The bird eye view is better.

Excuse me.. Getting bored waiting for my spring planting to begin.

Big formal building in countryside: the right setting for a formal garden layout.

Most people who try to plant formal arrangements of shrubs, trees and hedges don't have the right setting.

That is alot of work...you would need to hire a full time gardener to maintain that

Where is it?

you need to credit your pix... presuming these arent your own pix...

sorry.. all i see is a maintenance nightmare ...

i simply dont have 20 guys to maintain such ....

it has something to do with me spending most of my teen years.. into my 30's .... having to maintain mom's 100 feet of privet 3 times a year .... i will NEVER.. in my life.. plant another plant that requires such grooming...

ken

Oh my bad. This is a castle of some "lord" in Europe.

Majestically sited on approximately 120 fertile hectares, or nearly 300 acres, with another 300 available separately, in County Kildare, Ireland, Lyons Demesne stands as a striking ­example of classic Georgian ­architecture. The symmetry and proportions of the house are reflected in the composition of its formal ­gardens, establishing an ­ambience of timeless harmony and elegance.

Commissioned by Lord Cloncurry in 1785, the historic manor is in impeccable condition, having recently ­undergone a ­total refurbishment which was recognized as outstanding when it received the Europa Nostra and Institut International des Châteaux Historiques joint award for refurbishment. Contemporary conveniences are integrated into living areas of ­sophisticated design, allowing for a lifestyle of unique luxury.

The garden in the back has a different design...

Here is a link that might be useful: Link to more pics

This post was edited by ttonk on Fri, Apr 26, 13 at 17:25

It costs millions to keep up a place like this - and that's just the buildings.

That landscape doesn't look particularly high maintenance to me. A large perennial garden would be considerably more work. Most of the time spent there would be mowing, with pruning being something done in the spare time they aren't mowing.

This is a castle of some "lord" in Europe.... . Europe's a continent. This place is in Ireland, a country. It was owned by the boss of Ryanair, not a lord, but a very successful businessman.

These places aren't kept up by the owner personally. There is a staff and they are frequently open to the public. This place has 600 acres with it and there will be income from rents and farming. The way to think of them is as a business not purely as a home.

If you have some savings you could always put in a bid .....

Here is a link that might be useful: Lyons Demesne for sale

Many, if most of them are operated as tourist attractions etc. these days precisely because it is so costly to keep them.

Some years ago here in the US the time spent on each type of gardening activity was analyzed at a college that had lawns, borders etc. and by far the most hours were eaten up by turf maintenance. The keeping of large lawns originated a long time ago in Europe, as a way to fool visiting lords into thinking you had large herds of livestock around the place somewhere - this would have been far impressive than the ability to get peasants to cut expansive areas of grass.

I have little interest in such "landscapes". Way too formal and boring. They don't resemble anything in Nature, all that "green desert" (i.e. lawn) supports very few species and thus it is bereft of life, and it requires preposterous amounts of precious resources - water and fuel - to maintain this charade. A pompous and unimaginative design that reflects little more than the self-importance of some previous estate owner and one that has little connection to the natural world.

Can you tell I don't like it much? Haha

Oh, the mature trees look nice.

In the UK and Ireland turf maintenance on this scale is less difficult than in many places, including much of the rest of Europe. As long as you are not looking for bowling green standards and can tolerate the odd daisy you can keep up huge areas of lawn merely by regular mowing. Irrigation is generally unnecessary and I doubt the lawns in the pictures have ever been watered. If you look at the second picture you can see that the grass is not actually of particularly high quality and looks to have had pretty minimal maintenance. Also if you look beyond the garden you can see that the whole of the surrounding countryside is equally green. That's the natural colour of Ireland.

I work in a school and the groundspeople come once a fortnight and mow the grass. That's all they do - no watering, no feeding, no herbicide, no pesticide - and all they need to do. The school grounds remain green and attractive all year round. The smell of that first cut of the year of the school field is immensely evocative to anyone who grew up here. I don't have a lawn but I have grass paths on my allotment. I didn't plant them but merely kept mowing the strips of ground until only grass remained. Mowing emulates grazing by sheep and if sheep graze an area here you will end up with short, green turf i.e. a lawn. It is the natural appearance of downland and cliff tops. There is a very old joke about an American tourist going around a stately home. He asks how the lawns are maintained. The gardener says, " It's easy. You just mow it and roll it for 500 years."

