historic Gardens

2 very different historic gardens undergoing changes for various reasons.

I am visiting Enlgand for a week and have, of course, visited a few gardens. With kids in tow one has to be careful that the garden has more than pretty flowers! Yesterday we visited the famed Chatsworth House, the home of the Duke of Devonshire. Capabilty Brown worked on the garden in the 1700's and it is one of his most famous and gradiouse designs. Time however moves on and one must be seen to keep up. This, I suspect is the reason why there is an enormous 'LOVE' sculpture half way down the cascade of water and a white modern art piece on the formal lawn. It is perhaps as well that they roped these, probably expensive one-of-a-kind, sculptures off, because people like me wanted to drag a hammer out and demolish the garish objects! Sometimes taste and money/title do not go hand in hand.

By contrast today we visited Kenilworth Castle, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I. Alas it is now a ruin but the renovations have been going on for many decades. Up until last October the formal gardens of a high renaissance we wonderful - they were classic in design and very much in tune with the castle in its most vibrant years, but recreated in an image of what might have been there. Alas this was not good enough. The gardens have been ripped out while they find out what really was there and then they will recreate the exact, or close to, the real thing including a new fountain that was in the center of the garden.

These two gardens show how we forget that gardens are ephemeral features and when we own them, we rarely have regard for their history. We change them to our liking. Others, particularly historic monuments in the public domain, have the experitize to go back in time and educate us in how these lost gardens may have looked.

I will look forward to seeing the historic garden, but I doubt that I will return to Chatsworth to view more sculpture!