The 18th Century The Secret History of the British Garden

Nigel! Go on. Go on. Come on.

'In the 21st century, we now embrace wildlife

'and encourage it into our garden.

'But 300 years ago, everything was very, very different.'

Gardens were a sanctuary to keep nature at bay,

and they were ordered and controlled.

And then came perhaps the greatest revolution in the whole

of gardening history.

The landscape at large was embraced

and included on a scale that is almost unimaginable.

'On my journey through the past 400 years of garden history,

'I've so far looked at the 17th century

'and discovered the secrets behind the tightly controlled

'formal gardens created as a display of their owners' wealth and power

'as well as some hidden messages that revealed their true beliefs.

'I'm now moving into the 18th century,

'which saw a radical transformation of these grand, formal gardens,

'and I'll be discovering how

'and why these new landscapes were created and who was behind them.'

-He's an artist, I guess.

-Yeah.

Although I bet he never saw himself like that.

'I'll be getting some hands-on knowledge of

'the techniques of the century's most famous gardener, Capability Brown.'

Go!

'I'll celebrate the work of the maverick William Kent,

'who preceded Brown at the beginning of the century...'

This really doesn't feel like the entrance to one of the greatest

gardens in the world, does it?

'..and the marketing genius of Humphry Repton,

'who followed in Brown's footsteps at the end of the period.'

He's pitching it absolutely right.

Everybody always wants a certain degree of magnificence.

'I believe that gardens are every

'bit as important as the buildings that we live and work in.

'And if we can unearth their secrets and listen to their stories,

'we get a unique insight into our history...

'..and what makes us the people that we are today.'

At the beginning of the 18th century,

British gardens were still locked in a mind-set, exemplified by Dutch

formality, of controlling nature.

Everything was straight lines - canals, clipped trees,

avenues - just to show that man was in charge,

and all the natural world was seen as potentially wild and unruly.

And then, in a generation, all this was transformed

and the landscape was allowed in.

And the first garden to show this in its entirety was Croome Court,

the very first commission made by Lancelot "Capability" Brown.

And what is extraordinary, looking from above, is you can see how Brown,

with only the resources of 1750, was able to see

the landscape as it would become.

He diverted water, created a river - or at least it's a lake that looks

like a river - planted these rings of trees that would become clumps

beyond his lifetime, beyond the lifetime of his children,

and then these eye-catchers, the church over there

and the marvellous orangery...

..all this incredibly skilfully co-ordinated from the ground

so it appeared completely natural, but actually it took as much skill

and as much artifice as the most tightly controlled formal garden.

'In the mid-18th century, Croome Court, set within a 17,000-acre

'estate in Worcestershire, was the seat of the sixth Earl of Coventry.

'He was a young man who wanted a house and garden that would be

'in the most modern design as well as displaying his wealth and status.'

Now, this is the way to go and see gardens!

'To create the earl's new garden meant undertaking radical changes,

'and to learn about some of this

'I'm meeting the local archaeologist Dennis Williams,

'who's making a geophysical survey to get a detailed picture of these

'changes made to Croome in the second half of the 18th century.'

We've chosen this particular spot because we have some map-based

and documentary evidence

that the parish church for Croome D'Abitot

was once situated here.

And then, in the late 1750s, as the Earl of Coventry was having

the house and the landscape part-remodelled,

the church was demolished and the new church up on the hill was built.

What date is this picture?

That one, erm, the date is unclear,

but it's thought to have been about 1750.

-That's the gatehouse.

-That is the gatehouse.

-With the church...

And there's the church.

So Brown demolished all this to make his park.

As well as the church foundations,

presumably there was a graveyard here.

We believe that the tombs of the earls were moved to the new

church when that was consecrated in 1763.

The Coventry family were all taken, lock, stock and barrel, up there.

Certainly the earls. We don't know whether the countesses were moved.

That's something we're very uncertain about.

-They wouldn't have moved the countesses?

-Not necessarily.

One would have thought so, but the documentary evidence is not

clearly there to state that that were the case.

You realise there was a kind of ruthlessness about making

this garden and other landscape gardens, because a parish church -

you know, this is something that had been there for hundreds of years -

razed to the ground to make way for grass.

To the modern sensibility, that's appalling vandalism.

But it was the brave new world, it was the way ahead.

Out with the old, in with the landscape.

'Croome echoes the growing confidence of Georgian Britain.

'The country had moved away from the politics of its European

'neighbours with a settled constitutional monarchy

'and a more liberal philosophy.

'And this was expressed in a style of garden that dispensed with

'formality and created a romanticised image of the rural idyll.

'So what we see in these landscapes are a series of carefully

'manipulated, idealised views of the countryside as a wealthy,

'educated 18th-century nobility wished to portray it.

