SYLVA WAS ONE of several, and the most important, of the published works that Evelyn devoted to an understanding and description of England landscape, especially the materials of its trees, forests and gardens. It was published two years after the formation, in 1662, of what was called the ‘Georgical’ Committee of the Royal Society, named after Virgil’s agricultural poem the Georgics.1 This committee included Evelyn, John Beale, John Ogilby, Robert Plot, John Aubrey and Henry Oldenburg, among others, and it attracted correspondents, if not active members, like the poet Henry Vaughan. Aubrey noted his own election to the committee, which has ‘thirty-two members and will collect information on the history of gardening and agriculture in England, Scotland and Ireland. We will draft a set of questions and send them out to knowledgeable people in different regions’.2
The committee’s homage to Virgil was particularly contemporary and apt, the poet a valued predecessor and model. Virgil had first taken up agriculture in the Georgics, where he promised, but did not fulfil his wish, to write also a poem about gardens; at the very start of Cowley’s essay ‘Of Agriculture’, he says that ‘the first wish of Virgil . . . was to be a good philosopher; the second, a good husbandman’, and at the end he appended his translation of part of Georgics, Book 2. Translations of Virgil’s works by Ogilby and by Dryden, in 1654 and 1697 respectively, included engravings of Englishlooking landscapes and agriculture (illus. 28). These were used to illustrate not only the Georgics, but Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, which narrated the founding of Rome. Since England was, as Fumifugium noted, the ‘new Rome’, English landscapes could not only be properly used to illustrate Virgil’s poetry, but could equally testify to the agriculture of that ‘new Rome’.
28 Illustration from John Ogilby’s translation of Virgil.
Evelyn finds his place in this English landscape inquiry with several works: Sylva has been discussed in the previous chapter; its fourth book or ‘Dendrologia’ of 1706, ‘An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves’, drew attention to their use in modern parklands. Sylva’s third edition in 1679 added two pieces: the Kalendarium Hortense, and a topic that had been separately published three years before, a Discourse of Earth, which by the third edition was subtitled Terra. This makes sense: earth or soil is the groundwork of gardening, husbandry and the cultivation of timber, and the textual Imprimatur of Earth notes that it ‘concerned agriculture’. Aubrey, too, was fascinated by soils and the different clays to be found in Wiltshire. Jonson’s ‘Penshurst’ specifically celebrates soil as well as air, wood and water.
Discourse of Earth proceeds in great detail through a considerable agenda, but at a general remove from specific mention of site or place, though it is abundantly clear that the remarks were based on observations and experience. Earth clearly sprang from Evelyn’s own gardening concerns, as well as from what the Society’s correspondents contributed on all aspects of the landscape that form and sustain its natural materials, including the earth; as a member of the ‘Georgical’ Committee Evelyn would have had access to replies to its queries and questionnaires. The Discourse was first delivered at a meeting of the Society in June 1675, the week after Sir Robert Southwell had spoken on the topic of water, and it was first printed in Philosophical Transactions 10, probably longer than its original viva voce presentation. It acknowledges, among others, Hesiod, Theophrastus, Platt, Digby (now approvingly), Laurenbergis, Bacon, Boyle and especially Beale, ‘from whom I have long since received the choicest documents upon this and many more curious subjects’. Yet he is not above passing the comment ‘and if that be true’ about a remark of Boyle’s, and even more strenuously, having cited Bacon’s notion on the effect on the soil where the rainbow ends, suggests that is ‘may be very fallacious’, not least because there are two ends to a rainbow!
In dedicating the Discourse of Earth to the President of the Royal Society, Evelyn played down its importance by noting that a ‘thousand things of infinite more value’ would better add to members’ collections; but his own preamble then seems pleased to have ‘once again pitch’d upon a subject of somewhat a more brisk and lively nature; for what is there in Nature so sluggish and dull as Earth? What more spiritual and active than vegetation, and what the earth produces?’ A detailed discussion then follows of earth’s components, forms, amendments and uses and how it is relevant ‘to the use of the husbandman, the forester, and the gardener’. He accordingly explores in great detail many kinds of soil: what earth best suits, for example, the coronary garden, or which soil suits fruit trees; how the senses respond to and identify different soils, how different types of rain affect different soils, how compost may be created and treated, and the ways in which dung can improve earth: the dung of asses is best, because they ‘chew more’, but as there are few asses ‘in this country’, he passes to other more available resources.
