden belt’,[13] running around the edges of the garden and offering [end page 17] views into the garden itself and out across the surrounding countryside. It provided access to the main features of the grounds, but also formed an essential part of the garden’s function and identity as a garden, in which nature was interpreted and presented for consumption as a visual, intellectual and emotional experience. Indeed, the path can be seen as the basic structure of Shenstone’s garden; it is significant that Shenstone often used the term ‘my walks’ to refer not merely to the paths themselves but to the whole of the Leasowes.[14] George Johnson, in his History of English Gardening (1829), suggested the importance of the path when he wrote of the Leasowes that when it came into Shenstone’s hands it ‘was merely a grazing farm, but he left it a perfect fairy-land. Every thing that a classical taste could point out as decorative; or picturesque in scenery, were secured to it’.[15] The imagery of securing suggests the existence of structural members to which the decorative and picturesque elements were secured; the circuit path was that member. The path united the garden space, the objects, views and experiences within which it existed, into a single consumable unit; defined its boundary with the ‘unimproved’ natural world outside; and served to ‘programme’ the walk through the garden by ensuring that its features were seen to their best advantage, from particular viewpoints and in a particular order. In a relatively small garden such as the Leasowes, furthermore, as also at William Kent’s garden at Rousham in Oxfordshire, the circuit path served to make the garden seem larger than it actually was; as the American traveller Jabez Maud Fisher recorded in 1776, ‘The whole Ground is but 120 Acres, yet we are led in that round about way thro it, that 4 miles [end page 18] would barely make up our walk, the whole is Serpentine’.[16] The path led visitors along a winding route, ensuring that they saw the garden in small, individually released portions, rather than as a readily apprehensible whole.

The supposed naturalness and freedom from artifice of the paths around the Leasowes was remarked upon by many visitors and commentators. Thomas Whately described the circuit path around the property as consisting of ‘a walk as unaffected and unadorned as a common field path’,[17] and George Mason, in the second edition of his Essay on Design in Gardening (1795) remarked of the paths that ‘The very plan of their direction releases them from the restraints of similarity in breadth, and correspondence of outlines’.[18] Yet the paths, of course, were anything but natural; they were carefully laid to conduct the visitor through the garden in a particular direction, on a precisely planned route. For all their apparent artlessness, these paths directed the way in which the Leasowes was experienced by its visitors. Although, as has been mentioned above, visitors were not compelled to follow the circuit route, it was the route around which the garden was planned, and its role was reinforced by the printed guides to the garden which proliferated after the publication of Robert Dodsley’s description of the Leasowes in 1764, all of which were based upon the same circuit of the estate; furthermore, given that hedgerows and fences still surrounded and divided the farmland within the circuit path, opportunities to diverge from the path were more limited than they would have been in a more open garden.

[end page 19] An implicit recognition of the paradoxical nature of these natural, freely wandering, yet prescriptive paths can be recognized in some contemporary accounts of the Leasowes. Joseph Heely, writing in 1777, commented that the visitor was ‘Guided by the artless path: now lingering, now turning to every inviting object’,[19] while William Marshall described the path in the north eastern part of the garden as ‘well conducted; deviating, naturally, and giving variety of view’.[20] The ‘artlessness’ of the path was all part of the Leasowes’ image of a simple grazing farm ‘with a walk, in imitation of a common field, conducted through the several enclosures’.[21] The garden is a succession of self-contained scenes, spaces of varying dimensions, open vistas and composed views, areas of differing characters intended to contrast with each another. The whole experience can only work as intended if the visitor remains on the one-way path and is conducted through the correct approaches and routes. While it is true that during the circuit of a garden the visitor could exploit the spatiality of the garden scene, stepping off the path, and circling or entering a temple or grotto,[22] this could only be done where the presence of a temple, grotto or other feature licensed the visitor to do so; and, having investigated that particular site, the visitor would then return to the path and continue to the next feature on the prescribed route. The path defined the experience of the garden . To leave it except in specific circumstances detailed in the printed guides and signposted by the [end page 20] presence of a feature such as a building or seat (as in the case of the seat at the Leasowes inscribed to Joseph Spence, ‘somewhat out of the path’[23]), to retrace sections of the path or to travel along it in the wrong direction (Shenstone was apparently much annoyed on one occasion when a visiting neighbour introduced some visitors from the ‘wrong end’ of one of his paths), or to look at the wrong things while making your way along it (‘We now leave the Priory upon the left, which is not meant for an object here’[24]) is to subvert the carefully sustained spatial, pictorial and emotional construct which is the garden.

