Stowe British Gardens in Time

Four iconic English gardens.

Each is the product of one moment in history

and each gives us a fascinating window into the century

in which they were made and the people who created them.

Much more than just a history of gardening, these are extraordinary

tales of escape, social ambition, heartbreak,

downfall and disaster.

In unravelling these remarkable stories, we reach back over

the centuries to see these four great gardens through fresh eyes

and gain a greater understanding of their real significance.

Looming over the village of Buckingham in the Southwest

of England is one of the grandest

and most dramatic gardens in this country, Stowe.

Created in the 18th century at a time when England was emerging

as a superpower, it's so vast that it can feel like a small country.

Stowe for me has always been a sense of scale.

This is Capability Brown's Grecian Valley and it's remarkable to

think that there was 24,000 tonnes of topsoil removed from this valley.

250 acres of majestic parkland

envelop an extraordinary succession of neoclassical buildings,

avenues, lakes and rivers.

Stowe isn't a garden of flowers or shrubs - it's a garden of ideas.

Shaped by the political ideals of a man called Richard Temple

or Viscount Cobham, it fostered a rebellion that overthrew

the first Prime Minister of England.

What I love about Stowe is that it's a garden where politics

and gardening are deeply interwoven.

This is a canvas on which Cobham painted his political manifesto.

So every bit here means something.

We've just forgotten how to read it.

But Stowe isn't just a bold political statement, it's

the garden where nature was freed from the stranglehold of history.

This is a really significant turning point, it is

the catalyst for the most important change in British landscape design.

Stowe is the starting point of what we know today as the English

landscape school.

Stowe was created almost 300 years ago by an extraordinary man.

Richard Temple had a driving ambition to climb to the

pinnacle of political power and create an immortal dynasty.

But less than a century after his death, his family had

fallen from the heights of aristocratic pomp to become

the most scandalous bankrupts in the history of England.

Cobham's great dream ended in ruin but the scale of his ambition is

still written into the landscape today.

Alan Power, head gardener at Stourhead

and an expert on trees is trying to get a sense what it would

have been like to approach this extraordinary garden in the 18th century.

We're right on the edge of the village of Buckingham here

but we're also right on the edge of the landscape garden at Stowe.

And you can tell by the ornate nature of the gate lodges here

and the enormity of that avenue that goes off into the distance that

you're also on the edge of something really, really significant.

Those privileged to visit Stowe wouldn't have walked down this

avenue - they would have ridden it in carriages.

Alan is using something more contemporary.

There's one sure way to make an impression

and that is to plant an avenue of trees, this size, this scale

and invite you to come along it.

Originally, it was planted with elms to give a sense of height.

The trees are marshalling your way onto the property.

You know, you can't wander off-piste, can you?

The avenue focuses your eyes straight on the arch

in the distance.

You can see that the columns on the portico of the main house

are beyond.

So you're still not there yet.

By keeping it so formal, it's really, really impressive,

you know and quite intimidating at times.

Today the garden at Stowe is run by the National Trust

and the house where Viscount Cobham spent his childhood is now

an elite public school.

Cobham grew up here during a dramatic

and revolutionary period in English history.

Born just 24 years after the Civil War, he was

just 12 at the time of the glorious revolution when the Catholic King

James II was overthrown and replaced by the Protestant William of Orange.

His family were staunch Parliamentarians who

made their money in sheep farming and bought a title.

By the time Richard was born, they were heavily in debt.

So at just nine years old, he was sent into the Army.

Strong-willed even as a child, at the age of ten Richard was

court martialled for refusing to obey orders.

Forced out of the Army, he was sent to Eton and then Cambridge

but impatient to make his fortune, he abandoned his studies to

rejoin the army.

By the age of 20, Richard had gone abroad to Europe to

fight the French.

His victories on the battlefield earned him a reputation as a bold

and brilliant soldier but left him with a lifelong enmity for France.

By the time he inherited Stowe, a country house

and formal garden, he was financially secure

and established as one of the leading military men in the country.

Historian Richard Wheeler, has spent his life studying Cobham

and his garden.

He's hugely ambitious in every respect.

He's ambitious in the army and works his way up through the ranks

and ends up as Field Marshall.

He's ambitious socially and he's ambitious politically but in a

very different way because he's the theorist of the Whig party and he's

the one who sets the tone for Whig ideology for the next hundred years.