What Evelyn’s text called his ‘dull discourse’ on earth, mould and soil was eminently typical of the Society’s mixture of first-hand observations, instinct for curiosity and even wonder, and citation of ancient and modern authorities, yet marked by scepticism. The conclusions of this general and theoretical treatise are grounded on innumerable particularities. The following passage, chosen in part because he had been alert to the different microclimates found in the physic garden in Paris, suggests his habitual mode of discourse (it is quoted from the third edition of Sylva of 1670, where Terra was included):
Whatever then it be in which the earth contribute, or whether it contain universally a seminal virtue, so specified by the air, influences, and genius of the clime, as to make that a cinnamon tree in Ceilon [Ceylon], which is but a bay in England, is past my skill to determine; but ’tis to be observed with no little wonder, what Monsieur Bernier in his History of the Empire of the Mogol [sic] affirms to us of a mountain there, which produces on one side of it intolerably hot, Indian plants, and on the other, as intemperately cold, European and vulgar.
Evelyn’s early interest in understanding landscape was fuelled by his youth around Wotton, and by his attention in Europe to landscapes, its culture of buildings, gardens and their related history and even by the legends that were provoked during his travels. Later when revising his diaries he used his readings of Pflaumern’s Mercurius Italicus, Totti’s Ritratto di Roma moderna, Sandys’s Relation of a Journey, Raymond’s Itinerary and Lassels’s Voyage of Italy, all of which reminded him of how landscape was the foundation of the Roman land that Virgil celebrated.3 Once returned to England and finding that he was exploring more of his own country (as on his northward journey with his wife in 1654), it became of paramount importance to provide similar, yet more authoritative, descriptions of the particularities and curiosities of England. And his frequent excursions after the Restoration, if primarily urged by his inquiry into woodlands and country estates, were a major contribution that he would make to the ‘Georgical’ Committee.
English interest in the culture and history of its landscape was not new: William Camden’s Britannia (1586, with a sixth, enlarged edition in 1607) was written in Latin, but translated in 1610; Michael Drayton’s Poly-olbion (1622) was still being cited in the early eighteenth century by William Kent, who annotated his capriccio of Hampton Court and Esher with some lines from it concerning English rivers.4 But the Royal Society’s dedication to inquire into English landscapes, topography and their use in both the past and present required empirical observation. An insistence on ‘history’ or ‘histories’, rather than on fable, myth or other superstitions, was a central theme of the early English Enlightenment: ‘Natural Philosophy, next to God’s Word,’ wrote Joshua Childrey in 1661, ‘is the most Sovereign Antidote to expel the poison of Superstition’.5 Superstition was by the second half of the seventeenth century a dominant topic for probing and discounting: Aubrey, like Sir Thomas Browne, was constantly preoccupied with recording and sometimes questioning the actions of witches, accounts of people turned into stones, or omens conveyed by weather.6 Evelyn, as noted earlier, noted ‘Superstitions still remaining among us’ in a notebook of ‘Adversaria’.
29 Detail of the title page of Joshua Childrey’s Britannia Baconica; or, The Natural Rarities of England, Scotland and Wales (1661).
Childrey’s Britannia Baconia, or, The Natural Rarities of England, Scotland and Wales was written ‘according to the Precepts of the Lord Bacon’ (illus. 23). In this, Childrey was one of many contemporaries following and exemplifying the ‘agenda’ set out in Bacon’s work, in particular Bacon’s ‘Catalogue of Particular Histories by Titles’, or Sylva Silvarum.7 Not unlike Sir Thomas Browne’s similar approach to vulgar errors in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, first published in 1646 and with five revised editions until 1672, Childrey negotiated his way past dubious concepts, based on his own empirical study of British topography, geology and sometimes fauna; he argued that people must ‘attend to observation’ (B5r). Otherwise, he relied either on citing early ‘authorities’ like Camden, on his own sceptical instinct, or by falling back on phrases like ‘as it is reported’ or ‘They say’ (p. 158). But his concern was with mirroring British landscape, and – unlike some later writers in the seventeenth century – he refused to ‘meddle with matter of Antiquity, Pedigrees, or the like’ (B2r). His preface did what many Englishmen did, making boastful comparisons, sometimes laughable, between their own country and Italy: thus England, says Childrey, has its equivalents – Italy had Virgil’s Grotto and the Sybil’s Cave, but Somerset has Wookey Hole (B1r)! Similarly, while the manuscript of Robert Plot’s Oxfordshire records that Sir Timothy Tyrrels’s seat enjoyed ‘the bella vista of Italy [that] is pretty well imitated’, when the book was published in 1677 the Italian reference is dropped, and he simply applauds the ‘pleasant vista’ of the Chilterns scenery.
