In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose, or of such extravagant appearance that it transcends the range of usual garden buildings.
Cobham is a large village in the Borough of Elmbridge in Surrey, England, centred 17 miles (27 km) south-west of London and 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Guildford on the River Mole. It has a commercial/services High Street, a significant number of primary and private schools and the Painshill landscape park.
Bowood is a Grade I listed Georgian country house in Wiltshire, England, that has been owned for more than 250 years by the Fitzmaurice family. The house, with interiors by Robert Adam, stands on extensive grounds which include a garden designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown. It is adjacent to the village of Derry Hill, halfway between Calne and Chippenham. The greater part of the house was demolished in 1956.
An arboretum is a botanical collection composed exclusively of trees and shrubs of a variety of species. Originally mostly created as a section in a larger garden or park for specimens of mostly non-local species, many modern arboreta are in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants and are intended at least in part for scientific study.
Stourhead is a 1,072-hectare (2,650-acre) estate at the source of the River Stour in the southwest of the English county of Wiltshire, extending into Somerset.
The Boboli Gardens is a historical park of the city of Florence that was opened to the public in 1766. Originally designed for the Medici, it represents one of the first and most important examples of the Italian garden, which later served as inspiration for many European courts. Statues of various styles and periods, ancient and Renaissance, dot the garden. It also has large fountains and artificial caves, notably a grotto built by the artist, architect, and sculptor Bernardo Buontalenti between 1536 and 1608.
A grotto (grot) is a natural or artificial cave used by humans in both modern times and antiquity, and historically or prehistorically. Naturally occurring grottoes are often small caves near water that are usually flooded or often flooded at high tide. Sometimes, artificial grottoes are used as garden features. The Grotta Azzurra at Capri and the grotto at Tiberius' Villa Jovis in the Bay of Naples are examples of popular natural seashore grottoes.
The Parc des Buttes Chaumont is a public park situated in northeastern Paris, France, in the 19th arrondissement. Occupying 24.7 hectares, it is the fifth-largest park in Paris, after the Bois de Vincennes, Bois de Boulogne, Parc de la Villette and Tuileries Garden.
Prior Park Landscape Garden surrounding the Prior Park estate south of Bath, Somerset, England, was designed in the 18th century by the poet Alexander Pope and the landscape gardener Capability Brown, and is now owned by the National Trust. The garden was influential in defining the style known as the "English landscape garden" in continental Europe. The garden is Grade I listed in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of special historic interest in England.
The English landscape garden, also called English landscape park or simply the English garden, is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening style of Europe. The English garden presented an idealized view of nature. Created and pioneered by William Kent and others, the "informal" garden style originated as a revolt against the architectural garden and drew inspiration from landscape paintings by Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin, as well as from the classic Chinese gardens of the East, which had recently been described by European travellers and were realized in the Anglo-Chinese garden.
Croome Court is a mid-18th-century Neo-Palladian mansion surrounded by extensive landscaped parkland at Croome D'Abitot, near Upton-upon-Severn in south Worcestershire, England. The mansion and park were designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown for the 6th Earl of Coventry, and they were Brown's first landscape design and first major architectural project. Some of the mansion's rooms were designed by Robert Adam. St Mary Magdalene's Church, Croome D'Abitot that sits within the grounds of the park is now owned and cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust.
Cobham Park is a former mansion and country estate in Cobham, Surrey, England. The main house was converted to apartments in the early 2000s, but the majority of the surrounding former parkland remains undeveloped. At its height in the 19th century, the estate included the majority of the neighbouring settlement of dowside Downside.
Kate Felus is a designed-landscape historian. She studied at the University of Warwick and the University of Bristol. Her specialist subject area is the social history of 18th-century gardens and their buildings.
A shell grotto is a type of folly, a grotto decorated with sea shells. The shell grotto was a popular feature of many British country houses in the 17th and 18th centuries. It suited the Baroque and Rococo styles and often represented the mimicry of architectural features from the Italian Renaissance. The idea of a grotto was originally a means to enhance a dank undercroft, or provide an antechamber before a piano nobile, but later it became a garden feature independent of the house, sometimes on the edge of a lake, with water flowing through it.
Garden hermits or ornamental hermits were people encouraged to live alone in purpose-built hermitages, follies, grottoes, or rockeries on the estates of wealthy landowners, primarily during the 18th century. Such hermits would be encouraged to remain permanently on site, where they could be fed, cared for, and consulted for advice, or viewed for entertainment.
Pope's villa was the residence of the poet Alexander Pope at Twickenham, then a village west of London in Middlesex. He moved there in 1719 and created gardens and an underground grotto. When Baroness Howe of Langar (1762–1835) purchased the house, she demolished it in 1808 and built a new house next to the site. The house and grotto were topics of 18th- and 19th-century poetry and art. In about 1845, a neo-Tudor house known as Pope's Villa was built on approximately the same site; it has been used as a school since the early 20th century. Pope's Grotto, which is listed Grade II* by Historic England, survives, and is open to the public on 30 weekends each year.
Bacchi tempel öppnat vid en hjältes död, commonly known as Bacchi Tempel is a song play, a long poem in two thousand alexandrines, written by Carl Michael Bellman and published by Sweden's royal printing press in 1783. The illustrator was Elias Martin. The work had been preceded by a version from 1779 titled "Bacchi Temple opened at the death of Corporal and Order Oboist Father Movitz", but had been reworked and expanded several times.
A woodland garden is a garden or section of a garden that includes large trees and is laid out so as to appear as more or less natural woodland, though it is often actually an artificial creation. Typically it includes plantings of flowering shrubs and other garden plants, especially near the paths through it.
Stowe Gardens, formerly Stowe Landscape Gardens, are extensive, Grade I listed gardens and parkland in Buckinghamshire, England. Largely created in the 18th century, the gardens at Stowe are arguably the most significant example of the English landscape garden. Designed by Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, and Capability Brown, the gardens changed from a baroque park to a natural landscape garden, commissioned by the estate's owners, in particular by Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, his nephew Richard Grenville-Temple, 2nd Earl Temple, and his nephew George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham.
