Beyond Arcadia Part 2

Here is another little bit from the on-line E-zine discovered by our stage manager Debs. The Sidley Park garden is practically another character in ARCADIA. Just beyond our view through the windows (looking out over the East Section) is the garden being reborn to much controversy in the 1800s and resulting in much mystery in the present. Here is a little more reflection on the changing styles of the Sidley Park Garden.

Classicism vs. Romanticism in the Sidley Park Garden

Hannah: “The whole Romantic sham. It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigor turned in on itself. The history of the garden says it all beautifully.”

The grounds of Sidley Park, the house which provides the setting for Arcadia, are a canvas on which all three of the main styles of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century landscape gardening have at one time or another been inscribed.

These three different styles of gardening were treated by some contemporary commentators as mere changes in fashion, and they were frequently compared with changing fashions in dress, particularly in women's dress. For others, however, they were like fashion itself -- part of a complicated story of social and political change.

The Classical Italian Garden
The formal Italian garden reflects the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment. It was probably planted by Thomasina’s great-grandfather.

Until the 1740s, the garden was laid out according to an aesthetic which saw beauty only in symmetry, in the geometrical pattern made by circular pools and the intersecting straight lines of avenues, alleys, terraces, hedges.

Hannah says: “The house had a formal Italian garden until about 1740 …that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the Age of Reason….topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes. sublime geometry…the best box hedge in Derbyshire….”

1740-1809: The Natural English Park
The formal Italian garden is replaced by the “natural English park” for which Launcelot “Capability” Brown was famous. This was probably done at the instigation of Thomasina’s grandfather.

Around 1740 or so tastes changed and this formal Italian design was dug up and “improved” by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. Brown’s goal was to create open vistas which made the park and its surrounding countryside seem part of one harmonious landscape which ran unbroken to the horizon and beyond.

One way to make the landscape appear to flow seamlessly, was to remove anything that appeared “unnatural” or “man made” like topiary, pools and terraces, fountains and an avenue of limes. The” best box hedge in Derbyshire” was dug up and replaced by a “ha ha” (a ditch used to keep cows off the lawn.) “The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon… so the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside….”

This is the way the garden looks in Lady Croom’s time, and it is just to her taste.

1810 The Fake Gothic Wilderness
The Gothic Garden reflects the Age of Romance.
Lord Croom, Thomasina’s father, has hired Mr. Noakes, the landscape gardener to tear up the natural English landscape that Lady Croom so cherishes and replace it with a faux Gothic wilderness in the “picturesque” style.

As Arcadia opens in 1809, the English park that Lady Croom so admires is about to give way to the "picturesque" or “Romantic” style favored by Mr. Noakes. The picturesque was an aesthetic of irregularity, of "Romantic" wildness, in which the natural, flowing lines of Capability Brown were deliberately broken and obscured by sudden declivities, jagged shapes, ruined buildings and statuary, and the shadows of rocks and unkempt trees.

Lady Croom finds it utterly distasteful but her protests were obviously in vain, because by 1812, the process of transformation is under way, under the auspices of Mr. Noakes and his noisy “Newcomen steam pump”. .

Hannah, who is all geometry and reason, hates the whole “Romantic sham” of the Gothic landscape. She particularly dislikes the fact that the Gothic landscape, when plunked down in England, stands out like a sore thumb -- stagy and fake and artificial.
“…a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion”.


Playing to sold out houses, ARCADIA has been extended until June 20th!

And that's the word on the street!