The ‘Georgical’ Committee promoted an interest in local history, in part by promoting mapping, chorography and archaeological discovery. John Ogilby’s Britannia Depicta; or, The Traveller’s Guide; or, A Most Exact Description of the Roads of England (1675) utilized ribbon maps to document routes for both walkers and riders, noting items of local meaning and explanations of what was to be seen, an instructive way of viewing the English landscape. Each route delineates a stretch of road, for example from London to Bagshot, Surrey, in a map and an image (‘scenographically, or in Prospect’, Ogilby writes), then notes mileage and whatever the traveller should notice to left or to right of his route. Cartographic portrayal of Britain could not be accomplished without a careful and detailed accumulation of empirical evidence on sites, which could then be registered in maps; this required recovering the meaning and association of places, listing and identifying monuments, ruins and other archaeological remains and records of antiquity. Childrey had tackled some of these items – like Stonehenge in his discussion of Wiltshire. Aubrey in particular, as well as stressing the importance of an English chorography, had visited and sketched both Stonehenge and Avebury Circle with far more attention and care, long before he joined the ‘Georgical’ Committee.8 But its members wished to extend such inquiries, by printing and circulating questionnaires, entitled ‘Enquiries’ or ‘Queries’, that asked for information on a whole agenda of these topographical matters.9
The questionnaires asked for what were termed ‘observables’, that is, what could be seen or observed while walking the land. One member, Oldenburg, drew up a document on which to base ‘inquiries for all Counties’ in England, asking about such items as water and earth – the topics discussed by the Royal Society in 1675 – but also about ‘air, plants, animals, minerals, and famous inhabitants of particular locales’.10 These enquiries would be sent to parish clergy and other literate landowners. In a request by Ogilby, dated 1673 (illus. 30), designed to support his ‘Description of Britannia’, he sought information on urban centres, houses and their topography – ‘mountains, valleys . . . rivers, brooks, [and] springs’. A manuscript annotation on this Query notes that this was discussed (‘considered’) by Christopher Wren and John Aubrey, among others.11 Robert Plot printed his ‘Enquiries’ in 1674,12 asking observers travelling through England and Wales to supply materials on climate, ‘waters’, ‘Earths and Minerals’ and ‘stones’; he also sought information on vineyards and ‘curious Gardens for rare plants’. Others, like Thomas Machell in 1676–7, requested that his enquiries be answered by indicting the exact topic, marked with a T, R or E (that is, tradition, record or personal ‘experience’); Machell would also ask whether churches be ‘elegant or mean’.13 These requests for information were destined for volumes or histories somewhat different from Childrey’s book, which he designed for the use of the ‘vulgar’ (A8r) and the ‘gentry’ (B1r), and published as a small volume suitable to carry in the pocket while travelling. His was a rudimentary guide, covering all the English counties often very skimpily, whereas the Committee wanted a far more systematic and extensive inventory.
