Terraced Architectural Garden : Garden Design Style

Two years later he was working for the Royal Horticultural Society in the Arboretum at Chiswick. When Paxton was about to seek his fortune in America the President of the Royal Horticultural Society, the Duke of Devonshire, offered him the charge of the gardens at Chatsworth. By 1838 he was a personal friend of the Duke and travelled with him extensively on the Continent. In 1849 he produced in ten days a plan for a building to house the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. His last-minute entry was successful and the Crystal Palace brought him world-wide fame. When the Exhibition was over he superintended the removal of this gigantic conservatory to Sydenham, where he surrounded it with an extensive geometric garden in the seventeenth-century manner. Sir Joseph Paxton, alone of the leading garden designers of the period, was a gardener first and an architect in glass and iron second; but equally with Westmacott the sculptor, Nesfield the painter, and Barry the architect, he preferred the geometric garden? Terraces with their related balustrading and urns of stone (or iron cast and coloured to look like stone) now became a common feature of all large houses. Often the terraces were of the Repton type, that is they were belvederes overlooking the park, battlement walks rather than stands raised for viewing a parterre. On at least one occasion there was an attempt at that rare thing a fully terraced architectural garden in the Roman manner: this was by Barry at Shrublands Park, Ipswich. Here even the extreme form of parterre with coloured sands, pebbles and brick-dust was used, and care was taken that the terrace walls should be kept altogether free from plants. Shrublands for all its size and elaboration was and is an artistic failure. It may be that an Italianate garden needs an Italian sky, but there were no Italian skies in seventeenth-century England, and yet the geometric gardens of that period did not fail as Barry's gardens usually fail.