'I want to find out how Lord Coventry and Brown,

'although from very different backgrounds, both young,

'energetic men, created this new vision here at Croome.

'So I'm meeting the estate manager, Michael Forster-Smith,

'to look at Brown's original plans.'

A-ha!

-Look at this!

-It's fantastic, isn't it?

-What date is this?

Well, the plan was originally drawn up in 1763,

and it charts the position of every single one of Brown's

newly planted trees set out across this new landscape at Croome.

And the thing which is very clear

-is, you know, thick planting.

-That's right.

So this distant belt of trees almost gives the appearance that

there's a vast native woodland that stretches out beyond.

Of course, that's an illusion, but the shelterbelt makes it seems so.

-So, this obviously is the famous picture of Brown.

-Yeah.

My reading of Brown is that it's just practicality, a very English thing.

-"How do we make this work?"

-Yeah. An engineer.

-Yeah. Completely.

Completely so.

-An engineer, and, in the process, an artist, I guess.

-Yeah.

Although I bet he never saw himself like that.

No. Brown was the great landscape improver.

Not only did he make your land more beautiful,

it was much more economic to run.

Gone were the fussy and tightly clipped

box and yew hedges that required intensive labour.

And the sheep did the work for you. It was more productive.

And in fact, in the 18th century, great beauty

and productivity were seen as being the same thing.

And there's one letter from Lord Coventry, and he talks of creating

a utopia, and he doesn't just mean

in terms of how this is going to look.

These are grand ambitions.

'Brown and Coventry's vision for Croome was extraordinary

'and radical, but it wasn't wholly original.

'There's much more to see and discover about Croome

'and about how Brown and hence the whole landscape movement worked.

'But to explore its origins, I want to visit a garden designed by a man

'who Brown had previously worked under at Stowe and who really

'pioneered the revolutionary new concept of the landscape garden.'

The garden I want to take you to is Rousham.

It was made only about a dozen years before Croome started...

..but really is the door through which

Croome and, I believe, all Lancelot Brown's work passed.

'Rousham in Oxfordshire is the work of William Kent, whom I consider the

'great genius of 18th-century garden design, and this is his masterpiece.

'It's still owned by the same family who employed Kent in 1738

'to reshape the garden,

'and despite nearly 300 years of changing fashions and styles, Rousham

'has remained practically unaltered since the day it was completed.'

This is one of the great garden views.

It's about a kind of gentle embracing of this soft, very British landscape.

But it's manipulated, because there's a folly up there

on the hillside that looks like an old medieval ruin.

In fact, it's just a wall,

a facade designed solely to be seen from this viewpoint.

And another way that landscape was manipulated

was a new piece of garden architecture.

The ha-ha is a beautifully simple and effective device.

It's a wall designed to keep stock out,

but it's a wall sunken down in a ditch,

so from inside the garden it was an unbroken view.

You didn't see the barrier, you didn't see the ditch or the wall.

All you saw was what you wanted to see,

which was your prize animals,

your wonderful trees you were planting

rolling out into the landscape.

And it was incredibly liberating. It opened gardens out.

From the road, you look up to the house

and there's this enormous, impressive great avenue of grass.

In fact, most of it is just a steep slope made to look

as though it's much bigger than it is.

But once the scene is set, then to go into the garden proper,

there are a number of different routes. And this is very typical.

None of them are grand.

It almost doesn't quite look like you're in the right place,

and there's said to be something like 1,000 different routes round it.

So...let's go this way.

You see, this really doesn't feel like the entrance

to one of the greatest gardens in the world, does it?

This garden is green.

Every shade of green is played with.

The light is green.

You have this underlayer of laurel,

and then you have yews and you rise up and have the deciduous

trees with the light just shifting and falling through.

'Then, everywhere at Rousham there are scenes that are revealed.

'You come out and you find yourself in a setting.

'And of course, that's Kent's great genius.

'He was a stage designer, really.

'And you become the actor, you perform on it.

'And of course, what that does is make the garden work

'entirely in a personal way for you. Every time is a fresh performance.

'So instead of looking on and admiring it,

'like you do in so many gardens...

'you breathe life into it.

'And that's magic. That really is special.'

I've got a picture of William Kent.

And if Brown was someone that everybody admired -

he was professional, he turned up on time, amazingly efficient,

knew what he was talking about -

Kent was all over the shop.

He never turned up on time, he didn't answer letters,

he didn't send in invoices, he drank too much.

They always said that Kent would come and stay with you, drink all your

wine, probably sleep with your wife and your daughters and charm you.

And you can't help but love William Kent.

He's one of the great, brilliant rogues of history.

The accusations against Kent -

and he's not universally admired - are that

he really just added embellishment to good work that was already in place.

'But the touches that he added transformed everything that he

'touched, and all his work, I think,

'stands peerless above the more sober contributions of his contemporaries.

