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Showing posts with the label Nyman

British Gardens in Time - Biddulph Grange ep.3

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 Biddulph Grange, the best-surviving Victorian garden in the country, takes the visitor on a whistlestop journey around the world from China to Egypt in a series of gardens connected by tunnels and subterranean passageways.  Biddulph was created at the height of the British Empire by James Bateman, the son of a wealthy industrialist. Bateman was fascinated by botany and the emerging technologies of the Victorian era, filling his garden with rare specimens tracked down by the Victorian plant hunters laid out to designs that purported to come from around the world but were actually inspired by the Great Exhibition and painted plates from the Potteries.  But Bateman's fascination for all things new would come into conflict with his deeply held religious beliefs, leading him into open conflict with Darwin, financial ruin and the eventual loss of his beloved garden. British Gardens in Time - Biddulph Grange ep.3 Series which explores four iconic British gardens, from Christop

British Gardens in Time - Stowe ep.2

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Stowe, one of the most remarkable creations of Georgian England, is the birthplace of the landscape garden. Created on a vast scale with 36 temples, eight lakes and a dozen avenues, Stowe launched the career of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown and fostered a rebellion that overthrew the first British prime minister, Robert Walpole. Rather than being a garden of flowers and shrubs, Stowe is a garden of ideas and its grottos and classical monuments spell out a furious, coded political manifesto. Stowe's creator, Viscount Cobham, dreamt of climbing to the pinnacle of political power and establishing a long-lived dynasty, but less than a century after his death, his family was to become the most scandalous bankrupts in English history. British Gardens in Time - Stowe ep.1 The scale and beauty of Stowe have attracted visitors for over 300 years. Picture-perfect views, winding paths, lakeside walks and temples create a timeless landscape, reflecting the changing seasons. Ful

British Gardens in Time - Great Dixter ep.1

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Series which explores four iconic British gardens, from Christopher Lloyd's Arts and Craft Great Dixter to Georgian Stowe and from Victorian Biddulph Grange to the quintessentially English Nyman's. British Gardens in Time - Great Dixter ep.1  Great Dixter lays claim to being the most innovative, spectacular and provocative garden of the 20th century. Made famous by the much-loved eccentric plantsman and writer Christopher Lloyd, who used the garden as a living laboratory and documented his experiments in a weekly column in Country Life, Great Dixter began life as a Gertrude Jekyll-inspired Arts and Crafts garden surrounding a house designed by Edwin Lutyens. The Lloyd family created Dixter just before the outbreak of the First World War with the intention of establishing a rural idyll for Christo and his five siblings. Dixter was to be both Christo's horticultural nursery and the setting for his rebellion in late middle age as he finally threw off the shackles o