Gardens
The grounds of Cannons extended to 105 acres (0.42 km2) and were renowned for their magnificence. There was a pleasure garden an orchard and a grand terrace opening on to a parterre containing gilded statues.
Chandos had a water engineer of international fame in his household - his chaplain, the Rev John Theophilus Desaguliers, FRS. Desaguliers created a system of pipes of different materials and bores to feed the water features. In fact, he was better-known for his scientific expertise than his interest in his parishioners. The water gardens, which included a great basin, a canal and numerous ornamental fountains led Nicholas Hawksmoor to comment "I cannot but own that the water at Cannon's... is the main beauty of that situation and it cost him dear".
Another FRS associated with the Cannons garden was Richard Bradley, a horticulturalist who was to become the first professor of botany at the University of Cambridge. Bradley, who dedicated a gardening book to the Duke, supplied plants for the gardens.
Chandos, together with his head gardener Tilleman Bobart, oversaw changes at Cannons reflecting the eighteenth-century movement towards a more naturalistic style of landscape gardening. Some features from the original park survive, including two lakes, the Basin Lake and the Seven Acre Lake. English Heritage has included Canons Park on the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Read more about this topic: Cannons (house)
Famous quotes containing the word gardens:
“the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1985)
“These are the Gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
And fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned—”
—William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878)
“Within the memory of many of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than now.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)