Blenheim Palace

The Gardens

The visitor having tea in the Arcade Rooms beneath the Long Library or on the terrace looks down to the lake across the Water Terraces. Years of thought and work were devoted to these by the 9th Duke in the nineteen-twenties. The key to their design lies in the Bernini river-gods' fountain on the second terrace. A scale-model for the famous fountain in Rome's Piazza Navona, this was given to the 1st Duke and was venerated by the 9th, who was determined to give Vanbrugh's palace the majestic, formal setting he knew it deserved. With the help of the French landscape-architect, Achille Duchene, this had already been brought about on the north front, where Brown had grassed over the forecourt, and on the east, where the Duke had created a formal garden centring on the Mermaid Fou ntain designed by Waldo Story. The making of the western terraces presented almost insuperable problems, but the Duke and his architect solved them, and might have gone on to remake the Great Parterre on the south, had time and money allowed.

The Great Parterre, nearly half a mile (800 metres) long and as wide as the south front which overlooked it, had been a formal garden created by Vanbrugh with the help of Queen Anne's gardener, Henry Wise, and an army of labourers. It had a 'military' framework of bastions and curtain walls, like a fortress about to be stormed and captured from Louis XIV, whose 30-ton marble bust, taken from the gates of Tournai, a Marlborough conquest, was forced to look down on it from the porticoed centrepiece above the Saloon.

The curtain walls, with eight great round bastions, each more than 100 feet (30 metres) wide, supported a terraced walk from which the stroller looked out to the park or down into the parterre itself. The garden was patterned in dwarf box, sand and crushed brick, leading to a six-sided formal wilderness, called the Woodwork, which contained shaped shrubs and clipped bushes brought from Wise's nurseries at Brompton Park. There were formal pools with fountains and, as at Kensington Palace, lime-arched walks, carpeted here with fine sand from Queen Pool. This was no flower garden. It was an architect's garden carried out in brick, in stone and in evergreen topiary.

Many thousands of flowers - iris, hyacinth, narcissus, violet, carnation, Brompton stock - came from Kensington, but most of them were for the formal flower-garden which was made for Sarah on the east front. This was originally enclosed, to Sarah's annoyance, by Vanbrugh's 'out-boundary wall', a high barrier running south from the orangery and, as she protested, blocking the view from the bow-window room. The wall was soon demolished, but its central feature, the colossal piers, which were carved by Gibbons with 'frost work' and bulrushes and topped with urns brimming with stone flowers, now form part of the Hensington Gate.

Marlborough showed from the first a strong personal interest in the making of Blenheim gardens. The story goes that Henry Wise, being Òpitch'd on' by the Duke to plant his grounds, was cautioned that his master (then only fifty-five) might not have long to enjoy them. It was up to Wise to work some kind of miracle that would produce plantations of full-grown trees ready- made. No doubt Marlborough had heard about the mature lime trees which Wise had transplanted at Hampton Court. He was equally successful at Blenheim, where the Òelms out the country' chosen for the two main avenues (east and north) with few exceptions took root and flourished.

In the same way that Vanbrugh delegated to Hawksmoor in the palace, he relied on Wise for helping to change the landscape in the neglected Park. Wise, we know, was a gardener in a thousand; no job was too big for him. He undertook, to start with, the digging of the palace foundations through stiff clay to rock, and later was responsible for the causeway carrying the road over the Grand Bridge.

ÒThe Garden wall was set agoing', Vanbrugh told the Duke, 'the Same day with the House; and I hope will be done against your Grace's return . . . The Kitchen garden Walls will likewise be so advanc'd that all the Plantations may be made.' The gardens were planned in two main parts: the Great Parterre (with its Woodwork) and the Walled Kitchen Garden which, though concealed half a mile from the palace, was in form and produce to be the finest of its kind. Fashion ruled that everything within sight of the house should be formal and symmetrical; and although Blenheim's garden was less so than some, it was yet extreme enough to be decried as stiff and unnatural by some critics. No wonder then that when 'Capability' Brown's 'desolating hand' descended on Blenheim the Great Parterre was swept away.