When William Gilpin visited the Leasowes in 1772, he complained that the tour of the house began in the wrong place, in the valley near the house: ‘We should have been carried first into the higher parts; where we might have had a view of the whole at once. We should then have seen that it is, what is properly called, an adorned farm; and we should have taken that idea along with us’.[25] Yet to have entered the property in such a way as to have been offered ‘a view of the whole at once’ would have undermined Shenstone’s intention of having the Leasowes gradually reveal itself to the visitor in a succession of variegated scenes and distinct views. The widest prospects over the garden are reserved for the latter half of the circuit, when visitors had already passed through the more enclosed areas in the southern part of the garden. Walking along these wooded valleys, observing the views pointed out in their printed guides, reading the inscriptions and viewing the monuments, the visitors would absorb the carefully composed arcadian image of the farm before they were [end page 21] confronted with the wider views across the property from the higher paths, views which were not as open to mediation. The image of the Leasowes as an arcady had to be present in the minds of visitors in order to influence their appreciation of the grander prospects, as well as of the smaller and more easily managed views in the earlier part of the circuit. To have entered the garden in these higher areas would in any case have spoiled the effect of the climax of the garden, Virgil’s Grove, by having visitors encounter it either too near the commencement of their walk, or via an approach which would have denied it its vital quality of surprise and contrast with what had gone before. As Joseph Heely wrote of Virgil’s Grove, ‘no part of the vale ought to be discovered, until we enter it unexpectedly, at Virgil’s obelisk’.[26]

The seats, monuments and other features form the substructure which supports the external image of the Leasowes as it is experienced by its visitors; they constitute what Simon Pugh has called the ‘paradigmatic fragments’[27] which together are the sum of the garden’s significance. The path guides the visitor from one to the other, hurrying him or her through areas which are represented as containing little of interest or importance and which play no part in establishing the image of the Leasowes in the mind. The path serves as a unifying structure, and as a filtering mechanism. It unites the fragments and maintains their proper relationships, while ensuring their distinctness from one another. Wandering at will is not to be encouraged: the Leasowes is a narrative, with introduction, main and subsidiary themes, and climax; and it must be read in the correct order.

Rural retirement and the‘ornamental farm’

Shenstone did not refer to the Leasowes as a garden; indeed, he spoke of a ‘garden’ as something which he wished to avoid creating, worrying that ‘I have been embroidering my Grove with Flowers, till I almost begin to fear it looks too much like a garden’.[28] He referred to his property as ‘my walks’ (indicating, incidentally, the importance of the carefully managed path which visitors took around the garden), ‘my place’,[29] and, commonly, ‘my farm’.[30] This insistence that the Leasowes is just Shenstone’s country ‘place’, his working farm, is an important indication of his self-identification as a cultured country gentleman, a farmer and shepherd-poet living in a rural retreat that is both useful and ornamental. This role, as an important passage from a letter of Shenstone to Richard Graves, written in 1748, makes clear, was dictated not only by the genuine appeal which a life of rural literary retirement had for him, and by his wish to set a distinctive mark of his taste upon his place, but was also a reflection of his restricted financial and spatial resources: ‘The French have what they call a parque ornée; I suppose, approaching about as near to a garden as the park at Hagley. I give my place the title of a ferme ornée; though, if I had money, I should hardly confine myself to such decorations as that name requires’.[31] Shenstone found the restrictions of small property and income frustrating. He complained of being trapped in ‘the pitiful parterre-garden of amusement’, only able ‘to view the nobler scenes at a distance’, and wrote in his poem ‘The Progress of Taste’ of ‘how great a Misfortune it is, for a Man of small Estate to [end page 22] have much TASTE’.[32] Yet such limitations also contributed to his fame, for one of the reasons for the celebrated status of the Leasowes was precisely that Shenstone was felt to have achieved a great deal in a small space:

