Hertfordshire Garden History

A Miscellany

Edited: Anne Rowe

Hertfordshire Publications

2007

ISBN 978 1 905313 38 9

 

From the back cover

 

Historic parks and gardens are an important part of our heritage, perhaps particularly so in Hertfordshire where the proximity of London has exerted powerful influences, both positive and negative. For centuries those who have made their fortunes in the capital have often preferred to live elsewhere. The attractive countryside of Hertfordshire, with its good communication links to north and south, was a natural choice for many and much money was lavished on the laying out of parks and gardens according to the prevailing fashions. By the nineteenth century south Hertfordshire had some of the highest densities of parkland in the country and these are precisely the areas which, during the twentieth century, suffered most from suburbanisation.

 

These factors, analysed in Tom Williamson's overview, make researching garden history in Hertfordshire particularly interesting and important. Other essays in this fascinating collection look at a garden created in the seventeenth century by the Earl of Salisbury at his Quickswood hunting lodge, a remarkable 'lost' eighteenth-century garden at Roxford near Hertingfordbury, and the effects of wartime shortages on the creation of an early-twentieth-century garden (now Queenswood School). Elsewhere,  the impact of wealth derived from the East India Company on the county's gardens is described and the works of two leading eighteenth-century landscape designers, Charles Bridgeman and Richard Woods, are examined together with the garden and famous grotto created by John Scott of Amwell. Also included are the histories of two Hertfordshire businesses whose impact on horticulture was felt well beyond the county boundary: the Pulham family of Broxbourne who created rock gardens for royalty and Frederick Sander, known to Victorians as 'the Orchid King'], whose nursery was in St Albans.

Contents

1 The character of Hertfordshire's parks and gardens  Tom Williamson
2 The gardens at Quickswood, the hunting lodge of the Earls of Salisbury  Caroline Dalton
3 Charles Bridgeman at Tring Park: a reassessment   Alan Fletcher
4 Some Hertfordshire nabobs  Kate Harwood
5 A lost garden at Roxford  Patience Bagenal
6 The influences behind the creation John Scott's grotto  Lottie Clarke
7 Richard Woods in Hertfordshire  Esther Gatland
8 The PuLham family of Hertfordshire and their work  Kate Banister
9 A Victorian passion: the role of Sander's orchid nursery in St Albans  Harold Smith
10 Clarence Park, St Albans - a late-Victorian public park  Harold Smith
11 Garden creation in wartime: the legacy of the Great War at Queenswood School  Anne Shellim
The work of the Hertfordshire Gardens Trust