Search

Christopher Hussey has described Stowe, in English Gardens and Landscape, 1700-1750, as the "outstanding monument to English Landscape Gardening," a tribute to one hundred and fifty years of continuous development by successive generations of Temples and Grenvilles. This continual improving and remodeling began early in the eighteenth century and continued right through to the first great Stowe sale in 1848. Parterres were made and then unmade; buildings were put up then taken down, moved, or reconstructed; avenues were planted and felled; ha-has were dug, then filled in again; and statuary led a peripatetic existence around the gardens. In addition to this, the acreage of the gardens continued to expand right up to the time of the 1848 sale. For the next three-quarters of a century, the third duke of Buckingham struggled to retrench and consolidate his estate around a ten-thousandacre core. Management of the garden at this period was of necessity on a care and maintenance basis only and in time even this work was restricted to areas close to the house, leaving the farther parts of the gardens to fend for themselves. The death of the third duke, and of his grandson, in the First World War signaled the end of the family's involvement with Stowe, and in 1921 and 1922 the remainder of the estate was broken up. The final part of the history of Stowe dates from 1923, when Stowe School was founded, up to the present day. It includes valiant attempts by the school to restore elements of the gardens, but it also saw the addi