The best analogy is with Carmontelle (Louis Carrogis) at Parc Monceau, parts of which survive ( Fig. At Hamilton the essential property is not the pictorial aspects of the picturesque garden that are drawn upon, but the involvement of ‘imagination, memory or mind’ in a garden of sequential incidents. Īs this reveals, the picturesque garden requires a broad canvas, and does not lend itself easily to condensation into a small space. But not every picturesque landscape needed this appeal to painting for its essential structure or impact. In all it would be emotionally and aesthetically pleasing, the latter effect resulting at least in part of the design being reminiscent of landscape paintings or engravings or from suggesting itself as subject matter for them. It could be distinctly irregular …, it would feature if not try to show off the richness and variety of natural materials, even revelling in apparent randomness (heaped or scattered rocks, tangled shubs, meandering streams, ruined structures or dead trees it would appeal to eyes roving across an extensive scenery and trained to attend to its every aspect, from detailed foreground through a middle distance of calculated effects to hazy distance it would involve the imagination, memory or mind as well as the eye, perhaps by invoking historic events it also invented exotic buildings (what the French usefully call fabriques) to stimulate these associations when no original structure was handy. The length of this definition, even in condensed form, is indicative of the complexity of the problem:Ĭertain characteristics seemed to dominate picturesque design. John Dixon Hunt recognises this when he gives what is the best definition I have read of the picturesque garden. The garden at Hamilton is called a ‘picturesque garden’, but, unlike a Chinese, Japanese, or even Italian Renaissance garden, this category does not readily lend itself to distillation into a set of recognisable forms in the same way as Chinese and Renaissance gardens. At Hamilton this is done in an interestingly and quite original way by making a scenographic itinerary that recreates the Magic Flute and its Masonic symbolism. The Hamilton Gardens garden recognise that there is another garden style beside the Chinese that relies on a linear itinerary, the picturesque landscape garden.
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