30 Ogilby’s printed sheet of QUERIES, which is annotated at its foot by Christopher Wren and John Aubrey, among others.
Yet with so much varied and miscellaneous information circulating and arriving for consideration by the Committee, not much found its way into publication. Among the interesting manuscripts focused on ‘Georgical’ matters that either remained unpublished or waited some time before appearing were Aubrey’s ‘Designation de Easton-Piers in Co: Wilts’, ‘The Natural History of Wiltshire’ and ‘A Perambulation of Surrey’ (all now held in the Bodleian Library), John Beale’s letters on garden matters (in the Hartlib papers at Sheffield), Aubrey’s ‘Monumenta Britannica’,14 and Evelyn’s own ‘Elysium Britannicum’. Some of these Enquiries and Queries did result in publication: Aubrey published his Natural History of Surrey in 1718, but Evelyn had already corresponded with him about this in 1673. Robert Plot’s Enquiries bore fruit in his books on Oxfordshire in 1677 and Staffordshire in 1686–8; Evelyn owned a copy of Plot’s Oxfordshire and subscribed to the Staffordshire volume. The ‘Georgical’ Committee’s endeavours continued to draw in both Society members and others whose works were in the same vein: The Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire (1712) by Robert Atkins, elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1664, John Morton’s Natural History of Northamptonshire (1712), and The History of Kent (1718) by John Harris, elected a fellow of the Society in 1696.15 On Ireland came work by William Molyneux and Sir Robert Sibbald, on Wales by Lewis Morris and Thomas Pennant, and Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland in 1703.
On the title page of his Staffordshire, Plot, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, placed a biblical motto: ‘Ye shall describe the land, and bring the descriptions hither to me’ (Joshua 18:6), but now the recipient of this injunction was not so much Joshua or God as natural philosophers in the land of England with sufficient curiosity to seek out and describe the land themselves. One of the dedicatory verses to Staffordshire applauds the fruit that can now be plucked from a modern ‘inlightened tree’, as opposed to the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden.
Plot’s volumes consisted of chapters on heavens and air (what we would call climate), earth, stones both found and shaped, plants, beasts, men and women, arts and antiquities. But their indexes are more revealing: Oxfordshire lists buildings of eminent and minor nobility (that is, local gentry), and both volumes annex armorial shields as evidence of inhabitants and their families (matters that Childrey had excluded). Indexes also note old or unusual trees ‘of vast Bigness’, walks and ‘other curiosities in trees’ of the sort that Sylva addressed; but also barrows, burials, ley lines, waterworks, quarries, prospects, mills ‘of a rare contrivance’, fishponds and different soils for husbandry. The plates for Oxfordshire largely depict, not prospects or buildings, but plants native to that county. It is significantly in the Staffordshire volume – only ten years after that on Oxfordshire – that we see a huge increase in engravings of places, prospects and agriculture; images of houses suggest the land and estates that lay around them. Staffordshire’s index focused on industry (coal and coal-pits), but also on ‘Gardens, some curious hedgerows’, walks of pleasure, and vistas or pleasant lawns in parks and woodland. Some engravings of buildings do little more than depict the fabric of the facade, but other images show gardens, the larger landscape of woods and fields, topography and the lie of the land, with cattle sometimes and always with humans, those who worked the land, their owners, or passers-by.
These ‘Georgical’ endeavours therefore drew upon many responses, one example of which provided by John Beale is discussed below. But their work arguably also fuelled later landscaping ideas of picturesque explorations of England, and that topic too needs to be explored.
Before Evelyn’s membership of the ‘Georgical’ Committee, he had received a variety of observations from John Beale on landscape and gardening, examples of those choice ‘documents upon many curious subjects’ that clearly helped to shape Sylva and parts of ‘Elysium Britannicum’ as well as his understanding of how land was to be understood and shaped. In 1659 these included draft plans for both a ‘Physic Garden’ and ‘A Garden of Pleasure’, and a long letter on a specific landscape, Backbury Hill in Herefordshire, where Beale envisaged how it might be landscaped into an ideal garden. While the letter has been construed by several commentators as a plea for natural or even ‘Picturesque’ gardening (that is, eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics avant la lettre), it is far more important to situate it in the period when it was written and how it spoke to current perceptions of English landscape.16
Beale’s two plans address ‘soils’ and manure for botanical gardens, and a necessarily varied topography for different types of plants, including a note on how ladies may find out ‘unforbidden fruit’. For pleasure gardens, he specifies a more detailed agenda, but notes, as a preliminary, that it is not necessary to enforce a site in ‘any particular phantasy’; thus he would devise ‘an insinuating paradox’, whereby the mysteries of art would be selected that are fittest for a specific design, for ‘the productions of nature’ would be superior to ‘the charge [that is, expense] and cumber of art’. Gardens should find room for ‘novel experiments’ yet accommodate wild plants and work for the benefit of mankind. Both schemes invoke Pliny, Virgil and Columella as well as Bacon, Sir Henry Wotton and other contemporaries like Benjamin Worsley.
