Stowe, Buckingham, England

The manor at Stowe had belonged to the abbey of Osney at Oxford and after dissolution, to the bishopric of Oxford, before John Temple acquired it in the late 16th century. At that time, the park consisted of about 77 acres of farmland. In the 1620's, the Luffield estate to the north was added through marriage and at this time, the woods were laid out with ridings.

Sir Richard Temple laid the foundations of the current house and from 1668 started improvement works on the garden. He constructed a walled kitchen garden and in 1680 as the house nearer completion, he began the Parlour Garden. Sir Richard also planted an avenue of poplars south of the formal gardens and created fishponds at the bottom of the valley. To the west of the garden a 'wilderness' was laid out.

The next change occurred with Sir Richard's son, Viscount Cobham, from 1711 when he reshaped his father's parlour garden by opening out the 3 terraces to create a vast formal parterre with basin and fountain. In 1714 he called in Bridgeman to initiate major work on the landscape including the building of the Octagon pond. Five years later, Vanbrugh was employed to create the garden buildings including the Rotondo (1720) and the Lake Pavilions (1719).

Lord Cobham retired from politics in 1733 and it is said that he used his garden from then on as a political statement. In particular 'many of his temples…reflect in their iconography Cobham's dislike of Walpole and his love of freedom from corruption and tyranny'. He also wanted to use a more naturalistic style for the new area he was developing in the eastern part of the garden that came to be known as the Grecian Valley. He turned to the leading exponent of the new style: William Kent. The main area that Kent worked on was in a wooded valley on the eastern part of the garden that came to be known as the Elysian Fields. It is here that his most famous buildings are found: theTemple of Ancient Virtue (1737), the Temple of British Worthies (1734-5), the Shell Bridge (1738) and Grotto (about 1739).

Kent also supplied other buildings such as the Hermitage (about 1731), the Temple of Venus (1731) and the Pebble Alcove (about 1739) that were set around the two lakes.

Lord Cobham employed Capability Brown in 1741 and he developed the last major part of the garden: the rest of the eastern section the top part becoming the Grecian Valley. It was here that the last major garden buildings were erected including the Grecian Temple (1747) and the Gothic Temple (1748). With Cobham's death in 1749, its new owner, Earl Temple, softened the landscape by removing the straight edges of the lakes and canals and changing the avenues of trees into clumps. Whereas his uncle had eclectic tastes, mixing the Classical with the Anglo-Saxon and the Chinese, Temple began to 'classicise' the garden buildings changing the Grecian Temple to the Temple of Concord and Victory.

Subsequent owners such as the Marquess of Buckingham enlarged the estate and built grand avenues to the estate from the gatehouses at the turn of the nineteenth century. However mounting debts meant that the estate largely declined throughout the 19th and the 20th centuries, although for a brief period in the 1860s, the buildings were repaired.

It finally passed out of the Temple family in 1921 and has since been a school, with the grounds now owned by the National Trust.

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.   

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

The Temple family bought Stowe in the late 16th century. In 1677 the third baronet, Sir Richard Temple, began building a mansion on a new site. This building is at the core of the current mansion. Completed in the early 1680s, it had a formal terraced garden with straight walks to the south and a walled kitchen garden close by.

The fourth baronet became Lord Cobham in 1714. He rebuilt the house in lavish style and extended and developed the garden in collaboration with Sir John Vanbrugh and Charles Bridgeman (d 1738). Bridgeman created a semi-formal scheme between 1713 and 1734, of which little survives except the boundary walks. By 1724 it covered 14 hectares and contained more than ten buildings with an early ha-ha. By 1732 Cobham had extended the garden south and west, adding about 30 hectares and employing William Kent (1685-1748) in the early 1730s to design various buildings and the Elysian Fields, and then James Gibbs for the Hawkwell Field. From 1741 Cobham employed Lancelot Brown (1716-1783) as head gardener and clerk of works. Cobham died in 1749, leaving over thirty-nine buildings in about 100 hectares of garden, and Brown left in 1750 to set up his landscape practice. Cobham's successor, Richard Grenville, Earl Temple, reinforced the garden's naturalism and purified the Classical style of the buildings. He also rebuilt both main fronts of the house before his death in 1779.

Relatively little was done to the garden during the Marquess of Buckingham's time (1753-1813), but his son, the first Duke, was a plantsman and created the Japanese Garden in the 1820s. The garden then fell into a long, slow decline.

In 1921 the estate was sold and became a public school. Some restoration work was undertaken during their tenure of the garden, before the National Trust acquired most of the garden and much of the park in 1989 and embarked on a long-term comprehensive restoration scheme.