Here is nothing costly, nothing grand; yet for Taste in these improvements nothing can exceed it. ’Tis only a Farm; the Walks are laid out with little expence ... The Leasowes is a place which a Man of moderate Fortune may be a Master of, and is improving on a plan which a Person without an overgrown Fortune may imitate.[33]

Shenstone was seen to have set an example at the Leasowes which small landowners who wished to show ‘taste’ but did not have the scope to create a Stowe or a Hagley could follow. Rousham had had a similar significance, but was properly an ornamental garden rather than a working farm, and thus was more remote from the aspirations of small proprietors who had to combine working the land with ornamenting it. The Leasowes appeared to incorporate that union of profit and pleasure to which Joseph Addison had referred in his Spectator article of 1712, when he asked ‘why many not a whole Estate be thrown into a kind of Garden ... that may turn as much to the Profit, as the Pleasure of the Owner?’

... Fields of Corn make a pleasant Prospect, and if the Walks were a little taken care of that lie between them, if the natural Embroidery of the Meadows were helpt and improved by some small Additions of Art, and the several Rows of Hedges [end page 23] set off by Trees and Flowers, that the Soil was capable of receiving, a Man might make a pretty Landskip of his own Possessions.[34]

The blend of the useful with the agreeable in gardening was an abiding concern of the Augustan landed gentry; it was classical in origin, having its roots in an idealized conception of the ancient Roman villa.

There was great interest during the Augustan period in the architecture and gardening of the ancient Romans; works which sought to analyze and recreate the villas and gardens of Rome, most notably The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated by Robert Castell (1728), part of the Burlingtonian effort to restore the purity of architectural classicism, were popular and very influential. The gentry of Georgian England were intimately familiar with the works of Latin authors, and many of them visited Italy on the Grand Tour (although Shenstone did not) and saw existing Italian villas and gardens as well as the remains of ancient Roman villas. They believed that such villas were lived in by a class akin to their own, and through reading authors such as Horace, describing his Sabine farm, and Pliny the Younger, on his houses at Tusculum and Laurentum, they developed a vision of the villas of ancient Rome as unostentatious, moderately sized country estates, providing an environment of civilized pastoral retreat from the cares of the world, and exhibiting a graceful combination of productive agriculture and ornamental horticulture. Furthermore, it was a popular contemporary idea that the Romans had created their gardens according to what the eighteenth century understood as the natural style. Shenstone’s close friend Joseph Spence, who had a great interest in both Horace and modern gardening, recorded [end page 24] the view of his friend ‘Mr. T.’ that the poet ‘had that taste for wild natural gardening which has obtained so much among us of late’,[35] and that ‘his whole farm was a garden to him’;[36] while Castell wrote of Pliny’s villa that the larger part of the garden was created ‘in a close imitation of Nature ... where, under the Form of a beautiful Country, Hills, Rocks, Cascades, Rivulets, Woods, Buildings, &c. were possibly thrown into such an agreeable Disorder, as to have pleased the Eye from several Views, like so many beautiful Landskips’.[37]

Through his friendships with men such as Spence and his own deep interest in the classics, Shenstone was certainly familiar with this background, and the Horatian ideal had obvious appeal to him. The vision of the villa and its grounds as a retreat from the world, particularly a poetic retreat, was of great significance, and was a constant theme in his poetry. He described its pleasures (and its drawbacks) in works such as his first elegy: ‘He arrives at his retirement in the country, and takes occasion to expatiate in praise of simplicity’;[38] elsewhere, he dramatizes the retirement from the world of a great political figure in ‘The Judgment of Hercules’, [39]and uses his rural retreat as a setting for stories of disappointed love among poetic sheep-herding folk: ‘A Pastoral Ballad, in Four Parts. The sad story of Corydon, by faithless Phyllis betrayed’.[40] A passage in his Essay on Elegy illuminates his vision of the cultured [end page 25] landowner-poet and the life of rustic retirement which inspired both much of his poetry and his landscape gardening:

as pastoral conveys an idea of simplicity and innocence, it is in particular the task and merit of elegy to shew the innocence and simplicity of rural life to advantage; and that, in a way distinct from pastoral, as much as the plain but judicious landlord may be imagined to surpass his tenant both in dignity and understanding. It should tend to elevate the more tranquil virtues of humility, disinterestedness, simplicity, and innocence: but then there is a degree of elegance and refinement, no way inconsistent with these rural virtues.[41]

It is the example of that ‘plain but judicious landlord’ which Shenstone himself seeks to emulate; and it is the combination of rustic farm and rural garden which he sought to embody at the Leasowes which gave his garden its important place in the development of the ferme ornée.

