Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland: Mixing Foreign Trees with the Natives - Hardcover

Finola O Kane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 185918362X ISBN 13: 9781859183625

Publisher: Cork University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Unusual book

About this title

Review:

"Astute ransacking of archives - instructions from distant proprietors, family correspondence, estate plans and workbooks - allows Finola O'Kane to open windows upon three exemplary Irish landscapes - Breckdenston, Castletown House and Frescati. In the process, the Irishness of estate developments is explored - the subtle or more aggressive manipulation of English trends, the studied internationalism of sources and resources for both landscape design and agrarian efficiency (the Netherlands, most obviously, but also America and revolutionary France). But the focus also comes to include, not just estate management and landscape aesthetics, but the role of women as designers, planters and stewards of property, the education of children in country matters, Irish tourism, country house entertainment, and how all these elements were marshaled in the interests of Irish identity and political status." --John Dixon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania

Synopsis:

Within the walls of the demesne, the Anglo-Irish ascendancy constructed their vision of an Irish Utopia. Ideal landscapes were designed and planted out with standard temperate trees and newly introduced exotics from the Americas. Ideal cottages were built, paternalistic estate management structures developed, and complex planning and design theories indulged. Masques and plays, morally suspect in the strict Protestant ethos of the time, flourished within the enclosed world of the demesne. Robert Molesworth's radical Whig landscape influenced both Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Shaftesbury's political and aesthetic ideas. The women of Carton and Castletown employed the theatrical tradition of French gardens to explore controversial lifestyles. This book seeks to explore how and why the landscapes were designed, who designed them, who used them, and for what purpose. Detailed studies of selected and connected gardens were used to explore these questions, and the smaller compass is hopefully countered by a more detailed context.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cork University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 185918362X
• ISBN 13: 9781859183625
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224