The letter admitted that ‘hortulan affairs do require varieties of novel & conceited amenities’, and Beale wrote that he intended to put them into chapters of a book, though now they were ‘only shuffled together as a loose preface’. He proceeds to address one specific landscape and a possible reformulation of it, in the light of having seen Evelyn’s outline of ‘Elysium Britannicum’, to which Beale now recommends adding chapters on scenic entertainments, breeding or ‘transmutation’ of flowers as regards beauty, taste and scent, and another on ‘mounts, prospects, precipices & caves’. These suggestions conformed to current experimental ideas and were taken up in ‘Elysium’.
The proposal Beale advances for Backbury Hill (along the lines of that ‘insinuating paradox’) is both attentive to the natural site, which he describes carefully, and the wish to understand it as an ‘antique Garden . . . [that] shall as much excel most of the rest of those gardens’. This is premised on his confidence that ‘God’s own handiwork [in Eden, or maybe the creation of the world] did far exceed our modern gardens,’ where he sees only costly work in a ‘narrow, mimical way’. The ‘enchanted walks, pyrhian vaults, legislative mountains, the hills of blessings, of cursings; the Muses fountain’ that he will rediscover in Backbury Hill consist of a large green garden (‘a perfect resemblance of an ancient flower garden’), thickets of oaks, a precipice, prospects, a natural echo, pastures, a spring and a river; all these will make of this Herefordshire site a perfect example of England, for ‘how little some narrow hearted people do understand their own happiness.’ (A similar appeal to shape a better England had also been made in his 1657 book on Herefordshire Orchards, a Pattern for All England.) In the letter he takes up ideas that seem to find their way later into Evelyn’s Fumifugium – such as perfuming the adjacent countryside with ‘hedge rows of our old English friend the sweet eglantine, or of the later lilacs’, a lesson that London could learn in order to end the ‘corrosive smoke of their sea coal’. Without assessing costs for this ideal garden (for he excludes – that is, does not include in his calculations – expenses for buildings, walls, statues, cisterns and horticultural ‘workmanship’), he will form the indigenous materials and establish ‘banks, walks, squares, or other figures for flowers, vineyards . . . hedges of all sorts’. He addresses ‘what sort of trees . . . may be allowed for the ornament of the flowery regions, & to determine, whether viridaria, vireta, walks, mounds, groves & prospects be the principal, or ought to be so, & the flowery area but the trimmings (as spires, pilasters, & carved works in solid architecture’. While Backbury Hill had not been (as Hartlib liked to think) a Roman site, Evelyn certainly agreed that it was a worthy landscape ‘in our own country’.
The letter is not entirely free of muddles – as he says himself, it was shuffled into a preface, and he finds it difficult to explain a phrase, ‘indicative plants’, that he had used in the pleasure garden; his self-confessed enthusiasm and inclination to dabble with matters that would infuriate Puritans carries him away.17 But Evelyn, with Beale’s permission, inserted the letter into his manuscript of ‘Elysium Britannicum’, where its themes consorted with classical writers on husbandry and with the work of modern ‘terraculturists’ who use ‘natural philosophy’ to explore an understanding of the world as they found it in England; Evelyn’s own contribution is a strongly biblical emphasis that takes further Beale’s gestures to ‘God’s own handiwork’.