That importance was fully recognized soon after Shenstone’s death in one of the most influential theoretical justifications of the combination of farm and garden as the most natural style of gardening, that offered by Thomas Whately in his Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). For Whately, the essence of the natural style was that nature’s beauties should be presented differently in different kinds of property, as long as each landscape was internally consistent in style: ‘elegance is the peculiar excellence of a garden; greatness of a park; simplicity of a farm; and pleasantness of a riding’.[42] He held that the most natural landscapes were [end page 27] those of a rural farm, but that because the skills of gardening had hitherto been practised only on ‘a small plot appropriated ... to pleasure’[43] while the rest was devoted to profit only, gardeners had sought to make gardens as unnatural as possible, to distinguish them from areas of the property devoted to useful cultivation. Whately saw the rise of the natural style as a rejection of that ‘vicious taste’, beginning with the opening of the garden to the country, developing through the ‘ornamented farm’, and culminating in the truly rural farm in which the ‘idea of a spot appropriated to pleasure only’ had finally been superseded by a style in which the landscape’s beauties are at their most simple and natural; with properties such as the Leasowes, Whately claims, ‘we have at last returned to simplicity by force of refinement’.[44] Whately related Shenstone’s gardening directly to contemporary ideas of pastoral poetry, seeing in both a return to simplicity:

The ideas of pastoral poetry seem now to be the standard of that simplicity; and a place conformable to them is deemed a farm in its utmost purity. An allusion to them evidently enters in to the design of the Leasowes ... the whole is in the same taste, yet full of variety; and except in two or three trifles, every part is rural and natural.[45]

When the travel writer Joseph Heely visited the Leasowes in 1777 he also interpreted what Shenstone had created in terms of the farm as natural garden. He wrote of the Leasowes ‘smiling in all the perfection of [end page 28] pastoral beauty, and invoked Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’ in approval of a landscape whose beauty lay:

not in the soft mossy lawn, mown for no other use than to please the eye, or trimmed up in the glare of pompous imagery, shewing the carved vase, or sumptuous temple - but in the chaste humility of domestic and sylvan harmony - in fields glorying in ‘the milky heifer, and deserving steed’ - in groves to give them cool, refreshing shade.[46]

Heely follows Whately in appearing at times to argue for the abandonment of the terms ‘garden’ and ‘gardening’ altogether, implying that they were no longer relevant as the artificial practices associated with those terms had been superseded by the modern, natural style of ‘laying out grounds’ (to use the eighteenth-century term).[47] For Heely, the Leasowes was a ‘truly arcadian farm’ whose glory rested ‘on its simplicity’:

The Leasowes is to be considered as a farm only, without the least violation of character. - To have styled any part of it as a garden, or park, in fine shorn lawns, banks of roses, delicate flowers, and extragenous plants, would only have served to spoil the whole of its design, its simplicity, and its beauty.[48]

[end page 29] The Leasowes was indeed a rural farm; animals cropped the grass, haystacks stood behind the house,[49] and the grounds were divided by hedgerows which, although carefully varied in form and disguised,[50] spoiled the landscape for some visitors. William Gilpin complained after his visit in 1772 that Shenstone ‘might have thrown down more of his hedges ... his foregrounds are often regular fields. This regularity might have been disguised’.[51] This criticism is indicative of the paradox with which the ferme ornée is beset, as ornament is hardly natural in a farm, and a working farm is not by its nature a garden;[52] as William Marshall commented after seeing the Leasowes, ‘what is it? An ornamental farm? No such thing. What has farming to do with Temples, Statues, Vases, Mottos, Inscriptions, Mock Priories, and Artificial Cascades? Yet do away with these and who would visit the Leasowes: for what would it be then? Why, what it is now held out to be, an ornamental farm; a lovely little spot!’[53]