So what he's doing here at Stowe is actually setting out a personal

and political morality for young people to follow.

So it's really influential stuff.

Cobham's revolution began conventionally enough with

a desire to create a garden that would enhance his house,

impress his peers and raise his social status.

Reflecting the fashion of the time, he began by creating

a formal parterre.

But over the next 50 years, a series of extraordinary

circumstances would lead Cobham to ever more ambitious and radical

developments that would transform his garden beyond recognition.

Alan Power has come to try to get a bird's-eye view of Cobham's

great creation and the huge footprint

he left on the landscape from one of the oldest residents in the garden.

Trees are the quietest but probably the most important

element in a landscape garden like Stowe.

You can look at it in simple terms about quite how majestic

trees like this cedar get.

They also, in a strange kind of way, help you orientate yourself

because this cedar you can see from all over the landscape.

It feels as if the tree starts welcoming you as you come up

it into the canopy.

Before that, it just feels like an awfully long way up.

What I'm seeing at the moment is a whole new Stowe landscape garden.

It is light coming up and opening the stage curtains

on a fantastic performance, you know, because that's what it is.

I can see the house and the axis

and the view to the arch in the distance associated with

the view to the Temple of the Worthies behind and suddenly there's

two or three different elements to the landscape coming together.

Seeing the trees in the distance, they actually look like shrubs.

So when we're gardening nowadays, we're using shrubs to create

the same effect that they were using full scale trees.

Now that really is gardening on a very, very grand scale.

Viscount Cobham, as he became known, spent a lifetime and a vast fortune

creating one of the most radical and ambitious gardens in history.

Cobham had a real eye for talent and he chose the brightest

and most brilliant designers and architects in the history

of landscape design, from Charles Bridgeman, who freed the garden

from the tyranny of geometry and made the Serpentine famous,

to William Kent, who leapt the fence

and saw all nature as a garden, drawing inspiration from literature

and the classical world to transform Stowe into an act of rebellion.

And finally, a young gardener called Lancelot Brown who

earned his nickname by seeing the capability of a landscape.

Brown completed Cobham's great work before transforming

the English landscape with ideas pioneered at Stowe.

To understand the story of Stowe is to understand how

one of England's greatest creations, the landscape garden, was born.

One of the really nice things being up here is

you start seeing garden designers

and gardeners in the history of Stowe, almost meeting each other at

this point and you've got different influences coming together.

There's elements of Charles Bridgeman's formality,

one of the great gardeners that worked at Stowe,

laid out before us and over my other shoulder, William Kent,

another great gardener from the eighteenth century who

worked at Stowe, performing to my right-hand side.

Being up here seeing the different elements, the Kent,

the Bridgeman, the formal, the less formal.

The distinction was being blurred between parklands and gardens

and then it was really Brown that further naturalised the landscape.

Kind of - they referred to it as "calling in the countryside",

so you welcomed the countryside into the landscape garden.

But what we see today is very different from Cobham's

original vision for Stowe, which was surprisingly conventional.

To try and discover how this rich and multi-layered garden began,

designer and writer, Chris Beardshaw has come to

look at the original designs of Charles Bridgeman.

Bridgeman's plan from 1739, which is very traditional,

indicates this massive imposition striking through the landscape.

I mean, you could be looking at Versailles here.

It is a highly classically inspired,

great straight-line axes showing dominance and control

and that's typical of the classical period.

When we look at Bridgeman's drawings here, it looks like a hilltop fort.

It's a very prominent shape, and clearly a defence.

The landscape isn't sweeping in,

nature isn't allowed to sweep in, it's still kept at bay.

There's very careful use of hedges, and planting, and parterres,

and the garden exists within this rather secure space.

And when we come outside of the house, well, we're straight down

onto a parterre with formal watercourse,

flanked by gardens on either side.

We go down a double line of trees with a paved access path,

and then an octagonal lake at the base.

So it's very composed, very geometric, and very orchestrated.

If you came back here in 1713, you'd have seen parterre lawns,

you'd have seen an avenue of poplar trees

leading down to the octagonal lake - we call it the Octagon.

In the middle of the Octagon Lake there would have been a juglio,

a fountain.

So, in front of you, you've got what we call a palimpsest.

So, layer, upon layer of history evolving over time.