Beale said also that his design was to ‘rectify and purify’ landscape; so Evelyn also must have glimpsed in Beale’s proposed garden the sense that an art of gardens refined, epitomized, the unmediated wilder world and even the agricultural landscape. For beyond his sense that natural effects needed to be made more palpable or visible when used in gardens, Beale implied that there were hierarchies of design, whereby a layout would diminish in artifice as it moved further from the house or a fixed point in the landscape. Evelyn had seen that sequence or dialogue of forms at both Fontainebleau and in Italian villas around Rome; Hartlib, too, in Figure 112b of A Discourse for Division or Setting Out of Land (1653) set out a diagram for topographical layouts that established a hierarchy of control or geometry across the land, sometimes realized on an estate, or sometimes merely proposed. At least for Evelyn the purpose of this hierarchy was to educate humans in an appreciation of the ideal perfection of God’s handiwork in the larger world of nature: within a garden, the eye and mind were trained to see perfect forms that needed to be intuited and apprehended when the visitor moved outside the garden.18
A second and related theme was Evelyn’s focus on how the land should be worked or ‘traded’ (evidence, that is, of his unfulfilled history of all the trades). His communications with Beale, Hartlib and Aubrey suggest some ways in which their ideas would eventually bear fruit in eighteenth-century landscape ideas and aesthetics. This is not a question of tracking a growing ‘naturalism’ in landscape design, for that is clearly not what Beale writes about. But what is striking in some of their exchanges is how ‘ancient’ horticulture could be seen as sufficiently modern. Yet it is clear that the seeds of what would come to be acclaimed in the Picturesque movement in the eighteenth century were sown in the work of the ‘Georgical’ Committee and its associates; but the focus in each case was different. This can be explained briefly by comparing late seventeenth-century attitudes to topography, accidents and aspects of culture and land with the writings of someone like William Gilpin a century later; Gilpin’s publications, significantly entitled Observations on different parts of Britain, had an enormous effect on its inhabitants’ understanding and appreciation of their own landscape, but these books did not spring fully formed from his excursions into the British landscape.
To take one example, from the opening section of Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye, the first of his tours in 1770, though only published in 1782: his title recalls the Royal Society’s premium on observation, and he writes that ‘We travel for various purposes – to explore the culture of soils – to view the curiosities of art – to survey the beauties of nature – and to learn the manners of men; their different politics, and modes of life.’ Such a remark echoes Evelyn’s remarks on his European and his English travels, on soil or terra, and on the inquiries by the Royal Society that sought to ascertain the details of landscape and topography, and precisely on what publications like Plot’s and Aubury’s contributed. What begins to differentiate Gilpin from writers in the late seventeenth century is how and why he narrates his travels. Evelyn certainly sketched and drew on his travels (see illus. 14) and fleshed them out with further research, and so did Aubrey, among others. But Gilpin’s tours in different parts of the countryside are concerned to instruct others in sketching, while Evelyn was more focused on detailing his own observations. Gilpin’s later Observations, such as those Relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty . . . on several parts of England, particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, are much more focused on this pedagogic education than the Observations made when visiting the River Wye; by contrast, Evelyn’s concern was directed to making his own country more comprehensible, less on how an individual draughtsman would see it. Yet there is some fascinating interplay in this historical sequence: Evelyn was sceptical of too much generalizing and relied on his own empirical regard as the proper basis for scientific inquiry; in Picturesque viewing, however, observation is both more generalized and the interest in science has been succeeded by an emphasis on the aesthetic aspects of landscape, such as would promote sketching or even (some argued) the making of landscape gardens.
Evelyn’s commitment to empirical inquiry left him careful of theorizing, hence his passion for lists, hence his reliance on the particulars elicited by enquiries sent out from the ‘Georgical’ Committee. At one point in the ‘Elysium’ he notes that he descends ‘now to the particulars’ from ‘rules [that] may suffice for the general [reader]’, just as his Sylva opposed ‘particulars’ to ‘fantasms and fruitless speculations’ and his Sculptura praised Favi, who ‘neglected nothing, but went on collecting’. Evelyn’s whole life enacted this balancing act between the pursuit of detailed collections and theory (or concept, or even speculation), or between the atoms of experience (in Lucretian terms) and God’s larger purpose. Though he writes at the start of ‘Elysium’ that a garden is a ‘type of Heaven’ (EB, p. 2), he also knew that in this sublunary world he must find umpteen actual examples to consolidate the type, of which Backbury Hill was but one.