The real waste of resources happens with the attempt to transfer a concept naturally suited to a damp, cool, maritime climate to unsuitable places.

Right on, Flora!
There's a sheep pasture down the road from me. It stays green all year with no watering. Short, but green.
I live in the Pacific NW with a climate almost like most of England's. I never water or fertilize my lawn and it stays green, except for a small patch with southwestern exposure on thin soil in almost all full sun. I'd have no lawn, but my wife insists I have a little. Moles are my biggest problem in the lawn.
Mike

This is a castle of some "lord" in Europe.... . Europe's a continent. This place is in Ireland, a country. It was owned by the boss of Ryanair, not a lord, but a very successful businessman.
My apologies. I didn't meant to sound ignorant, if I did.

Here too, aside from some browning out during the winter, lawns tend to stay green without watering. The biggest issue with institutional lawn maintenance is that they scalp grass, so it burns out and gets weedy. Mowed at the proper height, it only needs mowing.

The other thing to realize is that the mowing is jungle control. Let go, ungrazed pasture turns into a mess of brambles, poison ivy, sumac, and other early succession plants that is neither useful or attractive.

No problem, ttonk - lords are of no interest to me - but I always find myself bristling at the use of 'Europe' as if it were one homogeneous place and not 47 independent countries with vastly differing histories, climates, languages and cultures.

That garden looks a bit odd to me and I rather suspect the formal part is fairly recent. It looks more French than Irish and to my eye too it lacks interest.

Actually, after I posted my rant last night, I thought that you guys in the UK probably didn't need to water the turf grass much, having a mild and rainy climate. That's not true in most places people grow lawns though. It generally requires supplemental resources and sometimes a lot of them, to maintain the lawn.

I think turf grass is very useful in some applications, such as high traffic areas and play areas, or over septic systems, and it can look pretty as a frame to the garden or to provide reasonable sense of space to the landscape, but in a lot of properties like that castle there is too much of it. It's basically green and boring.

Lawns in home gardens are access routes and play areas. You can't walk or throw balls in planted borders. Formal layouts in front of big country houses with geometrically symmetric facades serve as visual transition areas between the misty softness of the surrounding rural landscape and the solidity and straightness of the architecture.

"That garden looks a bit odd to me and I rather suspect the formal part is fairly recent. It looks more French than Irish and to my eye too it lacks interest."

Yes, this isn't really a particularly impressive European (ahem) stately home. That sort of Georgian architecture is dime a dozen in Ireland, and in the UK I doubt it would even get Grade II listed unless it had been owned by some nationally-significant historic personage. I can imagine a British writer characterizing the stab at formal gardens as "ham-fisted". (I always remember a UK architectural critic deriding Dulles Airport "Ham-fisted orientalism" which I took personally because I grew up near it and it remains to this day one of my favorite pieces of modern era architecture) For one thing, there's too much going on in front. If you consider almost all of the important English stately homes, and most of the ones on the continent, they really, really carefully control what's put in front of them. Often they have nothing at all anywhere near the entrance, like Highclere Castle so familiar now to Americans who watch Downton Abbey. This one at least doesn't crowd the facade with moronic "foundation shrubs"; but the formal gardens in the front somehow look like an awkward afterthought to me. I'm less concerned with what's behind it, though it still seems a bit busy and aspirant. This is why elaborately landscaped McMansion facades in the US completely crack me up. It would be looked down upon by the European nobility/gentry whose domiciliary architecture inspires many of those places. This seems a particular problem in Connecticut for some reason, but perhaps just more noticeable because some of the mansions there are actually architecturally cohesive and not the ridiculous hodge-podge of styles seen in the rest of the country. The really old money, well traveled, well read families - what remains of them - do get it right. The Hunnewell Estate in Wellesley, MA has almost nothing in front of the relatively modest house.