'William Kent was heavily influenced by a stay of ten years in Italy,

'where he studied and trained as a painter

'and absorbed every facet of art, architecture and decoration.

'And although he was the son of a humble joiner from Bridlington,

'this was the heyday of the Grand Tour,

'when aristocratic young men would set off on a kind of glorified

'gap year to absorb European art and culture.

'So from about 1730, as these aristocrats returned home

'and took over their country seats,

'British gardens gradually began to reject the existing Dutch

'formality and replace it with these classical influences.'

But Kent, a maverick to the end, also added a quirky element to it.

I love the way that,

in this temple of Echo called the Townsend Building,

you have the temple and the pillars, and in the front, not on the side,

a sash window.

So what you end up with is Rome,

but Rome with its feet firmly in Oxfordshire.

'And Kent was more, much more than just a garden designer.'

-Hello!

-Monty, how nice to see you.

-Nice to see you.

-Come in.

-Come in.

Thank you very much.

'No aspect of design was beyond him, and the home of

'Charles and Angela Cottrell-Dormer

'is testament to his extraordinary range.'

-Through here, the dining room.

-Right.

-But if we turn this way...

-Oh, this is an extraordinary room.

-Kentissimo!

'Every detail of this room,

'from elaborate marble mantelpieces to ornate gilt picture frames,

'decorative swans and intricate cornicing,

'was all designed by Kent.'

And Kent did this ceiling? Did he paint that?

Yes, he painted it on canvas,

and it was trundled down, rolled up on a wagon.

It is a wonderful decorative design.

Oh, look at the colour, the blues and reds. Absolutely wonderful.

-Come on, Monty.

-OK.

-A-ha!

-The general's very grand library.

-Now, that is General Dormer, is it?

-Yes.

-Who commissioned the garden.

And what relation is he to you?

Great-great-great-great...

Not sure how many greats!

-So that the line has stayed in the family.

-Oh, absolutely, yes.

I wonder if there are any other examples of rooms looking out

on to a garden design where the building has been designed,

the plasterwork, the furniture, all designed by the same man.

-It is extraordinary.

-Did you know, if you come... Oh!

You can just see it through there.

The visitors' doorway. That was built by Kent especially

so that passers-by in the 18th century could visit the gardens.

A great tradition in this country of places being visited.

And MacClaray, the head gardener, he got £60 a year in tips,

-which was a great deal of money.

-That's a lot of money. It is.

And he was a wonderful chap. And she sacked him.

-Jane Caesar.

-Right. Why?

Because she didn't like him getting the tips.

-So people have been visiting Rousham from the beginning.

-Yes.

-Yeah.

-The gardens, not the house.

-Yeah.

-Are you under any pressure to modernise?

-Oh, no!

-No?

-What for?

You can't hurt it if you respect its spirit.

-It tells you what it likes and what it doesn't.

-Mm.

'Rousham brilliantly displays how Kent included the landscape

'to make an idealised image of the English countryside.

'Brown was a pupil of Kent's, and as I return to Croome, I can see

'just how much he was influenced by him.

'But he took Kent's ideas a step further to create gardens that

'didn't just use the natural landscape as part of the design

'but embraced it for as far as the eye could see.'

Of course, Brown was a genius at manipulating the landscape

and creating this harmonious whole.

But his real contribution that was unique

was the park.

Until Brown, the park was still really

the remnants of a medieval deer park, an area that was fenced off

that deer were kept in that you hunted.

But Brown took that idea and brought it to the walls of the house.

Now, Kent had included it, but it was at a distance, it was a view,

and Brown brings it without halt

and then filled it with elegant trees

so that the space became managed and gardened.

This is a garden as much as anything else.

But of course, it appears completely relaxed and natural

and, critically, grand.

'Of course, Brown knew that as well as being beautiful,

'the wild-flower meadow also provided valuable hay.

'But cutting this great sea of grass had to be all done by hand,

'using a scythe, and this was hard and extremely skilful work.

'And although I've often used a scythe over the years,

'I've never really mastered it.

'So I'm hoping that Martin Kibblewhite, still scything

'regularly at 87 years old, will be able to share its secrets.'

It's like a saw.

You're actually swinging, swinging the blade in an arc.

-It's actually following the arc.

-Right.

-You're not actually...

You take very little. Let's see if I can find a bit to do here.

You don't take more than two or three inches at a time.

I love the sound.

SWISHING

'The saw action takes less effort, so you can keep going for longer.'

Where did you learn to scythe?

Well, I first learnt when I was 14 or 15, big enough to hold a scythe,

and then, later, in my twenties, an old man who

was in his seventies in the '50s -

he must have been a grown man in 1900 -

he showed me the finer points.

He must have learnt in the 19th century.

There are records of mowers here at Croome

being paid one shilling and tenpence a day for their mowing

plus 28 pints of small beer.