This paradox is revealed in one of the many popular guides to the Leasowes which were produced from the 1760s onwards. This account claims a vital role for Shenstone in the establishment of the modern taste in English gardening, described as a style in which ‘the Designer, attentively cautious of falling into the exploded error, of offending nature, by uniformity, and futile exactness, now robes her in all her own [end page 30] simplicity, and careless dignity’.[54] As an example of the kind of effect which the gardener should seek, and which Shenstone, at the Leasowes, had achieved, the writer instances ‘a peasant scatter[ing], without design, some beauties round his cot, that, were they to stand within the pale of the first park in England, would be an honour to it’.[55] However, the writer goes on to expose the uneasy balance which the creator of the ferme ornée must strike when he criticizes a part of the Leasowes for confusing rusticity with neglect; the unkempt ‘forest ground’ in the south-eastern part of the garden, he claims, ‘should be considered as a blemish: if we are every where to carry with us, the idea of a farm, as it is meant, it is unpardonable, because slovenliness always reflects disgrace upon the possessor of the land’.[56] Much more pleasing, because much more in accord with the imagery of pastoral beauty, was the view over the pastures north of the house: ‘Such scenes as these, where various groups of animals are seen feeding in the rich turf, dedicated to the uses of life, give a pleasing warmth to the idea of the happiness of those who prefer the calm rational pleasure of retirement’.[57]

A recent scholar of eighteenth-century images of the countryside comments on the ferme ornée ideal that ‘where small gardens retained the name of ferme ornée, they largely ignored the farmland they enclosed, on the model of the poet William Shenstone’s Leasowes’;[58] but this is both a misreading of the layout of the Leasowes itself, and a misunderstanding [end page 31] of the nature of the ‘thematization and eulogization’[59] of farming which the Leasowes expressed. It is more accurate to say that such gardens were built around a representation of an idealized countryside which took cognizance only of those aspects of the real countryside which accorded with that representation. As the evidence above indicates, the views into the Leasowes which the circuit walk offered were as important as those outwards into the surrounding countryside; and both offered a primarily agricultural scene, but a manicured and polished one which detached the pastoral character of Shenstone’s ‘farm’ from the reality of rural life.

For Shenstone himself and for those who were willing to be beguiled by the beauties of the Leasowes, the resolution of the paradoxical nature of the ferme ornée lay in the application of the appropriate pastoral mythologies: Virgil, Arcadia, the world of Corydon and Phyllis, Meliboeus and Galatea. The monuments, inscriptions, classicized groves and streams, separate Shenstone’s farm from the reality of rural life and lift it into an idealized arcadia more suited to the poetic temperament of its owner. This is an image which has little to do with productive agriculture, but everything to do with the ideologically-sanctioned projection of a particular representation of the countryside. If the viewer is willing to accept that representation, and accept the Leasowes as an emblematic, rather than an ornamental, farm, the paradoxical relationship between working farm and leisured garden is side-stepped. Shenstone certainly devoted much time and effort to creating this emblematic world of arcady, in which a wooded valley was Virgil’s Grove and a muddy spring was home to the Nereids. As Whately noted, however, his fondness for native British themes led him into inconsistencies: the objects at the Leasowes, he complained, were ‘borrowed partly from the scenes which this country exhibited some [end page 32] centuries ago, and partly from those of Arcadia’, which undermined the illusion Shenstone was seeking to create:

the Priory, and a Gothic seat, still more particularly characterized by an inscription in obsolete language and the black letter, belong to one; the urns, Virgil’s obelisk, and a rustic Temple of Pan, to the other. All these allusions are indeed equally rural; but the images in an English and a classical eclogue are not the same ...[60]

The additional, emblematic features of the landscape were more problematic than the disposition of woods, lawns and water, but for Shenstone they were an essential part of the creation of a garden which appealed to the imagination as well as to the senses. It was not enough for him to create ‘a lovely little spot’; it had to be a spot imbued with certain ideas about nature, the countryside, history and poetry, and expressive of a certain vision of the world, as a study of his gardening theory makes clear.

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Notes

1. See Williams, Letters, pp. 281-2 (letter of 27 June 1750).

2. Virgil, Eclogues, VII, lines 9-10.

3. A visitor to the garden, John Parnell, sketched this root-house in 1770; his drawing is reproduced in Robert P. Maccubbin & Peter Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Williamsburg, PA, 1984), plate 34.