It's difficult to imagine just how formal and geometric gardens

were at the beginning of the 18th century but Bridgeman's designs

for Stowe very much reflect the sensibilities of the time.

The outside world and nature itself was seen as chaotic

and threatening so gardens were enclosed,

almost fortified spaces where nature was rigidly controlled by man.

Historian and writer Andrea Wulf has come to another 17th century

house and garden that has survived in its original state.

This is Ham House in Richmond and its parterre garden is a vivid

illustration of how the original gardens at Stowe would have looked.

What you see is a garden that is entirely ruled by straight lines.

It's a rigid design, it's clipped shapes,

nothing is allowed to grow out of line.

Even the trees, they're pleached so the branches grow together

and they really create a green wall.

What we have to bear in mind is that this is a time when Newton,

for example, has just explained nature through mathematics.

So the universe is this divine clockwork, this very complex

clockwork, which was designed by the divine architect.

So this is about comprehending nature through reason

and this is expressed in the garden.

Though this formal style of garden had dominated England

for centuries, it had come from the country of Cobham's greatest foe.

In the early part of the 18th century, England was battling

France's supremacy in Europe, Asia and America.

The model of this garden really comes from France

and the supermodel of that garden is Versailles, which is the castle

and the garden of the Sun King, Louis the XIV, the absolute ruler.

He was an arch enemy to the English and he was Catholic.

Though Cobham had begun by following the popular fashion,

he never forgot his battles against the French.

Dissatisfied with his earlier plans for the garden, Cobham began

to search for something different.

Gardeners like Cobham were desperately trying to find a design

for an English garden that was truly English, and not associated

with absolutism and not associated with the Catholic Louis XIV.

To break free from French influence, Cobham decided to

make his garden a crucible for new ideas.

He looked for inspiration from the most brilliant Whig thinkers,

writers and architects of the day.

A select group of these met regularly at the Kit-Cat Club

where Cobham rubbed shoulders with the playwright

and architect Vanbrugh who designed many of Stowe's neoclassical

buildings and the politician and writer Joseph Addison.

Addison wrote a damning critique of English gardens

arguing that the only way to break free from the influence

of France was to look to the East.

This oriental garden at Tatton Park in Cheshire is a late example

of what emerged from increasing contact between East and West.

Some of the first descriptions of Eastern gardens

came from European missionaries in China who wrote home

describing gardens utterly different from anything in the West.

A Jesuit priest called Jean Denis Attiret who served as a

court painter to the Chinese Emperor wrote about his first

impressions of the royal gardens.

"One comes out of a valley, not by a straight wide alley

"as in Europe, but by zigzags, by roundabout paths,

"each one ornamented with small pavilions and grottos, and when you

"exit one valley, you find yourself in another, different from the

"first in the form of the landscape or the style of the buildings.

"Sometimes a canal is wide, sometimes narrow.

"Here they twist, there they curve,

"as if they were really created by the hills and rocks.

"These paths also twist and turn,

"sometimes coming close to the canals, sometimes far away."

Inspired by these revolutionary ideas from the East, Cobham

took the first step to break free from centuries of formality.

At Stowe, Chris Beardshaw has found the seed of what would become

a radical transformation, hidden among Charles Bridgeman's plans.

So, the most exciting element,

the most exciting single ingredient in this drawing is this

watercourse in here and the way that it joins the Octagon at that

point and this watercourse sweeping in from this side.

It's this that started to get the chattering classes really

excited - you start to see nature coming in.

This is the hybrid, really, between high formality, classically inspired

landscape, and the informality of the naturalistic approach.

You know, it's hard to overstate the importance of this particular view.

It's...to the untrained eye, and by today's measure, it is simply

a sinuous watercourse, drifting off into a naturalistic landscape.

But this is a really significant turning point - it is

the catalyst for the most important change in British landscape design.

It's about reintroducing nature into the garden.

Suddenly through a formal landscape meanders a soft watercourse.

Nature flows in and embraces the water, and what

we have is a relaxation of our obsession with control of nature.

It becomes a feature,

which every gentleman of the period had to have - the Serpentine.

This is the starting point of what we know today as the English

landscape school.

Thanks to his work at Stowe Charles Bridgeman's profile grew,

bringing him to the attention of Queen Caroline

who appointed him Royal Gardener.

When she instructed him to redesign Hyde Park,

Bridgeman drew inspiration from Stowe to create

one of the most famous man-made lakes in the world.

