The Secret History of the British Garden (Part 2): 18th-Century

Nigel, 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. 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. 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 he best 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 Humphrey Rapton, 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. 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 mindset 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 Croomcourt, the very first commission made by Lancelot Capability Brown. 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 orange tree. All this incredibly skilfully coordinated from the ground, so it appeared completely natural, but actually it took as much skill and as artifice as the most tightly controlled four-wall garden. In the mid-18th century, Croomcourt, 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 Croom in the second half of the 18th century. We've chosen this particular spot because we have some map-based and documentary evidence of the parish church where Croom d'Aberteau 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, the date is unclear, but it's thought to have been about 1750s. That's the gatehouse? That is the gatehouse, yes. Was the church... And there's the church. So Brown demolished all this to make his park? As well as the church foundations, presumably the graveyard here. We believe that the tombs of the earls were moved to the new church when that was consecrated in 1763. So the Coventry family were all taken up, lot of stock and barrel up there. Well, certainly the earls. We don't know whether the countesses were all 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, raised 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. Croom 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 Italy. 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 Croom. So I'm meeting the estate manager, Michael Forster-Smith, to look at Brown's original plans. Aha! Look at this. It's fantastic, isn't it? What date is this? 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 Croom. The thing which is very clear is, you know, this thick planting. That's right, this distant belt of trees almost gives the appearance that there's a vast native woodland that stretches out beyond. And, of course, that's an illusion, but the shout about makes it seem so. So this, obviously, is the famous picture of Brown. Yeah. My reading of Brown is just practicality. The English think, 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 you bet he never saw himself like that. No. Brown was the great landscape improver. Not only did he make your land more beautiful, but 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. You know, these are grand ambitions. Brown and Coventry's vision for Croom was extraordinary and radical, but it wasn't wholly original. There's much more to see and discover about Croom, 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 Croom started. But really is... ..the door through which Croom 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 gardening 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 with 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 prized 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 around 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 Rosham, there are scenes that are revealed. You come out and you find yourself in a setting. 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. He 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 in 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 Townsend Building, you have the temple and the pillars in the front and 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, Montague. Hello, Montague. Nice to see you. 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. A wonderful decoratorial design. Oh, look at the colour, the blues and reds, absolutely wonderful. Come on, Montague. OK. Aha. 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. I'm not sure how many greats. So that the line has stayed in the family. Oh, absolutely, yes. It does seem, I wonder if there are any other examples of rooms looking out onto 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, come, did you know... Oh, just see it through there, the visitor's 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 Clary, the head gardener, he got £60 a year in tips, which was a great deal of money. That's a lot of money. 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 Rowsham from the beginning? Yes. 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. Rowsham 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 Croom, 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. And 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 wildflower 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. 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 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. 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 20s, an old man who was in his 70s, 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 Croom being paid one shilling and ten pence a day for their mowing, plus 28 pints of small beer. Wow! 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 Croom 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 Crewe. 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 Tobey to see what the real man was like. So what have you got here? Because this is... this is a lot of stuff. This is a very, very small part of the Crewe 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 this 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. It's a lot of money. And where did the money come from? Where did the money come from? Everyone asks, but it's not apparent. But you would 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. He kept all his receipts, 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, Mariah 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. And this is a woman who'd been the most beautiful woman in London. So sad. Mariah 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. 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, 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 outside it. 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, Amanda 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 views into the house and out from the house need 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 to surround it by trees. That's why it's always been open to visitors. They welcome people to come and look at this wonderful thing they've created, as you would. So you're freeing out the views from the house and you're freeing out the views to the house. Absolutely. There you go. Do you see what I mean? Absolutely. It completely transforms it. I think this is so important, this landscape, and the House of Gardiner Park being one. Land art, really. It's dramatic. It is dramatic. It is dramatic. 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 Paines Hill in Surrey, the brainchild of a 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 every 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 Croom Court until the National Trust came to the rescue in 1997. And overseeing its restoration is the head gardener, Catherine Ulker. 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. Now, why is that? Why is that? Because you're battling against nature constantly. Croom was originally called Seguimia 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 workers and... That's where Brown is, just this very practical man, isn't it? 