Property News · September 29, 2016

The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden by Kate Felus review – sex and the ha-ha


A Merlin’s Cave, a Temple of Venus, cold plunge pools and summerhouses … with poetry and archery for good measure. This is a book about the history of aristocratic pleasureNo wonder scholars love 18th-century British gardens. Their affluent owners did not just pay men such as Capability Brown and Humphry Repton to landscape them, they filled the space with every kind of fantastic “eye-catcher” (as garden buildings were called): temples and shrines, grottos and fake ruins. Plants were the least of it. Proprietors seem to have indulged a kind of semiotic frenzy, so historians can discover in their garden whimsies the pleasures and fantasies of rich Georgians.Kate Felus has written an enjoyable anecdotal account of what Georgians did in their gardens: walking, sailing (if you had a decent lake), fishing, reading, enjoying amorous assignations, playing with telescopes and camera obscuras, practising archery, singing, dressing up or, if your grounds were spacious enough, just circling around in your carriage. Really, this is a book about the history of pleasure. Its arrangement is not, therefore, conventionally chronological. Instead it is divided into times of day (Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night-Time) and the pleasures that belonged to these. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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