Called the Serpentine

because of its curving shape, it quickly became one of the most

fashionable and imitated features in aristocratic gardens.

Though Bridgeman was working on a much bigger scale in Hyde Park,

it all began at Stowe.

Just look at that curve, it's that sinuous nature

and it sweeps round and then flows out.

It all starts here.

For me, the origin of the revolution starts at the point where

that water emerges.

Shortly after Richard was made a viscount by King George,

he married a wealthy young heiress.

This allowed him to embark on a massive expansion plan of his gardens.

In just over a decade, he extended them by 80 acres excavating

a canal, damming a river to create an 11-acre lake and building

a rotunda designed by his club mate Vanbrugh that housed a gilded Venus.

As his garden flourished, so did his career.

In just three years Cobham led a successful expedition against

the Spanish, was appointed Colonel of the King's Own Horse Guard,

Controller of Accounts for the Army, and a Governor of Jersey for life.

Cobham's success came at a time

when England was emerging as a great power.

It was his direct experience at battle that inspired him

to create one of the most deceptively simple

but radical features in his great garden, the ha-ha.

This construction here, known as a ha-ha,

is a buried boundary, or fence,

something that revolutionised gardens and landscape,

and more specifically,

revolutionised the link between building and broader landscape.

The notion is said to come from the French trenches

that were dug in the Anglo-French wars

but in landscape terms, what ha-has were allowing a designer to do

is to create division, but it's an invisible division.

The boundaries become increasingly blurred

and the view from the manor house is seamless.

By opening up the garden to nature and the world outside,

the ha-ha epitomised a new confidence

in England and its gardens.

But it was Charles Bridgeman's last contribution at Stowe.

His failing health forced him to retire.

His successor was a flamboyant and multi-talented artist,

writer and designer called William Kent.

Kent had spent a decade studying art in Italy

and he drew on his experience to provide a new direction for Stowe.

Looking to ancient Rome and Greece as the cradle of civilisation,

Kent added a new layer of sophistication to Cobham's garden

by recreating the classical world.

The Palladium Bridge is an extraordinary piece of work,

but probably the most incongruous in a landscape like this.

A rather strange union of architecture from southern Europe

but a landscape, which is uniquely British.

But it's a celebration of intellect.

It's a celebration of wealth, of power, of education,

inspired largely by the Grand Tour.

The wealthy and the learned would go on a grand tour

and see all the classical sights of Greece and Rome

and the Italian Renaissance.

Cobham had won his reputation on the battlefields of Europe.

And now he wanted to use his garden to lay siege to world of the mind.

It's curious that Cobham has so many classical references,

and architectural features

and yet he didn't embark on a grand tour,

he wasn't that well classically educated,

although a bright man.

And so monuments like this

almost become about convincing a wider audience

that you new what you were talking about

and that you were to be taken seriously.

Wealthy, well connected, and master of one of the grandest

and most admired gardens in the country,

Viscount Cobham appeared to be leading a charmed life.

But despite all his success and riches,

he was about to undergo a moral crisis

that would lead him into conflict

with the most powerful man in the world,

transforming his garden

into a radical political protest against King and party.

For most of the first half of the 18th century

English politics were dominated by one remarkable man.

Sir Robert Walpole,

the fifth child of a Norfolk Squire,

was the first man to be called Prime Minister,

a title he held longer than any one who followed him.

During his 21 years in power Walpole accumulated vast wealth,

which he used to turn his family estate,

Houghton Hall in Norfolk,

into one the grandest and most lavish homes in England.

Brilliant, controversial and ultimately divisive

he led his party, the Whigs, and Great Britain,

through a period of enormous prosperity and power.

Eloquent, pragmatic and according to some, corrupt,

he was equally at home speaking in Parliament

and whispering in the King's ear.

Cobham's long support of Walpole's government

had lifted him from the ranks.

But the Prime Minister's overwhelming power

and enormous wealth was causing increasing disquiet

among the more idealistic Whigs.

Many of them believed

that Walpole's control of the King and Parliament

undermined the very notion of democracy.

People don't like that he becomes, for example,

the conduit for royal favour.

In order to rise at court under Walpole,

you have to go through Walpole.

If you want to get something through Parliament,

you have to go through Walpole.

So, he has one foot in St James's Palace

and one foot in Parliament.

