Chiswick House Gardens
Chiswick, LB Hounslow. Mon 12 Mar 2018
One of quite a few sphinxes in house and gardens
Like the house, the gardens were inspired by those in ancient Rome
The house is a neo-Palladian design copied by Lord Burlington in 1725-9
Inigo Jones designed the gatewar for Beaufort House in Chelsea in
1621 and Lord Burlidng brought it here in 1738
The Italian garden dates from 1812. The first conservatory was built
here in 1813, designed by Samuel Ware
though we were always told it was by Paxton. It was the longest glass
house in the world, two feet over a hundred yards.
Camellias were a craze in the late 1790s and early years of the nineteenth
century, and nurseries sold them at
high prices - five pounds or more for some, at a time when servants
who worked here earned perhaps ten pounds a year.
The camellias fill the length of the conservatory, with some bushes
dating back to when the conservatory was built
They don't quite all look the same. There are pink ones, red ones,
white ones, some with more complex flowers than
others, some variegated.... They grow in the wild in Japan, Inodesia
and the Himalayas as simple flowers, but there was
a great deal of effort put into developing different hybrids. Chiswick
doesn't have any of the yellows found in China.
Camellias (named after a Jesuit botanist who described them) are commercially
important. One of them provides
the dried leaves we use to make tea, and others are crushed for tea
oil, widely used for cooking in China.
You can hire the conservatory for weddings etc
There are a couple of recently restored statues in the conservatory
Volunteers staff the place
The two Coade Stone vases used to be in the garden but have been replaced
by replicas and the originals
are now in the conservatory
the back of the Inigo Jones gateway
Chiswick House is run by Historic England
This is the Exedra, designed by William Kent in the 1730s to house
Lord Burlington's sculpture collection, which included
some ancient pieces as well as replicas. This is where the Beatles
were filmed in two videos in 1966
The Ionic temple and obelisk date from the 18th century
The bridge is a handy route across the lake, but mainly built to be decorative
and give views over the lake
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