High Summer (in Burford House)

“The seed of the series was planted twenty years ago when I first visited Rousham Park near my home town of Oxford. This small garden offering trees-framed vistas, winding paths, streams, classical statues, and a variety of follies and garden buildings is generally considered as the prototype where the English landscape garden were first worked out by designers Charles Bridgeman and William Kent. They in turn were influenced by the classical landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. At a time when the gardens were still tightly enclosed and formally laid out, Bridgeman’s main innovation was to include the surrounding landscape within the garden’s design. Kent for his part treated the construction of the garden as if making a series of painted views, connecting one to the next by serpentine walkways. I also used two other gardens from this period, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Stourhead in Hampshire, which are larger and more elaborate than Rousham.