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26 The tradesmen’s entrance
Aristocrats, up to now the great garden-patrons, began to go skint in the eighteenth century, and those whose fortunes were forged from trade began to take their place.
The banker Henry Hoare spent 30 years and much of his fortune on Stourhead in Wiltshire, with its walks leading between a string of temples in the trees and around the grand lake he created by damming the River Stour. He established what is quite simply one of the finest landscaped gardens in the world, often referred to as a paradise.
The cultured visitor would recognise that Hoare had created a series of scenes from Virgil’s Aeneid. There was a grotto to represent Virgil’s underworld, and a Pantheon, which held statues of philosophers and heroes.
This is gardening with grand ambitions: Aenaes built Rome, Hoare built Stourhead.

Other great 18th century gardens inlcude those created by Charles Hamilton at Painswick, and Leasowes created by the poet William Shenstone near Halesowen in Staffordshire.

What these gardens had in common was that, rather than looking down on patterns as had been the case in Tudor and Jacobean times, now you walked through a series of scenes.
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