Gentlemen & Players

The English love affair with the landscape garden reached its height in the eighteenth century, when the creation of some of our greatest gardens set a stylistic lead which Continental Europe was eager to follow. In this informed and entertaining book, Timothy Mowl reveals how this development in garden style came about through an interaction between the garden owners, who had a vision of what these gardens might become, and the professionals who had the expertise to realise this vision. Technologies and discoveries were exchanged, and theories were absorbed, popularised and then discarded, in a fascinating sequence of action and reaction. It was a mould-breaking, revolutionary period in garden history. Mowl takes the reader on a fascinating journey to the magnificent gardens at Chiswick, Stowe, Castle Howard, Painshill, Stourhead and an astonishing host of lesser Edens, and casts a fresh and illuminating perspective on the great age of the English Arcadia (1620-1820).