Now that is something a lot of the people within his own party,

within the Whig party, don't particularly like,

because one of the reasons for the glorious revolution

was that there is not going to be absolute power somewhere,

and suddenly there is this politician who is holding far too much power.

As Walpole's wealth and power grew even greater,

accusations of corruption and intrigue grew.

In 1733 Cobham decided to take a stand

and risk the enmity of the most powerful man in Great Britain.

At a crucial vote in the House of Commons

he withdrew his support from Walpole's government.

The opposition between Walpole and Cobham

is really between the army man, the military man, and the diplomat.

It's between vice versus virtue.

And then they finally fall out

over a very controversial tax on tobacco and wine.

Cobham votes against it

and Walpole is absolutely furious

and what he does as revenge is he strips Cobham of his regiment.

Filled with fury and righteous indignation,

Cobham decided to strike back at Walpole and his regime,

by turning his garden into a political protest.

With the help of William Kent he transformed Stowe

by dividing it into two dramatically opposed gardens,

which he called Virtue and Vice.

These would highlight everything good and bad

about the country he lived in.

Sitting on the top of the hill overlooking the Garden of Virtue

is the Temple of Ancient Virtue.

Sweeping down from this are the Elysian Fields,

a classical paradise where the brave and virtuous went

after they left this world.

Flowing through this beautiful valley is the Styx,

the river of the dead in Greek mythology.

And on the other side of the water is the Temple of British Worthies.

Highlighting both his knowledge of history

and his political views

Cobham celebrated an elite group of men and women

whom he regarded as the most influential and important

thinkers and leaders in British history.

This is the Temple of British Worthies

and this is at the heart of Cobham's political manifesto in this garden.

You have names like Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh,

King William III, very important for Cobham

because he's the man associated with the Glorious Revolution,

which is for Cobham, the changing moment,

the political moment in his life.

You have Queen Elizabeth for example,

she squashes Spanish ambitions.

So it says, "Inspired by every generous sentiment,

"these gallon spirits founded constitutions,

"shunned the torrent of corruption,

"battled for the state,

"ventured their lives in the defence of their country

"and gloriously bled in the cause of liberty."

I like this bit, the Elysian Fields, the most, in Stowe.

I think, because it is such

an unusual, obvious, political statement,

and it's brave.

And it kind of shows us, in a way,

that gardens are not just about pretty flowers,

it's about much, much more.

And I think it's beautifully expressed in this garden.

Cobham wasn't just looking to English history for inspiration.

On the far side of the valley in the Temple of Ancient Virtue

he chose four great figures from Ancient Greece as shining examples

of what he believed his contemporaries should aspire to be.

The poet, Homer, the General, Ipanimondos,

the lawmaker, Lysurgess, and Socrates, the great philosopher.

What I find really extraordinary about this

is this is not just the odd, pretty, lovely temple,

but what Cobham is doing here

is he's putting everything together in one big narrative.

So, as you walk through the garden, this narrative unfolds.

Over there is the Temple of British Worthies.

If you just look at the Temple of Ancient Virtue

where we're standing, and the Temple of British Worthies,

they are talking to each other.

So it's almost as if the moderns are looking over,

over the river to the ancients, their ancient forefathers.

And they are in conversation with each other across the garden.

These two temples with their coded political message

are big enough ideas for any garden.

But there's an even bigger one at the heart of William Kent's design.

The gentle contours of the Elysian Fields

would spark another revolution

that would sweep through the English garden

transforming it beyond recognition.

When we look at this today, it doesn't look very revolutionary,

I would say, but at the time when Cobham created this,

in the 1730s, it was absolutely different to anything

that had happened before.

So, if you look around this, this is like a natural landscape,

so this is a place where he eradicated all straight lines.

You have a river here that's meandering, soft, gentle lines.

You have the grass sloping down,

so again this is not a kind of hard, geometric parterre.

You have trees that are not clipped into topiary.

He's bringing this idea of liberty into the garden.

So, he's removing the corset that man has imposed on nature

and he's letting the trees grow free.

In stark contrast to the lofty ideals

celebrated in the Garden of Virtue,

Cobham and William Kent created another garden

that told a very different story.

Situated at the opposite end of Stowe,

the Garden of Vice is presided over by the great temptress herself,

Venus, the goddess of love.