4. See Parnell’s account in Maccubbin & Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens, p. 63.

5. Horace, Odes, Book I, Ode I, lines 30-31.

6. Horace, Satires, Book II, Satire VI, lines 1-4.

7. Virgil, Eclogues, VII, lines 37-40.

8. Alexander Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, line 298; in Herbert Davis (ed.), Pope: Poetical Works (London, 1966), p. 118.

9. Virgil, Georgics, II, lines 485-6.

10. Virgil, Eclogues, II, lines 32-3.

11. See Hal Moggeridge, ‘Notes on Kent’s landscape garden at Rousham’, Journal of Garden History, vol. VI (1986), no. 3, p. 191; Simon Pugh, Garden-Nature-Language (Manchester, 1988), pp. 50-1, 71.

12. See Max F. Schulz, ‘The circuit walk of the eighteenth-century landscape garden, and the pilgrim’s circuitous progress’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. XV (1981), no. 1; Ronald Paulson, ‘The pictorial circuit and related structures in 18th-century England’, in Peter Hughes & David Williams (eds.), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the 18th Century (Toronto, 1971).

13. Philip Southcote first used this term, for his circuit walk at Woburn Farm. See Jacques, Georgian Gardens, p. 25.

14. Mallam, Letters, pp. 152, 228, 243, 298; Williams, Letters, p. 280.

15. Johnson, History of English Gardening, p. 267.

16. Jabez Maud Fisher, An American Quaker in the British Isles, ed. Kenneth Morgan (Oxford, 1993), p. 260.

17. Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (London, 1770), p. 162.

18. Mason, Essay on Design in Gardening (London, 1795 edn.), p. 118.

19. Joseph Heely, Letters on the Beauties of Hagley, Envil, and the Leasowes (London, 1777), p. 214.

20. William H. Marshall, Planting and Rural Ornament (London, 1796), vol. I, p. 319.

21. J. C. Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Gardening (London, 1822), pp. 71-2, paragraph 109.

22. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression (London, 1975), p. 21.

23. The Works in Verse and Prose of William Shenstone, Esq., vol. II, p. 214.

24. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. II, p. 203.

25. William Gilpin, Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772 (London, 1786), vol. I, p. 52.

26. Heely, Letters, p. 213.

27. Pugh, Garden-Nature-Language, p.66.

28. Mallam, Letters, p. 145.

29. Mallam, Letters, pp. 112, 376.

30. Mallam, Letters, pp. 117, 398, 355.

31. Mallam, Letters, p. 117.

32. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 166.

33. Fisher, American Quaker, pp. 259-60.

34. Quoted in John Dixon Hunt & Peter Willis (eds.), The Genius of the Place (Cambridge, MA, 1975; 2nd edn. 1988), p. 142.

35. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. J. M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966), vol. II, p. 672.

36. Spence, Observations, p. 676.

37. Quoted in Hunt & Willis, Genius of the Place, p. 187.

38. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, pp. 11ff.

39. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, pp. 165ff.

40. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, pp. 129ff.

41. Works in Verse and Prose, vol. I, p. 5.

42. Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, p. 156.

43. Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, p. 161.

44. Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, p. 161.

45. Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, p. 162.

46. Heely, Letters, p. 191.

47. Jacques, Georgian Gardens, p. 12.

48. Heely, Letters, p. 191.

49. See Shenstone’s own pictures, reproduced in John Riely, ‘Shenstone’s walks: the genesis of the Leasowes’, Apollo, no. 110 (1979), pp. 1-25.

50. See Parnell’s comments in Maccubbin & Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens, pp. 61-2.

51. Gilpin, Observations, vol. I, p. 55.

52. See William A. Brogden, ‘The ferme ornée and changing attitudes to agricultural improvement’, in Maccubin & Martin (eds.), British and American Gardens, pp. 42-3.

53. Marshall, Planting and Rural Ornament, vol. I, p. 320.

54. Anon., A Description of Hagley, Envil and the Leasowes ... (Birmingham, c.1800), p. 7.

55. Anon., Description, p. 8.

56. Anon., Description, p. 27.

57. Anon, Description, pp. 49-50.

58. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA, 1986), p. 30.

59. Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, p. 30.

60. Whately, Observations, pp. 170-1.