(^62) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
zinc, barium, chromium, copper and fluorspar were mined.^11 These, as
we shall see, became more significant as the scale of extraction increased
through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
elite landscapes
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the country’s social elite had
their own, particular environmental signature. Manor houses and mansions
were generally accompanied by ornamental grounds which boasted a flora
already radically different from that of the surrounding landscape. Gardens
had passed through a series of stylistic changes in the course of the fourteenth,
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the details of which need not concern us here.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries their design was shaped
by a mixture of influences: elements of indigenous medieval traditions, fused
with Renaissance fashions from Italy and more recently, as a consequence
of the exile of many royalists during the Civil Wars, with French and Dutch
styles.^12 The main garden areas were set within enclosures, fenced or walled,
and often included terraces and garden buildings of various kinds. Their
design was highly structured and geometric in character, with grass lawns
or plats, parterres comprising patterns in clipped box or defined by flower
beds, as well as box or yew bushes cut as topiary. ‘Canals’, ‘basins’ and other
small areas of water were a common feature, while beyond the gardens one
or more avenues generally ran out through parkland or (more usually) across
the surrounding agricultural land. Many gardens also featured ‘wildernesses’,
areas of ornamental shrubbery/woodland, which from the 1680s were
increasingly brought up close to the walls of the house, often ranged either
side of a central vista. That at Raynham in Norfolk, planted in c.1699,
comprised a network of straight paths, hedged ‘with hornbeams of two sizes
ye Smaller Size of about 2 foot high and Better and ye Larger Size of 4 foot
high and Better: the Quarters (i.e. the areas between the hedges) to be planted
with ye sevll. Varietys of Flowering Trees Undermentioned ye walkes to be
laid all with Sand ye Center places to be planted with Spruce or Silver Firs’.^13
The ‘Flowering Trees’ were listed as horse chestnut, wild service, laburnum,
guelder rose, lilac, bladder senna, wild olive, ‘stript’ (variegated) sycamore,
beech and birch, mixed with ‘Silver Firs, Spruce Firs, Scotch Firs, Pine’. The
Raynham wilderness thus typically contained a mixture of indigenous plants,
some doubtless already modified into more aesthetically appealing forms –
wild service, guelder rose, beech – alongside foreign introductions like lilac,
laburnum, and bladder senna (Colutea arborescens).
New plants continued to arrive through the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth century, joining the range of exotics already established in
gardens here, including the Tulip tree, Portugal laurel and the weeping
willow.^14 The use of trees which, while indigenous to England, were not
native to a particular locality also served to distinguish elite grounds
elle
(Elle)
#1