The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden by Kate Felus

Author:Kate Felus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786720078
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

Wise Jemima.

Thomas Robinson did not mention bowling as one of the diversions of his summer holidays at Wrest, but the garden was equipped with a bowling green, and with the bowling green house where tea had been taken when Jemima was a girl and had friends staying at Wrest during the summer.108 Bowling had been popular for over 200 years. The national obsession was so strong in 1541 that the state feared people were playing bowls rather than practising archery, and a law was passed allowing bowling greens only in private gardens. In the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was hardly a garden of the gentry class or above that did not have one, and a neat rectangle of perfectly level grass fitted seamlessly with the aesthetic of the formal, geometric garden. By the second half of the eighteenth century that style was in decline and so were bowling greens. It was while playing bowls at Stowe that the Reverend Rand’s interest was excited by the young lady on the swing, but by Earl Temple’s period the alteration of the garden meant that it was not one of the diversions he mentions for his summer guests. Though she may not have been able to enjoy it at Stowe, it was one of the diversions that Lady Mary Coke enjoyed during several visits to Park Place (Oxfordshire). In July 1768 she wrote to her sister: ‘After taking a very long walk, we play’d Bowls, ’tis a great while since I play’d, yet I think they agreed I was one of the best of the Party.’ The family at Park Place may have been particularly fond of the game, and were perhaps rather old-fashioned, because this is a very late reference; the popularity of the game appears to have dwindled in the second half of the century.109

As the aesthetic of the designed landscape evolved, from formal to the naturalistic of Brown and his followers, those perfectly level parterres and the fine turf of bowling greens close to the house were easily adapted for another sport, one that was entirely suitable for these more relaxed spaces – cricket.110 Emily Lennox’s father, the 2nd Duke of Richmond, did much to popularise the game of cricket in England, and it was a sport which the Robinson boys played enthusiastically at school, perhaps practising their batting at Wrest in the holidays. Many a mid-eighteenth-century landscape, even today, is home to a cricket pitch, including the Duke of Richmond’s Goodwood. During Queen Charlotte’s final fête at Frogmore House in Windsor Great Park in July 1817, boys from Eton School played cricket.111 In his Red Book for Ashridge in Hertfordshire (1813), Humphry Repton suggested the construction of a cricket pitch.112

Quoits was a popular outdoor game, often played at inns and on village greens; it was an appropriate amusement for children and also suitable for the levelled ground of the garden close to the house. In July 1759, Caroline Fox wrote from Holland House to her sister

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