Landscape gardens in essence

Apollo, Feb, 2005 by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

None of Piper's proposals were, in fact, executed, and Drottningholm was laid out to the king's own specification. Piper was instead directed to recast the gardens at Haga, which he did without royal interference. The resultant landscape was the most 'uncompromising English concept aimed at integrating architecture and park': the old garden's parterres were swept away and replaced with oval lawns framed by serpentine walks, the margins of the artificial canal were replanted and new walks and drives were introduced. The project was an instant success--indeed, so much so that it created an 'exaggerated belief in the unlimited possibilities of the new garden style prevailing at that time': no site was too small or too insignificant to be transformed into an English park. Piper soon found himself designing English parks for a handful of the king's closest companions, at Tyreso (1781-86), Bellevue (1784, 1789) and Tivoli (1784-85); he also laid out a ferme ornee at Godegard in Ostergotland.

Piper's career began to wither in the late 1780s as he became increasingly marginalised by the king, who may have tired of the architect's hubris. This setback and others--including Gustav's assassination in 1792--galvanised him to apply for leave to travel to England, where he familiarised himself with the latest gardening fashions. Once again the Swede revisited his hobby-horse, the English landscape garden, and prepared a design for a country house and park, which he submitted to the Royal Society of Arts. This, too, was exhibited; the proposal was a reinterpretation of his earlier submission.

In 1794 Piper returned to Stockholm, where he was elected deputy president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. Two years later he developed a scheme for the Royal Garden in Stockholm that was partly executed. From 1800, Piper dedicated himself to a few new building projects in Vastmanland (c. 1803) and Halland (c. 1810-12), and a public 'place of pleasure and promenade' in Karlskrona (c. 1813). At the close of his life he revived the General Plan initiated in London in 1780, a work that he doubtless intended to publish as a lasting memorial to his ideals. This was not to be--until this publication in facsimile, with an accompanying explanatory book.

The first volume of the newly published Description, titled 'Text and Commentary', contains four essays--all in both Swedish and English. The introductory essay, by the eminent British architectural historian John Harris, discusses Piper's place in the English topographical tradition, and charts the individuals, publications and landscapes that influenced him when he toured England between 1779 and 1780, and again in 1793. Harris--the biographer of Sir William Chambers--argues that Chambers was 'almost certainly instrumental' in promoting Piper's garden studies and travels. He also proposes that Piper's 'idiosyncratic and compelling mode of draughtsmanship' sets him apart in the historiography of English garden art, and that his exquisite views of Stowe, Painshill (Fig. 1) and Stourhead constitute a unique record of these and other 'natural arboreal landscapes' made or remodelled in the second half of the eighteenth century.