ROUSHAM *rubs crocodile tears
I wrote a blog about my visit to Rousham years ago, back in around 2017 it was this;
Held in the highest esteem by the RHS and among garden designers/enthusiasts. Designed by William Kent, Palladian inclined architect primarily and who dabbled with garden landscape design on the side. Immediately, reading up on him I’m inclined to think he was a bit of a chancer. He pioneered the English ‘natural’ landscape design and managed to make it a thing, which was handy since he knew bugger all about horticulture hence why there is a focus on the wider landscape, sweeping lawns and inclusion of trees. Anyway, he got away with it because he was a bit good at building things for extraordinarily rich people to put on their land and sit in and since the Enlightenment was eating everyone’s money up, a big green garden meant you could save money paying for Dirt Gardeners. You only needed one probably working a twenty-five hour day for a potato and perhaps, some left overs from the dog feed.
As a garden visitor the first thing I pick up on is the atmosphere of a place. Its overall energy.. not getting too hippy’esque, but places definitely have the ability to exude and elicit emotions. Perhaps this is an overall influence from the weather conditions on the day, its placement in the landscape, the size and use of plants, lay-lines!? Whatever creates the feeling, that’s my first judgement on a place. The feeling at Rousham is immediately summed up at the gate with a sign declaring, ‘NO CHILDREN’. That’s cool, it’s a private garden, I’m not a fan of kids really either, screechy little bleedahs running about and swinging off of things, tramping flower beds with abandon.. and all that tedious laughter.. *shudder. Thankfully the only trace of a child was a deflated balloon on a recessed ledge in one of the grottoes. There weren’t any dogs allowed either.. so that’s a big fat NO to two things that are naturally joyful, spontaneous and in the moment then… OhhhhhK.
After walking about the garden for a while I began to wonder if the ‘NO CHILDREN’ sign was there to protect them. I found Rousham to be intensely austere/intimidating/unnerving/, NOT relaxing or making me feel inclined to reflect on nature. I wanted to escape! Not to risk a law-suit, but I felt it was distinctly possible that small children were sacrificed at Rousham at some point, their blood let into the (underwhelming as it turned out) famous rill to be fed into the various grotto ponds for England’s 17th century elite to bathe in under the gaze of Dionysius and Pan. I repeat, THIS PROBABLY DIDN’T HAPPEN.
Horticulturally, I knew that the main Kent renowned part of the garden wasn’t about clever borders. It is all about the architecture and borrowed landscape and manufactured contours. When Kent would have designed the garden there wouldn’t have been a road or a railway track interrupting the “view”, the little bit of view you have left anyway, because trees have become so immense as to have enclosed and obscured spaces and views that presumably at one point would have been framed and airy. I wonder is the protection order on the planting there so extreme that you couldn’t just start lifting the canopy a little to help the space and make the place feel a little less…intimidating. After five minutes of walking about feeling watched, I became bored. The follies and grottoes are nice, if you like Palladian artifice. The water feature dedicated to the dead otter hound was cool, I’m guessing he was the dog that chased the children down before they were sacrificed.. (that probably didn’t happen), but on the whole I felt rather uninspired. I get that the point of the garden is a complete step away from horticultural ‘fluff’ but I felt that the bare palette could be played with more, perhaps experimenting with the nuanced textures/tones of different meadow grasses, or even adding some sort of living creature to the ponds. I pity the poor individual who has to clip the god-awful Laurel (I hate Laurel) hedges, seemingly with secateurs, I hope they’re paid handsomely. I did like the HA-HA though, but I’m a sucker for a HA-HA.
Where the Kent “designer” landscape garden is the bleak, austere and scary father, the walled garden entered through a quite lovely blue gate, is the beaten into shape, very serious and afraid of love, mother. The parterre has sort of crept into a bit of joy with a generous splattering of Digitalis filling the knots, dobbed with sporadic roses, Sisyrinchium and Centaurea. The herbaceous border is stuffed with the usual suspects, big blobs of things that ‘do well’ and more roses. There is a lovely little pond with more Sisyrinchium seeding itself informally around the edges and a lovely arbour clad with old Wisteria and more roses, intertwined with torturous looking chains.. *cough. A magnificent gnarly Mulberry and some hanging-on-for-dear- life apples were the loveliest parts of this garden… and the quirky immense hedge was a nice touch, a tiny glimmer of ‘fun’. Mind you, that was at the entrance to the garden so was placed perhaps to lull the children into a false sense of security before they were tortured in several different ways by middle-aged men wearing the local Long Horn cattle horns and chanting incantations in front of the Lion massacring the Pony statue on the front lawn. Which obviously, PROBABLY DID NOT HAPPEN.
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So, the recent hoo-haaa about Rousham being “endangered” by actual homes for humans, forgive me, is pretty fucking petty! The landscape around Rousham isn’t all that, really, be honest! Mostly arable, a bit boringly flat, pretty meh. The idea that somewhere should be immune to having to gaze upon modernity just because the family are old and conservative & the garden was designed by a long-dead landscaper is a bit Boo.Hoo. Here’s an extract from an article in Tatler (eye-roll) from December 2014, a special about people with double-barrel names and silly titles who own cows & swathes of the UK countryside:
“They don't like foreigners at Rousham. Not when it comes to cattle. Only English breeds have graced this dreamy Oxfordshire landscape since William Kent laid it out in the 1730s, and that's how Charles and Angela Cottrell-Dormer plan to keep it. 'We don't like Continental breeds,' says Charles Cottrell-Dormer, a Tory councillor, as he cruises over a pancake-flat field in his Range Rover. 'Second-rate, tasteless beef.' His family has lived at Rousham since 1635, though his great-grandmother 'mucked up' the house in 1875, adding a 'completely unnecessary' Victorian wing. His great-grandfather used to keep Longhorns for milking, though the herd was sold in 1927. So when his wife Angela saw two at the Royal Show in 1971, they 'had to have some'. 'We started with six third-rate heifers, then got a bull, and off we went.' They have two herds now, and some Anguses, though they are famous for the Longhorns, which have won countless prizes. They take a different letter of the alphabet to name the heifers each year: 'K was tricky. We had some very silly names, like Kanga.'
*shrug.
