William Kent, Design for Chinoiserie garden temple, showing plan and detailed elevation with bamboo porch, c. 1730–1735. Pen and brown ink and brown wash on paper. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, E.384-1986. (Fig. 1) English Chinoiserie pavilions explored a … Continue reading →
Although the gateway arch was initially intended to have been based on Serlio’s Libro Estraordinario, as it has unfolded it has become the Mannerist Gateway. The inside façade is based on Michelangelo’s Porta Pia, the outside one on Giulio Romano’s … Continue reading →
[This paper discusses a category of building that is related to, and sometimes overlaps with, the pavilion: the fabrique. The fabrique is not to be confused with the folly, although both are found in parks and gardens and the terms … Continue reading →
Following my exploration of the somewhat unsatisfactory Garden for Lovers at Schloss Trautsmannsdorf (https://villacastagnadaylesford.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/schloss-trautmannsdorf-and-the-problematic-of-gardens-for-lovers) it may be worth turning to eighteenth-century France for a very different approach to the erotic garden. The key text is Jean-François de Bastide’s La Petite … Continue reading →
The garden at Schloss Trautmannsdorf is a kind of Eden Project, a new garden created from 1995 and opened in 2001 (Fig. 1). The castle, which has had a sorry history, contains the provincial tourism museum, or Touriseum, which is … Continue reading →
At the National Trust’s Biddulph Grange garden in England they have a little terraced gardens in the section called ‘Italy’ which has four small monkey puzzle trees in a little box-edged parterre centred on a stone vase (Figs 1–3). This … Continue reading →
The most useful way of approaching Portmeirion is through the concept of the picturesque. Williams-Ellis (or, as everyone calls him, Clough) explains how he liked sailing around the Mediterranean and enjoyed the view of coastal towns from the sea. He … Continue reading →
A garden is both a real place, and a cloud of possibilities. What you will find here will be both something real, and something that may or may not become real. For this reason you will find no map: Instead you will meet fragments, part real, part possible.