Her gilded statue had been created before Kent arrived

but now he made her the central character in an erotic drama

that was inspired by one of the most popular,

and longest poems in English, Spencer's Faerie Queen.

Across the lake from the rotunda he built a new temple to Venus

where she could seduce the unwitting visitor

before they discovered her darker side.

William Kent decorated the interior of this temple

with colourful murals.

Sadly they haven't survived.

Coming in from the garden, which is all green and serene,

and you come in here and it was a riot of colours,

because everything was painted here.

So you had Venus presiding over the whole thing

in the middle of the ceiling,

and when you look outside the door

you see the rotunda which has the miniature Venus in there,

so that it's kind of the two Venus temples,

kind of speaking to each other.

And then on the walls you had murals of scenes

painted after Edmund Spencer's Faerie Queen,

which was a very popular book.

This is all about love, it's about infidelity,

it's about jealousy, it's about unrequited love.

It's really the downfalls of what happens to you

when you follow the pleasures of the flesh.

The story it told here was about Malbecco,

who was an 80-year-old man, who was married to Hellenore, who was 18.

So she, quite understandably I think,

gets fed up with her rather senile husband after awhile,

and she wants to run off,

what she does is she sets fire to his treasury

and then sets off with her lover.

In age when it was becoming fashionable

for gardens to tell stories

William Kent designed the Garden of Love

as a stage where the visitors weren't just in the audience,

they were right in the middle of the action, walking from scene to scene.

Once Malbecco has sorted out his burnt treasury

he decides that he better go and follow his wife,

so he runs into the woods and he finds Hellenore,

but Hellenore, who had run off with her lover,

got raped by her lover in the woods,

she then begins to frolic with the Satyrs.

So, Malbecco realises that he's just lost his wife, so he goes mad.

He goes mad with jealousy and he runs off,

he runs off into a cave which is his temple of jealousy,

the Hermitage that William Kent built here.

So the whole path from the Temple of Venus to here

is almost like a stage,

it kind of leads the visitor along here,

you can see the rotunda with the Medici Venus

kind of glinting in the distance.

So wherever you go Venus is presiding over this story

and again it's Cobham telling us

what happens to you if you follow the pleasures of the flesh.

Cobham chose the Faerie Queen

because it was written as a moral fable.

But the story of Malbecco and his young wife

allowed him to take another swipe at his arch-enemy.

At that time Walpole has a mistress who is much, much younger.

So what Cobham is doing is painting this portrait of Walpole

as the senile, old mad husband.

Despite Cobham's damning critique of Walpole's government,

the Prime Minister remained very much in control of the country.

Frustrated by his lack of progress Cobham decided to change tact

and try a more direct assault on his enemy's powerbase.

He began by gathering the most brilliant,

ambitious and disaffected young Whigs around him at Stowe.

This group, made up of family members

and their closest friends,

became known as Cobham's Cubs.

They would lead the attack on Walpole

right from the garden of Stowe itself

in a specially built headquarters called the Temple of Friendship.

What he's trying to do,

is he's still trying to keep his hands in politics,

and he's doing that by nurturing up

a new generation of young politicians,

so he's trying to create a new powerbase.

You have William Pitt here,

who is going to lead Britain through the Seven Years War.

You have George Grenville, who will be come the Prime Minister

who loses the American colony.

So a lot of the future of Britain is almost born in this place.

He's assembling this gaggle of bright, young men

who are also incredibly ambitious.

So this is not just,

"Let's talk about little bit about literature and art."

This is about, "How can we use this to get into power

"and to change British politics?

"How can we mould and shape the future of Britain?"

It's quite a bold thing to do.

He's creating his own, almost his own political party.

Just five years after the Temple of Friendship was built

Cobham and his Cubs helped to force

a vote of no confidence in Sir Robert Walpole,

ending his 20-year domination of English politics.

Cobham was now approaching 70

and though he helped to negotiate a new government

he retired from politics shortly afterwards.

His political career may have ended

but his great ambitions for his garden continued.

When William Kent, his head gardener, left,

Cobham replaced him with a promising young 25 year old,

called Lancelot Brown.

This is Capability Brown's Grecian Valley

and it really is a remarkable achievement.

If you look to the left you can see some of the darker trees

and you can see some of the Scots pine reaching out,

the top of the canopy,

you look to the right and you start seeing the old characters

like that lovely chestnut over there.