-Wow!

-MARTIN LAUGHS

28 pints! So, thirsty work.

They were probably mowing half-cut most of the day.

But they were doing long, long hours.

Keep the heel down.

That's a lot better.

'Now, we know from the records here at Croome that this meadow was

'cut by 28 mowers, so to maintain Brown's landscape took an army

'of skilled men and women

'working long hours for days and days.

'We tend to romanticise the work

'that was done by the whole landscape movement

'and the parks that were created.'

But behind a lot of them lay enclosures.

Now, enclosures were Acts of Parliament which enabled

a landowner to take land that had otherwise been common

and literally enclose it, hedge it off, and use it for themselves.

And common land had been a really important resource for villagers,

people who might have just one cow or half a dozen sheep or just

grow a little bit of corn,

a really important part of their survival, in many cases.

So behind these scenes often lies a story of people dispossessed, moved,

and land that had been used in a certain way for centuries

suddenly becoming the property of just one individual.

'Given the great human and financial cost

'attached to making these 18th-century landscapes, I want

'to find out more about the Earl of Coventry, who commissioned

'and funded the garden at Croome.

'The earl has been described as a proud,

'argumentative and not altogether attractive figure.

'Yet he was clearly a great patron and collector.

'So I've come to the orangery to meet the Coventry family archivist,

'Jill Tovey, to see what the real man was like.'

So, what have you got here? Because this is a lot of stuff!

This is a very, very small part of the Croome archive, which is huge.

But we've got some plant bills.

25 white raspberries.

12 pineapples.

Cantaloupe melon.

-This is a huge plant list...

-Yeah.

-..which would have all been quite rare and interesting.

-Indeed.

How much did he spend on his garden?

Well, on the garden alone I'm not really sure, but on the whole

project it's been estimated it's equivalent to 28 million these days.

-So a lot of money.

-And where did the money come from?

-Where did the money come from?

-SHE LAUGHS

Everyone asks, but it's not apparent.

But you'd think for such an obsessive collector and recorder of events,

he would have recorded it.

But this is the other thing -

he doesn't keep any of his private letters.

-But he kept every receipt.

-Exactly.

But there's no clue as to his private life.

'What little we do know is full of tragedy.'

He was 28 when he inherited the title, a single man,

so the first thing he needed was a wife, of course.

So he chose the most beautiful woman in London, Maria Gunning.

'The new Lady Coventry was already famous for her extraordinary

'beauty, which was said to make grown men faint before her.

'But in keeping with the fashion of the day,

'she wore a heavy layer of lead- and mercury-based make-up,

'which caused blood poisoning and began to eat away her skin.'

It's reported that she would only have the light of a tea kettle

in her room because she was so devastated by the sight of her face,

this little woman, who'd been the most beautiful woman in London.

So sad.

'Maria died at the age of 29, leaving the earl with four children.

'But his relationships with them was at best fractious.

'He disinherited his eldest daughter for her choice of husband.

'And his son and heir, George, was banished from Croome

'when he also married against his father's wishes,

'Coventry even refusing to speak to him

'when he was blinded in a hunting accident.'

That says something about this man that we glorify,

because he did a wonderful thing at Croome,

but at the same time there was a dark side to him.

-He was rigid.

-Mm.

-Cruel.

Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.

'It seems that Coventry had a closer bond with his garden designer than

'his own kith and kin,

'giving Brown the friendship he was unable to offer his children.

'And it was his work at Croome that paved the way for Brown's

'spectacular career and saw him subsequently

'work on over 170 different projects across the country.

The success of Croome meant that Brown's fame quickly spread,

and one of the grandest places that he came to...

was here, at Chatsworth.

'Chatsworth in Derbyshire has been the seat of the Devonshire family

'for six centuries and for nearly all that period at the forefront

'of style and fashion, displaying wealth, power and grandeur.

'By 1759, seven years after his work at Croome,

'it was already one of the great gardens of Britain

'and the perfect setting for Brown to add his own distinctive stamp.

'And in true Brownian style, he swept away much of the formality,

'widened a river and moved an entire village.

'He did, however, preserve one of the country's finest garden features,

'created 50 years earlier, at the beginning of the century.'

The Cascade was part of the extensive formal garden that

surrounded the house here.

But when Capability Brown came here

in the middle of the 18th century, much of it was swept away.

And if you look beyond the house,

you can see a typical Brownian landscape, and you have that flow

from house to park to countryside beyond in one unbroken movement.

'Like his mentor, William Kent, the key to all Brown's landscape

'designs is the creation of spectacular views and vistas.

'And I've met up with the current Duke of Devonshire,

'who's attempting to restore many of the views that Brown

'originally intended at Chatsworth.'

I've come to learn that the house and the garden and the park

are really one work of art and they're all part of the same thing.

