Faced with her sister Jane’s eager inquiries about when her initial coldness towards Mr. Darcy gave way to more tender feelings in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet mulls it over for a moment before answering: “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” The grounds, the reader infers, were a reflection of their owner’s character.
As one would expect, Jane Austen’s figures show up repeatedly in the gentle landscapes examined in Kate Felus’s charming The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden, as does Austen herself whom we find picnicking neat and businesslike in Godmersham Park in Kent “with a basket of Bread and Cheese & a bottle of Water, some books & work & Paper and Pencil.”1
The all-important figure was Lancelot Brown.
Garden design under the Hanoverians was a case in art history in which the British led rather than followed the dictates of the continent, dispensing with the geometric tyranny of the walled baroque garden with its straight avenues and poodle-trimmed evergreens: the French called the result le Jardin Anglais, writes Felus, and “it was imitated from colonial America to imperial Russia,” from Marie Antoinette’s Petit Hameau at Versailles to Catherine the Great’s Tsarskoye Selo outside St. Petersburg.
While earlier architects such as Vanbrugh and Bridgeman had experimented with the use of the ha-ha,
