The idea of the sacred in neoclassical British gardens of the eighteenth and late twentieth centuries

This study takes as its subject the sacred element in neo-classical gardens of the 18th and late 20th centuries. This element may be represented in the classical idiom (by temples or statues), or translated into the terms of the Christian religion as practised in England. The study argues that sacred ideas are an important motivating force in garden design, and moreover have a prominent socio-political content. It demonstrates this force at work by focussing first on the devotional aspects of Alexander Pope's garden, which, it is argued, displays an ecclesiastical ichnography informed by Roman Catholic values. In the middle of the 18th century, by contrast, political and cultural hostility to Roman Catholicism finds expression in the design of the landscape garden. During the second half of the century the constitutionally assured supremacy of the Church of England is also reflected in landscape garden design. Duncombe Park with Rievaulx Terrace, and Sledmere House, provide examples of these changes. Sacred neo-classical gardening emerges from 19th century eclipse to find its fullest contemporary expression in the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose garden in Scotland is tested here for consistency to the 18th century tradition he often invokes. His work also provides the material for a modern definition of the sacred idea. While it is still connected to political ideas, the sacred is now divorced from involvement with the Christian Churches and allied to imaginative and poetic effects of gardens and landscape. Throughout the study evidence from literature, painting and architectural history is brought to bear on the subject, and it is argued that the connection between signs of the sacred in the garden and actual sacred practices in society is essentially a rhetorical one.