It's not a house with a garden round it which happens to have a park.

And actually, the park was getting a bit cluttered up.

People had planted, understandably, lovely trees,

because they felt there was an empty space

and it's a natural thing to do.

And we decided, the manager and I decided to take it back to the

middle of the 18th century as best we could.

'Today, the duke is having an oak tree cut down to reveal

'a long-lost view.'

It's a lovely tree in the wrong place. The view is into the house

and out from the house. It needed to be opened up.

The house was built purely to show off.

The owners wanted to be seen to have a great big house.

They didn't want it surrounded by trees and for nobody to see.

That's why it's always been open to visitors.

They welcomed people to come and look at this wonderful thing

-they created, as you would.

-Yes.

So, you're freeing up the views from the house and to the house.

Absolutely.

There you go.

-Do you see what I mean?

-Absolutely. It completely transforms it.

-Yes.

I think this is so important, this landscape,

and the house and garden being one, land art really.

-It's dramatic.

-It is dramatic. It is dramatic.

-Yeah.

Financed by growing colonial trade and industrial development,

by the 1760s, any self-respecting landed gentry

were creating their own landscape garden,

complete with classically inspired buildings,

statues and eye-catchers,

often set miles from the house.

Perhaps the most extraordinary of these follies

is at Painshill in Surrey, the brainchild of the painter,

designer and politician Charles Hamilton.

He had a grotto built, using hundreds of thousands of crystals,

including gypsum from the Atlas Mountains.

Hamilton had been inspired by his own grand tour to Italy where the

ornate grottos were a key feature of ever renaissance garden.

But for all its ornate and intricate craftsmanship,

the grotto was just one element of the 158-acre garden,

which took over 30 years to construct.

But in the end, Hamilton was forced to sell his estate.

One of the many wealthy aristocrats to have bankrupted

themselves in their endeavour to create landscape art.

The sheer scale of maintaining these vast gardens

meant that in time, many were turned back to farmland

and this is what happened to Brown's garden at Croome Court,

until the National Trust came to the rescue in 1997.

And overseeing its restoration is the head gardener, Katherine Alker.

I guess running a garden like this is a very different matter to

running a more conventionally formal garden.

Well, there's probably some similarities

but also quite a few differences.

So, this naturalistic style of gardening, you could argue,

is even harder to attain...

Why is that?

Because you're battling against nature constantly.

Croome was originally called Seggy Mere and it was a marsh.

And that marsh is constantly trying to return

and on a day like today, it's probably partly achieving that.

The Earl of Coventry once described his estate as the most

hopeless spot in all the land.

Brown's answer was to create a network of underground

drainage culverts that channelled water from the sodden ground into a

mile-and-a-half-long lake he designed to look like a curving river.

However, this meant massive earthworks,

all of course dug by hand.

But Brown did have a clever way of easing the workload.

So when you're looking down the river from the house,

the bits that you see are deliberately wide

and the bits which cross in front of you,

which are not in the views from the house, are much narrower.

-So he was obviously thinking of the work...

-That's where Brown...

-He is just this very practical man, isn't he?

-Yes.

So far, I've admired this huge undertaking from the distance

of history.

But I want to get inside the practical reality of creating

an artificial landscape like this.

So Katherine is taking me to a site where she's planning to plant

a tree that was in Brown's original plans.

-It's a nice spot, isn't it?

-It's not bad.

It's not bad.

How do we know that there were trees up on this rise?

We've got a watercolour by Burney, 1784.

He was doing watercolours of Worcestershire for a guide book.

And this whopper here...

Yes, using this watercolour and the other documents, we know that there

was a clump of trees at the top here, located quite near the church.

Right.

If this is the site, that's great and we can get at it, that's good,

now we have to find the tree. Where's the tree?

OK. Out in the parkland, I think we've got an option.

-Come on, let's go and have a look.

-OK.

Most of the trees here would have been planted from seed

or as saplings.

But Brown was well known for planting mature trees for a spectacular

instant effect.

It's a nice little oak, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-It's little until you have to move it!

-Yes!

I think it's quite an exciting challenge.

-I think that is a challenge. It is a real challenge.

-Yeah.

It's one thing to move it and another to keep it alive,

so I think that's a big challenge and I cannot believe that Capability

Brown would have tried things much bigger with the equipment he had.

No.

We can't move the tree until autumn when the growth stops

and it goes into winter dormancy.

And this gives us a little time to prepare the equipment

that we'll need.

So, I'm meeting up with Russell Stringer, whose students at

the Worcester Design and Technology College are going to build me

a horse-drawn cart,

based on images of the equipment that Brown himself would have used.

This one here, moving really quite a large tree,

and we can see from the figures and the horses, the size.

I actually think it's quite fanciful because those roots...

-If you had that much bare root, the tree would die.

-Yeah.

