The Renaissance Garden in England
The great formal gardens of the Tudors and Stuarts in England ranked among the masterpieces of Renaissance Europe. Henry VIII's Hampton Court, Burghley's Theobalds and Lord Pembroke's Wilton were some of the most awe-inspiring garden complexes of the period, yet all were to be swept away in a wave of destruction by exponents of the landscape style in the eighteenth century. Of the true formal gardens as they existed before Humphry Repton, Capability Brown and Henry Wise nothing remains; they are seen today only through the rose-coloured spectacles of the Romantic movement in the form of Victorian re-creations around the ancient manor houses Of England.
Sir Roy Strong evokes both the people and the ideas that led to the creation of these gardens, and his story touches on some of the great figures of the age as well as on the history of politics, art, architecture and literature. Also included here for the first time is the surviving visual material in the form of plans, diagrams, views and engravings of the lost gardens of England.