GORFFENNOL
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ISSUE 6
aristocratic gardens. He writes ?But why may not a whole estate be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent plantations, that may turn as much to the profit of as the pleasures of the owner??.12 Denis Cosgrove suggests that ?T he image confirms the comforting sense of paternal responsibility on the part of the landowner whose ?cheerful peasants toil, but in doing so bless their labour and owe their happy existence to the care of their ?lord??.13 T he opportunity to express these political notions through the landscape was taken up by L ord Southcoate in 1735, whose Woburn Farm was ?the first example of the ornamented farm and was directly inspired by Addison?s essays on Taste? and was ?esteem?d the most elegant in England? in 1757.14 Southcoate?s execution of the ferme ornee was a conscious effort to embrace the livelihoods of the common people of England, the Many, and it did so without any influence from France. I ndeed, if parkland was going to be used as an exhibition of English society?s hierarchical integration, ?everything in it would have to be of English make, underpinned by English agriculture?.15 William Pitt, after purchasing Hayes Place in Kent from a Mrs Montagu in 1756, also practiced the style. He redesigned his grounds so that, visiting her former property in 1771, Mrs Montague wrote to her husband of how Pitt had ?called forth all the rural beauties from a spot which was once very unpromising. I wish you could see how sweet a pastoral scene he has made around him?.16 Pitt, who had sat the common man on the benches of Westminster,
had also brought him into his personal grounds by sweeping aside parterres and hedges that had stood in the French manner and opening up the grounds of Hayes Place to a spot of ?rural beauties?. Pitt was also a frequent visitor at Shenstone?s T he L easowes, another celebrated example of the ferme ornee.
AViewof Wooburn in Surrey theSeat of PhilipSouthcote Esqr, LukeSullivan, etchingand engraving, 1759
I t seems that, rather than submitting to France?s high art and culture, there was a certain landscape movement which, beginning in the first quarter of the century, embraced the labour of the lower ranks of English society and provided a landscape that was essentially English. Distancing himself from the targets of Francophobic criticism, in 1770, William Pitt, speaking in the House of L ords, declared that ?Without connections, without any natural interest in the soil, the importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament?.17 T he ferme ornee, however, was not the only means of expressing patriotic fervour through landscape design.
