In the approximate quarter century since Roy Strong wrote (in his seminal work The Renaissance Garden in England [London: Thames & Hudson, 1979], 11) that the English gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a “totally lost art form,” this area of interest has become a veritable growth area of cultural history. Advances in archaeology and aerial photography, along with simultaneous and continuing discoveries of important manuscript plans and drawings of English Renaissance gardens, have substantially increased the research possibilities in the field of garden history. Yale University Press in particular has recently published a number of important works in the field. This burgeoning has been paralleled in the related field of architectural history, in which detailed and often wonderfully illustrated works by, for example, Marc Girouard, Malcolm Airs, Maurice Howard, Nicholas Woolgar, and Nicholas Cooper have provided a new and more critical literature than existed the same quarter century ago. But a joining of the two interests that would examine the house and garden in their natural juxtaposition has for the most part been approached casually or implicitly in these historiographic developments. Paula Henderson's Tudor House and Garden promises to fill this hiatus by an extended examination of English houses and gardens in relation to each other in the Renaissance era.
Her tale of the evolution of this relationship in design and architecture embraces several key points. Concentrating on defense and other practical requirements of the medieval household, great houses built much before the sixteenth century were surrounded by defensive structures, service buildings, and “offices” that left no room for gardens and generally cluttered up the foreground for their inhabitants. Once these were no longer required or were moved elsewhere in more secure social conditions, extensive areas became cleared away for other uses. Long and straight approach ways to the houses themselves became possible. Entrances became more physically and visually accessible. More aesthetically pleasing and socially recreational structures emerged in and around the houses themselves. Gardens either emerged for the first time in many properties or changed with the times from small and utilitarian operations geared to growing food and herbs for the household to larger and many-faceted plots given to aesthetic pleasure, entertainment, recreation, and myriad other social activities. These larger spaces inspired new building types of their own, ranging from distinctly practical if still aesthetically pleasing sundials, fountains, and banqueting houses to the less distinctly utile but often even more aesthetically pleasing forms of bowers, grottoes, and similarly inventive spaces for privacy and pleasure. At its most intimate, Henderson notes, the private garden, shielded from view either by fencing or plantings, proved a rare place of quiet repose or contemplation: a private space that was to landscape what the portrait miniature was to painting.
As gardens reshaped the landscape of country houses, so did grand houses evolve to take note of the garden. Increased fenestration, viewing towers and rooftop banqueting areas, garden-side loggias, and elevated state rooms all served to achieve better views of the grounds, while the incorporation of garden themes from both plant and animal kingdom into interior design, especially of tapestry but in other media as well, further enhanced the interaction between house and garden. In the course of these sundry developments English patrons drew extensively on foreign models and expertise, so that fine examples of neoclassical design in both landscape and physical structures were widely employed before Inigo Jones made his splash upon the scene.
Given the limited number of surviving Renaissance gardens or of houses associated with them, and the equally limited documentation for both, Henderson makes full use of familiar examples—the Hardwick Halls, Longleats, Bolsovers, Gorhamburys, and Holdenbys of their day; the work of the Cecils, Francis Bacon, and Christopher Hatton. But she also manages to incorporate an impressive number of less familiar examples and to draw on maps and plans that have but recently been discovered.
These less familiar sources stand as one of the more novel elements in the book but not the only one. The point that ideas about classical design in both houses and buildings far predate Inigo Jones will not surprise many specialists in the field; Girouard's 1970s work on Robert Smythson and much else since then have suggested as much. But it receives somewhat fuller documentation here than elsewhere and comes as a welcome corrective to those with more casual acquaintance with the subject. Perhaps more genuinely innovative are at least brief discussions of structural types and ornamentation that are not widely treated elsewhere: sundials, fountains, sculpted landscapes, ponds and water gardens, and “wildernesses,” areas given over to the keeping of birds and mammals.
Overall, this is a broad survey of issues and scholarship rather than a true monograph: neither the lightweight entertainment that its Yale-produced coffee-table look initially suggests nor the definitive word on almost anything it discusses. It succeeds more in making connections between kindred but discrete issues than in any probing analysis of any particular issue. While Henderson usefully points to appropriate interdisciplinary frameworks of, for example, social history, literature, humanist learning, and architectural advances for her subject, she rarely carries this recognition beyond the gateway. Many historiographically current issues to do, for example, with issues of material culture, civility and hospitality, aesthetic sensibility, agricultural innovation, public and private space, and the discourse of social status remain out of reach. Current postmodernist conceptual contexts are neglected altogether. This makes the work an appropriate introduction to the history of English Renaissance gardens that begs rather than answers in any definitive manner myriad more specialized questions that it raises. Save for a few howlers along the way (e.g., the coronation of Elizabeth in 1553 [31]), Henderson writes reliably and gracefully, for which those coming to the field for the first time will be additionally grateful. And she suggests at least implicitly the historical roots of some quite modern phenomena: the late twentieth-century use of Longleat's grounds as animal wintering quarters for Billy Smart's circus now takes on a whole new dimension.