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, Catherine 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, it is. How do we know that there were trees up on this rise? We've got a watercolour by Burney, 1784, and he was doing watercolours of Worcestershire for a guidebook. And this whopper here. Yeah, so 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, and 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. This is a real challenge. Yeah. I mean, 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. 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. I mean, the wheels are going to be the main problem, but you've got to bear in mind the weight of the tree. Two-inch wheels will take two tonnes. Three-inch wheels, three tonnes. Really? Four-inch wheels, four tonnes. That's interesting. So that's the sort of thing we need to bear in mind, the size of the wheels to take the size of the tree. OK. For all the manpower and ingenuity involved, transforming the landscape at Croom took a generation. Brown never lived to see his vision completed. He died in a May 1st 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 Croom well into the 19th century. 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 Croom was this pair of sphinxes, and they were very fashionable. They're made out of code stone, which became hugely popular amongst landowners at the end of the 18th century. And the whole point about code 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, been cast. Code 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 code production. So I'm off to Wiltshire, where the recipe for code stone has been rediscovered. The original workshop ceased production in 1837. Hello. And it took years of trial and error for the sculptor Stephen Pettyfer... I'm Steve. Steve. Very nice to meet you. ..to uncover the secret of the code formula and technique. Is this all repairing stuff that was made in the heyday of code? 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 code at Buckingham Palace? A huge amount. Oh, that's written on there. That's the original piece of graffiti from the people who made it. Is it? It says... Foolish or...? Foolish Barnet. And Barnet was the bloke who made it, was it? Presumably. Maybe there were two people working on it. 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. Code 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 code 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. 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. Stephen 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 the secret, by the way. I realise, do you want to give away the blend? I'm not that secretive about it, because ultimately it's the sculpting that's difficult, that 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. Code 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... Yeah. ..and it goes through. But it will weather and last much better than normal terracotta. Yes. And some stone. Oh, yeah, I mean, lasts a lot longer than any limestones. Right. And marble. Really? Longer than marble? Yeah. See, to the 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. Right. So this is... Are these all part of the same mould? Yeah, this completes one mould. So that's ready to receive... Clay. ..the code clay. So we just take handfuls and push it in? Yeah, but when you... Yeah, basically, what I would do is... Politely, no. Well, you know, we need to be careful, so I'd identify the fact that the nose is quite deep and undercut, so you need to make sure initially that we get clay into there. OK, so that's the first bit. Just 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 into the corners. They're sometimes quite difficult. You need to actually make real attention to that corner. Of course, it's absolute joy, working clay. You know, it's lovely material. You're doing very well. I'll definitely give you a job. The success of Code is remarkable for the fact that in an age dominated by men, it was the brainchild of a woman, Eleanor Code, 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 the bits. Yeah. Mrs Code 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 Code 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. Yeah. So, yeah, take one half off and then... And I might damage it? You might drag a bit, but no. OK. In its heyday, Code'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 Code 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, almost every aspect of it, than that. The reason people really like Code 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 Code was so good at. Great. Well, that's beyond my skill anymore. I can't work on that. Just as Code 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 Humphrey 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. Good morning, Monty. How are you? I'm very well. Nice to see you. 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. 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. Humphrey 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 a 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's proposing. So immediately you could see the change. And here, the house across, a bit further up, and there's a lake and a 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 pay 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's 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 equaled since. But before I leave this century, I'm returning to Croom Court for one last visit. It's now autumn. With help 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. Good girl. Gently, gently. Steady. Randy Hiscock is supplying the horsepower. Wonderful. What are those? This is Minnesota and Anastasia. And this is fantastic-looking. Yeah. Specifically built for the purpose. Very good. And these wheels are really substantial, but I guess it is quite a weight it's going to take. Will they be up to it, do you think? Well, hopefully they'll do the job. Well, we'll find out. Otherwise 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. Steady. Before the horses can be put to work, we need to dig out the tree whilst preserving as much of the root ball as 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, we're using... 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, let's start lowering it. Hold the rope. That's it. Someone else... Someone else go on the rope. Pull it back a bit. Put your wheel back that side a bit. That's it. Now push, push, push. OK. 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. Moment of truth. Let's give it a go. One, two, go! Yeah, yeah. It's exactly why we would not do it with the horses. Cos that's what happens, innit? Something like that might happen. Right. Pull in the top. The bottom's going in. What's happened here is that... You see there's a branch that's gone through there. You've got a shank and a fork, 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, they would have known, they would have valued the importance, so they would have chosen a really fine bit of wood. However... You let him. OK. 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. Look at his movement. Yes! Now he's coming. Yes! 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. 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 hang of it. And we're just having to make it up as we go along. All right. Gently, come on then. 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'd 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 of any kind. 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.