-I think they've exaggerated that.

-Exactly.

And I think this is much more the type of thing

-and much more the scale.

-Yeah.

It tips up and is held and there it is being moved.

It's not a complicated piece of machinery.

The wheels are going to be the sort of...

the main problem, but you've got to bear in mind the weight of the tree.

-Two-inch wheels would take two ton.

-Will they?

-Three-inch wheels, three ton.

-Really? That's interesting.

So that's the sort of thing we need to sort of bear in mind,

-the size of the wheels to take the tree.

-OK.

For all the manpower and ingenuity involved,

transforming the landscape at Croome took a generation. Brown never lived

to see his vision completed.

He died in a Mayfair street in 1783,

apparently having just met his old friend the Earl of Coventry.

By then, the Industrial Revolution was rapidly gaining ground,

bringing with it new wealth right across Britain,

which in turn was invariably expressed

in new grand houses and gardens.

The Earl of Coventry lived on at Croome well into the 19th century and

even in his old age, commissioned new sculpture for the house and garden,

using a technique that had become all the rage in Georgian high society

and they included these statues, guarding the entrance to the house,

designed by one of my own ancestors, the architect James Wyatt.

One of Wyatt's contributions to Croome was this pair of sphinxes

and they were very fashionable.

They're made out of Coade stone, which became hugely popular amongst

landowners at the end of the 18th century.

And the whole point about Coade stone is it's not stone at all.

It's clay mixed in with various ingredients to make it

exceptionally durable.

So this hasn't been carved, it's been modelled and cast.

Coade stone added a new dimension

and sophistication to garden sculpture and architecture

and left its stamp on a surprising number

of our finest buildings and landscapes.

I'm fascinated by this Coade production,

so I'm off to Wiltshire,

where the recipe for Coade stone has been rediscovered.

'The original workshops ceased production in 1837.'

Hello.

'And it took years of trial and error for the sculptor Steven Pettifor...'

-Hello, I'm Steve.

-Steve, very nice to meet you.

'..to uncover the secret of the Coade formula and technique.'

Is this all repairing stuff that was made in the heyday of Coade?

No, it's a mixture of some repair work and some new pieces.

So this is a restoration job here.

Hannah's making new pieces.

-And then this is a bracket off a building in London.

-Which building?

Buckingham Palace.

-Right. Is there a lot of Coade at Buckingham Palace?

-A huge amount.

Ooh... That's written on there...

That's an original piece of graffiti from the people who made it.

-It says foolish or...

-Foolish Barnet.

-And Barnet was the bloke who made it?

-Presumably.

-Maybe there were two people working on it, or...

-Foolish Barnet.

How fantastic!

So that must have been hidden

from when it was done to when you took it off.

-Yeah.

-First people to see that.

Coade sculpture was made using moulds, which is

both much faster than carving a block of stone

and also meant that the mould could be reused many times.

However, the main advantage of Coade over carved stone

lay in the extreme fine detail

and the quality of craftsmanship that could be applied to the clay.

If I wanted to order a pair of tigers, what would it cost me?

16,000 for the pair.

-8,000 each.

-Mm.

Wow.

-This is not a poor man's stone.

-No.

They were held in high regard by the architects of that time.

Actually, in clay, we can really push the detail and the undercuts

and be really extravagant with it, whereas in stone, it's harder.

-So presumably... Take this here...

-This keystone.

-Yeah.

That would be really difficult...

If you look at the detail in here, it would be very tricky in stone,

-wouldn't it?

-Exactly.

-Yeah.

-You wouldn't do that in limestone.

'Steven explained to me some of the secrets of this extraordinary

'versatile and durable material.'

-This is the clay. We have lots of different blends.

-OK.

-This is...

Is this a secret, by the way? Do you want to give away the blend?

I'm not that secretive about it.

Cos ultimately, it's the sculpting that's difficult.

Makes it hard to produce.

So let me have a look at that.

So I can see the little bits in it, little white bits.

And what you're looking at there is this, which is called grog.

'Coade is a mixture of fired- up ceramic grit, powdered glass,

'sand and ground flint.'

-But then you treat it like clay.

-Yes.

You model it like clay, you fire it like clay and it goes through,

but it will weather and last much better than normal terracotta.

-Yes.

-And some stone.

Oh... Yeah. I mean, last a lot longer than any limestones.

-Right.

-And marble.

-Really? Longer than marble?

-Yeah.

-See, to a layperson...

-A lot longer.

-..that is an incredible fact.

-It's incredibly hard material.

'Producing these finished works is highly skilled, but to get

'a feel for the process, I'm going to help make a Georgian keystone.'

So this is... Are these all part of the same mould?

-Yeah, this completes one mould.

-So that's ready to receive...

-The clay.

..the Coade clay.

-So we just take handfuls and push it in?

