The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden: Beautiful Objects and Agreeable Retreats by Kate Felus

The Georgian landscape garden has been hailed as the greatest British contribution to European Art, It has traditionally been seen as a beautiful composition created from grass, trees and water, and perhaps a little sterile. But scratch below the surface and history reveals they were a lot less serene and, in places, a great deal more scandalous. This book about the private life of the Georgian garden reveals its previously untold secrets. It explains how by the eighteenth century there was a desire to escape the busy country house where privacy was at a premium, and how these gardens evolved aesthetically, with modestly-sized, far-flung temples and other eye-catchers, to cater for escape and solitude as well as food, drink, music and fireworks. Its publication coincides with the tercentenary of the birth of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, arguably Britain's greatest ever landscape gardener, and the book is uniquely positioned to put Brown's work into its social context.