Robert FitzGerald's tour of surrey gardens

Abstract

Edward Malins and the Knight of Glin, in their book Lost Demesnes: Irish Landscape Gardening 1660–1845, have shown how much traffic there was in the eighteenth century between England and Ireland in terms of sharing the spreading ideas about the new gardening. The ‘Irish connection’ produced a number of visitors from Ireland who came over to England and saw various gardens, leaving detailed and informative records of their impressions in manuscript form. Garden history is indebted, in recent years, to the discovery and publication of several important documents of this kind. Author of the most valuable of these documents was John Parnell, whose accounts of Woburn Farm and Painshill have been published in Garden History,¹ of Stourhead in The Journal of Garden History ² and of Hagley and the Leasowes in British and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century.³ William Robertson visited a number of gardens in c.1795, and his MS account of Oatlands has been reproduced in Garden History:⁴ he also wrote at length about Esher Place and Painshill. Now a third visitor comes forward, whose description adds materially to what we already know about some important Surrey gardens.