-Yeah, but we... Yeah, basically.

-What I would do...

-Basically means, politely, no!

Well, yeah, we need to be careful,

so I've identified the fact that the nose is quite deep and undercut,

so you can make sure initially that we get clay into there.

OK, so that's the first bit.

Push it in with your thumb. Make sure it gets right into the bottom.

You can maybe just use two fingers to go into that forehead.

You've got to get it into the corners.

They're sometimes quite difficult. You need to make real attention...

-OK.

-..to that corner.

Of course, it's absolute joy working clay.

-You know, it's a lovely material.

-You're doing very well, Monty.

I'd definitely give you a job!

'The success of Coade is remarkable for the fact that in an age

'dominated by men, it was the brainchild of a woman,

'Eleanor Coade, who was a brilliant businesswoman

'and quickly made her company a household name.'

Right.

Well, we'll wait and then hopefully, I'll be able to take it to bits.

Yeah.

Mrs Coade was obviously a business genius,

but she was lucky because by 1770, there was a lot of new money

and this money was generated by industry.

Until about 1750, most of the money being spent on houses and gardens was

essentially old landed gentry, but by the end of the 18th century,

all this new wealth developed from the Industrial Revolution

expressed itself in new houses,

new gardens, new ornaments,

and Coade supplied it superbly

because it was a little bit cheaper, a little bit more accessible,

and could be produced at home in a very efficient manner.

So she got everything right

and the thing that was most right of all was her timing.

-It's time.

-Yeah.

-Can I just pull it out?

-Yeah, take one half off and then...

-I won't damage it?

-You might drag a bit, but no.

OK.

'In its heyday, Coade's work could be found in almost all the stately homes

'and gardens of Georgian Britain, but its success was short-lived.'

There's an eye looking at me.

'Eleanor Coade died in 1821, leaving no natural successor, and poor

'management and changing fashions led to the company's swift demise.

'However, there is still no better material

'for producing high-quality durable outdoor sculpture.'

Right.

We're now faced with tidying this up

and adding all the detail, generally.

Because ultimately, what we're trying to get to is this.

-That is much more detailed...

-Mm.

..almost every aspect of it, than that.

Mm. The reason people really like Coade and why it's

so revered is it is this stage now,

the addition of all this detail will really lift it and bring it to life.

And that's what Coade was so good at.

Great. Well, that's beyond my skill any more. I can't work on that.

Just as Coade profited from the building boom of the late 1700s,

the next generation of designers tailored the English landscape

garden to the broader tastes of the industrialists

and the businessmen who were pouring their new money into country estates.

By the end of the 18th century,

the whole landscape movement was evolving and changing and from these

changes, one dominant figure emerged

and his name was Humphry Repton.

'Repton had tried his hand at many ventures before he spotted

'a gap in the landscape industry and adroitly filled it.

'So I've come to Powys in Wales to visit one of the surviving

'examples of his work, the privately owned Stanage Park.

'And although Repton didn't have the sublime

'artistry of William Kent or the

'innate practicality of Capability Brown,

'his great talent was recognising the demands of a new clientele

'and brilliantly marketing his designs to them.'

-Hello. Good morning, Monty. How are you?

-I'm very well.

'Jonathan Coltman-Rogers' ancestor, Charles Rogers,

'was among the hundreds of wealthy aristocrats who commissioned

'Repton and each was presented with what became his famous trademark,

'a red book.'

There it is, in pride of place.

Bright red.

It's brilliantly written, considering he was supposed

to have written these in a carriage on the way home.

Beautiful.

'It's very rare to find one of these books still in the house

'and garden that Repton designed.'

Humphry Repton, and there's a picture of him here,

was a self-made landscape designer,

which was a term he coined.

He had tried and not done very well in trade and in his 30s, applied

himself to the study of plants and of design and set up in business.

And quite systematically marketed his services.

Unlike Brown, who would oversee the creation of almost every

aspect of his designs,

Repton simply offered his clients clear instructions and plans in their

red book and then they could execute them when and how they pleased.

He also devised a clever trick to show what his plans would look like.

He did these pretty little drawings of the site as it was,

but you lift up a flap

and that is what he is proposing,

so immediately you could see the change.

And here, the house, across, lift that up,

and there's a lake and the new house.

And the cattle and the deer grazing.

The other aspect of these red books, which was new and fascinating,

was that it was geared as much to the women of the household as to the men.

The men would still be paying for it,

but the women would play a very important part of it,

so there's an awful lot of reference to domesticity, to flowers,

to convenience. The watercolours are pretty.

And the changes are delightful.

And that's a much more feminine approach.

And what I love is the three following principles - economy,

convenience, and a certain degree of magnificence.

He is perfectly pitching it absolutely right.

Everybody wants to save money.

