Last week’s post looked at the background to the building of Lyveden New Bield by Sir Thomas Tresham in the very last few years of Elizabeth I’s reign. We began a tour of the garden and ended having reached the terrace at the top of the orchard and looked backwards, down the hill over the Old Bield.
Today we’re going to continue the tour round the other part of the garden and ending up at Sir Thomas’s extraordinary garden lodge, before going on to look at the more recent history of Lyveden.
We all know that houses and gardens are the product of their creators, sometimes almost inextricably so. But we also know that houses get altered, rebuilt or even demolished from time to time while gardens are even more ephemeral and apart from the obvious seasonal changes of planting and growth, are often altered with every successive generation.
So today’s subject is extraordinary because in so many ways it doesn’t fit into that pattern. It was the product of one man’s imagination, passion and faith and it was abandoned when he died.
It helped that his family had little spare money and the estate was remote, so it has remained basically unchanged, except for the normal decay and change caused by time and the ploughing of some sections for agriculture. No-one has ripped up his planting, rearranged the layout or added new features. The relationship between house and garden is unaltered until very recently when attempts have been to recreate the very few things that have changed since his death over 400 years ago.
Lyveden in Northamptonshire is an almost incredible survival of a late Elizabethan garden, and its story is inseparable from the story of its creator Thomas Tresham.
Last week’s post looked at the evidence for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and ended with archaeologists excavating Babylon in the late 19th/early 20thc unable to find any real sign of them.
Today’s is going to continue the story and end by suggesting that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon probably ought to be renamed following a complete re-examination of the sources and finds by Stephanie Dalley, formerly of the Oriental Institute in Oxford, whose book The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced published in 2013 I finally read over the Christmas holidays and which inspired me to write about – and reassess -the fabled gardens.
History is always changing. The kind of history I did at school, kings and queens, great battles and the stories of great men [and occasionally women] has given way to a much more broadly based picture of the past. We now see things from more than one perspective and look at the stories of more than just a few rich and powerful people. But some things don’t change. Our fascination with certain events, places and ideas is never-ending and, for example, I suspect most of us are fascinated by great monuments and how and why they were built.
Who, for example, didn’t learn all about the Seven Wonders of the World at school? Although it might be hard to remember them all [answers at the bottom of the post!] I bet that there are at least a couple that everyone recalls because they were so fabulous and almost unbelievable. I’d guess we’d all think immediately of the Great Pyramid of Giza but I wouldn’t be surprised if not far behind came the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
But what do we actually know about them?
You’d think that being the Hanging Gardens of Babylon we’d at least know where they were, but unfortunately we don’t – indeed we can’t even be sure they actually existed at all. So read on to find out if there’s any the evidence or if the whole idea is just a romantic myth…
The quirks of the calendar mean that this is the last blog of 2020 and that the blog has now been running for 7 years. Like all 7 year olds it’s still growing, and at a pretty staggering rate. This year there have been about almost 100,000 hits, [as I’m about to publish at 8.46 this morning it’s 98,569, so maybe it will get there by midnight on New Year’s Eve] virtually double last year’s 55,000, with the average number recently being well over 300 a day. There have been about 56,000 visitors, over double last year’s 26,000.
Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is the 362nd post which in total contain 788,059 words, with this year’s posts averaging about 2500 words each.
As always, thank you for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list. Just go to the very bottom of any post and enter an email address and each new post will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in good time for breakfast.
And now read on to test your memory with the 6th annual quiz based on this year’s posts.
