Brooke, Edward Adveno

Folio (21 x 17 3/4 inches). Chromolithographic title, uncoloured lithographic dedication to the Dutchess of Sutherland, 16 uncoloured lithographic vignettes on india paper mounted, 24 fine lithographic plates, printed in colors and finished by hand. Expertly bound to style in green morocco, covers bordered in gilt, spine with raised bands in seven compartments, lettered in the second, the others with a repeat decoration in gilt, yellow endpapers.

Abbey, Scenery 392; Bobins 62; Mass.Hort.Soc.(1918) p.39.

Bowood House, Alton Towers, Woburn Abbey, Holkham House, Castle Howard, Wilton House, and thirteen others are featured. The resulting plates offer a rare eye-witness record of many of the gardens of these best-known English country houses at a time when they were coming into what was to prove to be their glory days. Various factors combined to produce this flowering amongst the English landscape: fashion amongst the landed elite required them to surround their great houses with great gardens; a flood of new species were arriving from throughout the Empire and beyond; a generation of knowledgeable gardeners were in place to employ the latest effective cultivation techniques; public interest in general was focused on botany and on a number of plant groups in particular (tulips, auriculas, camellias, orchids and ferns). Given this set of circumstances and the plethora of botanical monograms and periodicals that were published at this time, it is surprising that this work is almost unique in what it set out to do.

Many of the gardens were begun in earlier times, but most feature additions, sometimes in the Italian style, which proved a major attraction for Brooke. The magnificent gardens depicted include those at Trentham Park (laid out by Capability Brown with additions by Charles Barry in the 1840s), Enville Hall (gardens extended in the mid-19th century and celebrated for its fountains, its floral display, and its domed and turreted oriental palace of a conservatory), Bowood House (originally laid out by Capability Brown but with Italianate terraces added), Alton Towers, Elvaston Castle (famous for its splendid arboretum), Shrublands Hall (Italianate terraces by Barry), Woburn Abbey (a Repton masterpiece), Holkham House (William Kent-Capability Brown, with extensive 1850s additions including a parterre with the Earl of Leicester's initials in box, and a pair of flower beds in a Louis XIV pattern accompanying a fountain representing St. George and the dragon), Castle Howard (whose modern additions included a new parterre using yew hedges to frame the lawns and the Triton Fountain taken from the Great Exhibition), and others.

There are no other pictorial surveys that can match Brooke's work for its scale or its scope: it is one of the truly great gardening books. A lovely copy.