Increasingly, people wanted to be able to live with a degree of

comfort, but everybody always wants a certain degree of magnificence.

Repton's success lay in his ability to appeal to a growing landed gentry

who, by the late 18th century, wanted a little less of the landscape

and a little more of the garden.

Capability Brown had parkland

coming right up to the house,

almost like a sea lapping at the door.

What Repton did was hold the park at bay

and established a kind of base relating to the house,

so the house sat on a level area of gardens with straight lines,

lawns, paths, and then the park would be approached

and you can see here that the wall is visible. It's not a ha-ha.

There are markers, there's mown grass,

there's a real delineation between garden and park.

Repton was the last

of the great landscape designers of the 18th century.

It was an age that had witnessed garden building on a scale

that exceeded anything before it in this country

and has never been equalled since.

But before I leave this century,

I'm returning to Croome Court for one last visit.

It's now autumn and helped by a small team,

we're attempting to replant an oak tree to complete

Capability Brown's original designs, using only the methods

and technology that were available to him in the 1750s.

Gently, dear. Gently.

Gently, gently.

-Steady.

-'Randy Hiscock is supplying the horsepower.'

-Wonderful. What are their names?

-This is Minnesota and Anastasia.

-And this is fantastic!

-Yeah.

Specifically built for the purpose.

And these wheels are really substantial,

but I guess it is quite a weight it's got to take.

-Will they be up to it, do you think?

-Well, hopefully they'll do the job.

-Well, we'll find out.

-Or I'm in trouble.

-We'll find out!

-OK, dears. Walk on, dear.

Walk on. Good girl.

Walk on.

Walk on, dear. Gently. Gently. Steady.

Before the horses can be put to work, we need to dig out the tree,

whilst preserving as much of the root balls we can.

But the soil is heavy and compacted

and it's proving to be a really difficult job.

You can see we're using pickaxes, there's lots of people, the roots

have been slashed and broken and now, left like this, it would die,

without any question.

So speed and minimum damage is really what we're after.

'Before removing any more soil and damaging the roots further, we decide

'to try and use the cart as a lever to prise the tree from the ground.'

Very nice. Beautiful job. OK, start lowering it.

Hold the rope.

That's it.

Someone else go on the rope. Pull it back a bit.

-Get your wheel back that side a bit.

-That's it. Now push, push, push.

OK, let's go.

'Using the horses at this stage would be too risky because

'if the tree suddenly comes away, it could scare them and make them bolt.

-'So we have to resort to manpower.'

-The moment of truth.

-That shouldn't go anywhere really, should it?

-Let's give it a go.

One, two, go!

CREAKING AND SNAP

Oh!

LAUGHTER

That's exactly why we would not do it with the horses cos that's

what happens. Something like that might happen.

Right.

The bottom's pulling the top. The bottom's going in.

What's happened here is that you can see a branch has gone through

there, you've got a fault and it's split.

At that point. And in fact, it's split right the way down,

back down to another big knot there.

So this is a useless piece of wood and that actually illustrates a point

because what they would have done is they would have known,

they would have valued the importance,

so they would have chosen a really fine bit of wood. However...

We learn.

'We really need to get this tree out of the ground before the roots

'dry out completely, so having lashed the shaft together,

'we're giving it one last try with just rope and brute force.'

There is movement.

-Yes!

-Now he's coming!

-Yes!

-Yay!

There we are.

To be honest, I genuinely thought we were going to have to give up

and put a vehicle on it.

OK, so if we now get it back upright, get the machine on,

strap it on and pull it out.

Let's have some manpower.

This way, this way, this way.

'Obviously, the roots exposed like this is not good.

'I mean, this goes against all good advice, but on the other hand,

'moving a tree like this is sort of emergency treatment.

'Now, all these problems, you can only learn how to do it by doing it.

'And by doing it badly.

'And my guess is that to learn how to do this,

'they probably failed on 10, 15 trees'

before they really got the knack.

And we're just having to make it up as we go along.

Gently. Come on, dear. Walk on. Good girl. Walk on.

Steady there. Gently.

Good girl. Walk on.

If nothing else, today has increased my respect for the amount

of work in making these landscapes. This is a modest tree.

Moving it has taken about a dozen of us all day,

with lots of trials and tribulations.

And the chances of success are fairly slim.

Yet, this was a tiny aspect of making these landscapes.

Lakes were dug, rivers dammed and moved, land was reshaped

and formed and the fact they dotted around a few mature trees

really didn't amount to much

when you'd had to do all that massive amount of work.

It really does go beyond anything that we experience today,

let alone without any machinery.

A little bit more.

Very good.

There.

Done.

The landscape movement was based upon

the fashion for an idealised countryside,

but by the end of the 18th century,

it was going out of fashion because the world had changed.

Big new technological developments, big new cities,

new ideas demanded new styles of gardening.

But that is another story.