They're framing the valley, they're creating a stage

for the magnificent temple in the distance,

the Temple for Concord and Victory.

Capability Brown's ambition was to flood it, you know,

was to fill it with water and make it his great lake at Stowe,

but they couldn't quite work out how to achieve that,

so I suppose, in a way, in my opinion, thankfully,

we're left with this beautiful, sweeping, dog-legged valley

that almost connects the garden into the landscape in the distance

and the temple on top of the hill remains, it remains the focal point.

So you've been lead up the valley, the Grecian Valley,

to the Temple of Concord and Victory

and what you get at this point is a really precise view

out through the trees to the Obelisk in the distance,

so precise that the trees frame it,

you have a really narrow frame through it.

And then you sweep across the valley again,

very open, up to another very precise view to Cobham's column.

And again, framed, like a picture frame created with the trees.

And Cobham's overlooking this great work that he had done.

It's all put together in this area wonderfully, I think.

When you look at the Grecian, it does look quite simple,

it looks quite natural actually, which is perfect,

which is what the ambition was.

After serving his apprenticeship

in the most radical garden in England

Lancelot Capability Brown would use ideas pioneered at Stowe

to transform the English landscape.

Unlike his mentor Viscount Cobham, Brown was not political

and neither were his gardens, which had no great message.

Alan Power has come to see an example of Brown's work

at Compton Verney in Warwickshire.

Beautiful and deceptively simple,

Brown's gift was to create a landscape

that appeared natural even though it wasn't.

These limes are really old characters here in the garden, aren't they?

And they've just got the end of Autumn

hanging on the end of their branches.

It's just like a shadow of colour on the edge of them.

There's a group of trees here to bring you

from the house down to this viewing point.

And we can see one of Capability Brown's features

emerging in the distance.

We can see the bridge just beyond the tree on the edge of the lake.

I think this is what Brown did really well.

He got you to a point

where you were almost compelled to explore the garden

and explore the landscape.

Brown cleverly used an architectural feature

like a bridge or a specimen tree

to create a focal point in the landscape.

That Cedar is magnificent, isn't it?

It's a real, big strong feature.

It's compelling, it draws you towards it.

It completely dominates this part of the garden

and was part of Brown's intention.

And here he is. This is Capability Brown at his best.

So it's all there, the whole story, his bridge, his lake.

His loosely planted oak trees in the foreground.

This is very typical.

And then beyond in the distance you've got a much heavier,

dense woodland that stops your eye travelling beyond that point.

And that's what Brown was genius at, controlling the views.

And it's not just trees he was planting here, the hills we see,

the rolling hills we see, the trees he's planted on them,

they're adjusted, or improved,

as they would say in the 18th century.

I love that term, you know, the improvements that were made.

They were massive alterations, an amazing feat.

The aristocracy loved the simplicity of Brown's designs.

His natural parkland was cheaper to maintain

and could be used for grazing livestock,

making his improvements even more appealing.

His talents earned him a fortune

and a host of followers who copied his ideas.

By the time he died there were 4,000 gardens in England

that had been landscaped according to his principles.

It's an amazing spot this, isn't it?

We really get to reap the benefits of what landscape gardeners

and landscape architects did in the 18th century.

It just makes you happy that people like Brown did work like this.

In the 50 years

since he began working under William Kent in Cobham's Elysian fields,

the English garden had changed beyond all recognition.

Viscount Cobham died at the age of 74,

leaving an extraordinary mark on the landscape and history.

During his lifetime,

his gardens had grown from a dozen to over 200 acres.

He built 36 temples, excavated eight lakes and a dozen avenues.

He built four miles of ha-has

and commissioned almost 100 busts and statues.

But his greatest legacy was to liberate the English garden

from the shackles of man.

Over the next 50 years Stowe grew more and more removed

from the politics that had inspired it.

Cobham's family climbed further up the ranks of the nobility,

becoming marquises and then dukes.

But they won their titles

by abandoning Cobham's political convictions.

By the 19th century the garden that had been inspired by lofty ideals

had become a garden of pleasure.

The first Duke was notoriously self-indulgent.

Unlike Cobham he never went to war

but spent a fortune playing soldiers with his own private army.

His son was even more profligate,

borrowing huge sums of money

to the make the family estate even grander and more lavish.

But the house and gardens grew more and more removed from real power.

