The Arcadian Friends

"Well, I see it slightly differently. For me The Arcadian Friends is a brilliant book because Richardson does two things. For one thing he really knocks Capability Brown off his green throne. It really is inexplicable how Brown has become the hero of British landscape garden when, in fact, he destroyed quite a lot of landscapes. He must have been a very good promoter of the services he provided in order to achieve that status. So I adore the book for its relentless demolition of Capability Brown, because he really annoys me so much. So that’s a large part of its appeal. But what he does very brilliantly, unlike any other garden historian I know, is that he doesn’t only consider the pretty landscape and plants. He really understands that in the 18th century the landscape garden was a canvas to express your political beliefs. There are two elements to it. He explains the difference between a Whig and a Tory garden and he also brilliantly shows how landscape was the only way disgraced politicians could express their power. He begins with the Glorious Revolution, saying that before then all gardens were imitating French gardens. He then looks at how after the Whigs in Britain invite William III to take the throne, instigating a constitutional monarchy, French gardens can no longer be countenanced because they express French absolutism. These French gardens have avenues that cut through the landscape. Everything is formal. There’s this corset of patterns you impose on nature. Here I am, the King: I can subjugate. After the Glorious Revolution they stop clipping their trees and it becomes a symbol of liberty, at a time when England was seen as the seat of liberty. The Empire becomes really important in terms of the plants in the garden. You have someone like Joseph Banks who sees the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew as the engine of colonial growth, the storehouse of the Empire. His idea was to bring potentially lucrative plants from all the colonies back to England, to test them, propagate them, experiment with them at Kew, and then send them out to other colonies. For example, it was Banks’s idea to bring tea plants from China to India, though it’s not until 40 years later that it finally works. But let me give you an example too of how Banks used his horticulture to project values in visual form. In the gardens at Stowe House that he designed there are temples in the gardens that are literally a manifesto of his political beliefs. You have a ‘Temple of Modern Virtue’ and a ‘Temple of Ancient Virtue’, which is built as this flawless classical temple with statues of all the Greek thinkers in it, because Banks and his friends all believe that the Roman and Greek Republics represented virtuous civilisation. At that time Robert Walpole was the Prime Minister and was criticised by the country Whigs for being debauched, for having too much power, for being too close to court. So Banks builds a ‘Temple of Modern Virtue’ deliberately as a ruin to show how bad modern virtue has gone and, to ram it home, he puts in a headless statue of Walpole in modern dress. We’ve forgotten how to understand this language: we see the building as a pretty ruin, but to the aristocratic visitor of the day all these things would be understood as political satire. That effect starts at the gate to the garden, where you have to choose between the Path of Vice and the Path of Virtue, which is the choice of Hercules, so they’re taking Greek myths, placing them in the garden and applying them to modern politics. Everyone understands it. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson go to Stowe they talk about the garden in that way, and they love it because they view in it an expression of liberty: actually, they go a step further in interpretation, seeing in it symbols of debauched England and the virtuous America."