Evelyn was constantly in search of garden examples, some of which he found on his travels around southern England and his discussions with Aubrey about his own Surrey and Aubrey’s Wiltshire. But he also found opportunities to propose designs for actual, provisional, examples of a heavenly type, and sometimes enabled others to contrive typical examples on other sites, besides his own Sayes Court. He helped to ‘project the garden’ for Lord Clarendon and his son, Henry Hyde, at Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire, and at Euston Hall (see illus. 37). He offered advice, and advice was sought from him for other sites. Through his cousin Sir Samuel Tuke he advised Henry Howard on making a public garden in Norwich, which matured by the 1680s into ‘many fine walks’ and a bowling-green, reached by ‘handsome stairs’ from the River Wensum.19 He advised John Shaw on gardens for Hugh May’s design of Eltham Lodge, near Deptford, and later on the garden layout for May’s Moreton Hall in Chiswick for Sir Stephen Fox.20
But perhaps the most famous of Evelyn’s moves into landscape practice came in his design of the terraces at Albury for Arundel’s grandson in 1667. The first Earl had confessed to Evelyn in 1646 that he would ‘have sold any estate he had in England . . . before he would have parted with this darling villa’.21 In self-imposed exile in Italy he had commissioned Wenceslaus Hollar, well known also to Evelyn, to make engravings of Albury; these were done in Antwerp in 1645. They show a wooded and peaceful landscape; in one, on a hillside, with what are maybe vineyards, is an astonishing Italianate grotto overlooking water. Evelyn even tried in the 1650s, after the Earl’s death, to obtain Albury for himself before he was forced to settle on Sayes Court. Arundel had been a companion and friend to Evelyn in his European travels, a mentor and guide to things to see in Italy (illus. 31).22 More generally, Arundel’s approach was an example of how the ancient world should be construed and emulated. His sculpture garden beside the Thames was one of the first attempts to make a garden after the Italian fashion (illus. 32), and in 1667 Evelyn had successfully obtained the Arundel Marbles from Henry Howard as a gift to the University of Oxford.
31 Peter Paul Rubens, Thomas Howard, 21st Earl of Arundel, c. 1630, oil on canvas.
On visiting Albury in 1670 to see how his work was progressing, Evelyn noted that he ‘found [it] exactly done according to the design & plot I had made . . . the canals are now digging, & vineyards planted’ (Diary, III.561–2). His design (illus. 33) clearly responds to the actual site, as Beale had argued about Backbury Hill; but now, with distinct recollections of Italy and of Arundel, it was transformed into an ideal paradise. A modern aerial view (illus. 34) shows what still remains – an extremely long series of terraces, with slopes linking them at either end, and in the centre a hemicycle that incorporated perhaps some of the Italianate grotto depicted by Hollar, or maybe a later version of it; at the rear, pushed into the hillside is an exedra hidden now by a clump of trees.
Evelyn’s elaborate plan described a complex repertory of water (pools and canals), trees and vines planted in different layouts (circular, random, quincunx), vegetable gardens or maybe orchards of fruit trees (at the ends of the long vineyards); there were little sculptures on plinths above the vineyard, while the two higher terraces have ten little exedras carved into the hillside, with two larger bays at the centre of each level. The higher exedra shows a dark opening into the hill, the slope of which is drawn as a large grassy enclosure. The opening was the feature that expressly pleased Evelyn in his ‘new’ garden – a ‘crypta through the mountain in the park, which is 30 pearches in length, such a Pausilippe is nowhere in England besides’ (Diary, III.561–2).
32 Lord Arundel’s house on the Thames, in a detail from Wenceslaus Hollar’s map of London, 1646.
33 Evelyn’s plan for the garden of Henry Howard at Albury Park, Surrey, from the extra-illustrated copy of The Miscellaneous Writings . . ..