In a desperate bid to revive the family fortunes

by gaining royal favour,

the second Duke invited Queen Victoria to visit Stowe in 1847.

I have here a article from the Illustrated London News

which describes the days of her visits here,

and they're wonderful illustrations

that show us what kind of show the Duke put on.

He sent his yeomanry,

which is basically his private army, to greet her.

They were all given very elegant new uniforms.

All the tenants and peasants turn up, line the streets,

all dressed up very nicely because the duke had given them clothes.

There were illuminations, which said,

"Long live the Queen, God save the Queen."

For the Duke this is the event of his lifetime,

this is the party of his lifetime.

He is refurbishing the house, he buys new paintings, new silks,

new curtains, new silverware, new goldware,

the whole place is just so full that the Queen says

that she doesn't have apartments like this in any of her own palaces.

When she gets let into her bedroom she sees this huge Persian carpet

and she says to her husband, "Oh, Albert, I know this carpet,

"it was offered to me

"but I didn't want to spend so much money on a carpet."

The Duke borrowed hundreds of thousands of pounds

to put on this lavish entertainment,

and by the time the royal visit was over

he owed £1.5 million, around £1 billion in today's money.

His extravagant display of wealth

hadn't impressed Victoria and Albert,

who epitomised a new age of self-restraint.

Smelling blood, his creditors closed in.

The Duke was left with no choice but to open his doors

and put the contents of his great home up for sale.

Christies were the auctioneers

and this contemporary sale is filled with the kind of lavish furnishings

that would have been on sale at Stowe.

In the summer of 1848, this house, these rooms,

were filled with strangers

who came to buy all the possessions of the Duke of Buckingham,

they could buy this book, which is the sales catalogue,

and anybody who could afford this, 50 shillings,

could bring in four people, so it's like the entrance ticket.

Everything was sold from the wine to the bed linen, furniture,

paintings, candlesticks, silverware.

Those 40 days in the summer of 1848,

that is really the end of Stowe, as we know it.

A lot of people from within the aristocracy

just thought that the Duke had really brought shame to their class

because he was so extravagant and so over the top.

There's a wonderful article in The Times, written at that time,

which says that, "A man of the highest rank

"and of a property not unequal to his title,

"has flung all away by extravagance and folly

"and reduced his honours to the tinsel of a pauper

"and the baubles of a fool."

This is the end of Cobham's dream, that's really what it is.

The dream of creating this dynasty,

the dream of shaping Britain's future.

All of that is at an end that summer.

Cobham's family never recovered

from the financial devastation caused by the second Duke.

In 1910 they sold the house and gardens

and it was turned into a public school.

Right, OK guys. So, here we are.

This is the entrance to the Elysian Fields.

Cobham's Cubs are long gone

but new generations are being shaped by the garden.

We're going to stop off at Temple of Ancient Virtues.

So have a quick look, turn around.

'I don't think it's possible to grow up in a place like Stowe

'and not be affected by the place itself.

'There is a message that infuses the garden'

that ideas matter,

that people of the past

have something to say

to people in the present.

There are not many places that are as evocative as that.

To promote his political ideas Cobham encouraged visitors to Stowe,

beginning a fashion for garden tourism

that would sweep through the country.

Over the last twenty years The National Trust has spent

£6.5 million restoring his gardens to their pomp and glory.

Stowe's influence is far reaching.

Cobham's garden of ideas didn't just overthrow a Prime Minister,

its serpentine lakes and rolling fields sparked a revolution,

which freed the English garden from centuries of western formality

to become something unique, and quintessentially British.

You really get a sense of how the landscape

has been moulded and formed, and how the tree plantation works.

I mean, this is essentially the English landscape

that we're looking at

and it's a very manufactured product

and really that's the legacy of Stowe.

It's set up in us.

The idea that our landscape should appear like this,

and you can see why,

as a nation of gardeners, we have separated ourselves

from the rest of the Western world

and that chasm starts to emerge right here.

It's this landscape that creates that sense of division.

It drives a wedge between the Western landscape principles

and the English landscape principles,

and we carry that with us, 300 years later.

Next time we go on a journey around the globe

in a revolutionary Victorian garden, Biddulph Grange.

It's a story of empire, science, and religion.

This garden is like a very bizarre piece of Victorian theatre.

For me it feels almost as if I've stepped into Alice In Wonderland.

Wow, look at that!