Stourhead Gardens
Stourhead in Wiltshire is one of the supreme masterpieces of English landscape garden design, an early eighteenth-century garden created around an artificial lake in a wooded valley by Henry Hoare II between 1741 and the 1780s that established many of the principles of the English Landscape style and remains one of the most perfectly composed and most visited gardens in Britain. The garden takes its inspiration from the classical landscapes of the Roman campagna as painted by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, placing temples, grottoes and bridges around the lake in a series of composed views designed to evoke the pastoral Arcadia of ancient literature.
The circuit walk around the lake is the defining experience of Stourhead, each step revealing new composed vistas that place the classical buildings in calculated relationship to the water, the surrounding woodland and each other. The Pantheon, a domed temple modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, provides the visual climax of the garden seen from across the lake, its reflection in the still water completing a composition of extraordinary harmony. The Temple of Apollo on the hillside, the Grotto with its sleeping nymph, the Gothic Cottage and the Bristol High Cross imported from Bristol to add a medieval element to the classical programme complete a circuit of remarkable concentrated beauty.
The surrounding woodland, planted by Henry Hoare with a variety of deciduous and evergreen trees, provides the framework within which the classical buildings are set and changes character dramatically across the seasons. The spring flowering of rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias transforms the garden with colour from April through June, while the autumn foliage of the beech, oak and other trees creates a quite different but equally spectacular seasonal display.
The Palladian house at Stourhead, managed separately by the National Trust, contains a significant collection of furniture, paintings and Chippendale furniture of international importance.