This tunnel is shown on his plan as an opening under the hillside, on top of which there seems to be a catena d’acqua, or water channel, leading downwards from a pavilion on the crest. The catena d’acqua was a feature Evelyn might have seen in Italy at the Villa Lante or Caprarola, but the ‘Pausilippe’ he had certainly witnessed when visiting Naples. For what he saw in Italy was a tunnel that cut through the promontory between Pozzuoli and Naples, and above it was the supposed tomb of Virgil, whose magical powers were assumed locally to have created the tunnel. In February 1645 Evelyn saw and noted the ‘mountain Pausilipo, at the left hand of which they shewed us the poet Virgil’s sepulcher, erected on a very steep rock, in the form of a small rotunda’; he could probably have seen the site drawn by John Raymond in Il Mercurio Italico of 1648 (illus. 35). It was, it must be said, an unnecessary practical invention in Surrey, for although the tunnel still exists (in the 1980s I was allowed to penetrate only a few yards into it), the need for it seems simply to be a memorial and nostalgic gesture, a studied attempt to introduce into an English site something that was ‘nowhere in England’ – a gesture, albeit fictitious, to Virgil and his magical powers to transform a landscape.
34 Modern aerial view of the terraces at Albury Park, Evelyn’s Surrey estate, with the entry into the crypta hidden now by trees in the exedra at the top above the ‘Roman baths’.
The reformation of the earlier terraces responded to and better articulated the lengthy site, and they may well allude to the Roman terraces at the Temple of Fortune at Praeneste (the modern Palestrina) that were explored and drawn by Pirro Ligorio, and perhaps to Ligorio’s reconstructed plan of ancient Rome, where lengthy terraces above the Forum contained, as at Praeneste, an exedral platform; but such exedras were frequently invoked in Roman designs and taken up in Italian gardens like the Villa Aldobrandini. Whether the two lateral temples at either end of the Albury terrace or the hilltop pavilion in Evelyn’s drawing were constructed is unclear; the latter may correspond to part of Aubrey’s account: ‘In the park is a spring called Shirburn Spring, which breaks out at the side of a hill, over which is built a handsome banqueting house, which is surrounded (almost) with trees, which yield a pleasant solemn shade.’
If Beale had espoused an ideal garden where the eye and the mind could encounter the perfect forms not to be matched in the less mediated world outside, Evelyn at Albury wished visitors’ imagination to grasp how ideas and indeed forms of a classical garden past had come home to England. It was a memory theatre, its shape almost literally an amphitheatre, a conspectus of Italian garden ingredients that were ‘nowhere in England besides’.
35 Virgil’s Tomb, drawn by John Raymond, from his Il Mercurio Italico . . . (1648).
Vineyards – they clothed one of Albury’s terraces – were not entirely unknown in England. The year before he visited Albury to see his design, Evelyn published The English Vineyard Vindicated; the text was his, though its title page attributed it to John Rose, the royal gardener in St James’s Park, from whom he derived his ideas. The ‘vindication’ consisted in proposing that vineyards, not much encountered in England, and ‘not altogether from the defect of climate’, could now be introduced again into England’s horticulture as an allusion to ancient Rome and Greece. In the Preface, signed with the pseudonym ‘Philocepos’ (friend of gardens, cepos or kypos being the Greek for garden or plantation), he mocked French gardenists ‘new come over, who think we are as much oblig’d to follow their mode [that is, design] of gardening as we do of their gardening’, that is, horticulture. Yet though he may have wanted to vindicate English vineyards as authentic rather than French, Evelyn eventually included this in four later editions of The French Gardiner. So he worked to establish a bridge between ancient horticulture and a modern English method, which was confirmed in Sir Robert Southwell dividing his time and energies, when out of office, between reading Virgil’s Georgics and Evelyn’s Sylva.23
But Evelyn’s ‘Georgical’ work was not exclusively focused on English material. The Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations also devised questionnaires to circulate ‘to all his Majesty’s plantations & territories in the West Indies & islands thereof’, but equally to understand how much, for instance, New England was independent of ‘old England’. Much of their discussions also centred, during the Dutch wars, on shipping as well as on horticultural matters: ‘enquiries about improving his Majesty’s American dominions by silk, galls, flax, senna &c & considered how nutmegs & cinamon might be obtained, & brought to Jamaica, that soils & climate promising success’. And in a letter to Christopher Wren of 1681, then President of the Royal Society, he urged the composition of a ‘Natural History of our American Plantations’ (LB, II.665). Evelyn’s ‘Georgical’ work, then, encompassed a wide range of activity, from landscape analysis to landscape design, from foreign or ancient lore and importations of materials to celebration of native topography, fauna and flora. It was also, in an informal fashion, one of his main contributions to his role as a civil servant.