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:343547}}

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Mon, Apr 29, 13 at 6:39

Effectiveness of approach taken will vary in each instance depending on the design of the house facade and the character of the house setting, as well as how big the space in front of the house is and so on. Formal gardens in front of formal country houses provide transitions between the formality of the houses and the informality of the rural landscape by making geometric patterns (like those of the facade) using earth materials like gravel, stone and plants. In tighter quarters in town the outline of the garden space can determine what is called for, in addition to the design of the house - if everything around the planting area is rectilinear curving lawn or bed shapes do not really belong.

Curving lawns and beds can serve as a counterpoint to straight lines. I think it works very well in most cases. More so than boring, high maintenance, formality.
Mike

For most people lawns are a complete waste...my neighbors bust their a** trying to maintain their lawns and don't even use them...maybe once or twice a year to host a party...even then they only use one part of their lawn and yet they have their entire yard as a lawn. And then they dump loads of money on watering it and fertilizing it and buyig weed killers. Its a complete waste of time and money.

"And then they dump loads of money on watering it and fertilizing it and buyig weed killers. Its a complete waste of time and money."

I don't fertilize my lawn precisely to keep it from growing fast. A deep green color is often more a byproduct of the iron supplement in the general purpose lawn fertilizer, so I sought out a low N, low P, medium K (for some reason), high iron supplement fertilizer. I did broadcast weed spraying for a couple years but now have so few broadleaved weeds I can just spot treat them. (although chickweed is hard to spot in its early stages and is trying to pull off a resurgence) I also cut it high. 95% of people scalp their lawns and then wonder why they turn brown the first time we go a week w/o rain in the summer. It also makes it easier for weeds to establish. But this is getting OT...

Btw bboy you are correct it depends on context; for grand houses in peri-urban settings on small lots some landscaping in the front has always been considered permissible. It's also been considered correct in certain circumstances where a thoroughly gardenesque spirit prevails, to landscape the front of a residence. Such as Great DIxter - which still maintains a comparative spirit of reserve on the front facade, not wanting to overpower the medieval architecture. No weeping Higan cherry planted 5' from a front window! But this place's ill-thought out and sparse pastiche of a french formal garden are totally out of character with what it's aspiring to be. You wouldn't find any stately home in England that had been in the same family for generations to have such nonsense in the front. An architecturally pleasing structure isn't somehow "improved" by plants. Of course, many structures are not. About a month ago I was thinking about an impromptu trip to Seattle to visit a relative, but decided against it. In thinking about what gardens I might visit, I remembered hearing about Lakewold's rhodie collection and googled it. I could not believe how hideous the front of this sorta stately home was. This is a rare case of me just saying, "Ok, go ahead with those 'foundation shrubs'. They can't possibly make things worse." It looks like a mortuary where the offices are on the second story and they didn't put windows on the ground floor because that's where the visiting rooms are. Besides doing something like that is essentially quasi contemporary anyhow - almost brutalism-lite - and I don't care how places like that are landscaped because it's not offending the historicity of the architecture. If you have a Williamsburg colonial, you can't throw 100 shrubs of 15 different varieties in front of it because that's . If you're making a California Midcentury Modern, go ahead, surround it with Strelitzeas, Erythrinas, Palms, and colorful Phormiums. If you can make it all look good, great.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 15:25

This was originally landscaped with relatively standard foundation shrubs.

{{gwi:343552}}

Beaux-Arts, McKim, Mead and White, c. 1900

Fifty years later, the powers that be decided that foundation plantings were not historically correct, and had been added later. So they ripped them out. Then when more information came in, it was revealed that those yews had been planted the year the building was completed. Since there are no foundation plantings now, visitors might jump to the conclusion that foundation plantings are 'wrong' for the history of the site. While in reality, history has been rewritten.

BTW, this is arguably the 'back' of the mansion, even though it is the side currently usually seen. It can be (and has) been debated whether the river side, or the drive side is the true front of many of the river estates.

This post was edited by mad_gallica on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 14:16

Thanks not-mad gallica (haha). Seriously, debating with actual evidence is fine.
It may be that some mansions have modest (or I should say, reserved) plantings of evergreens. What I'm lampooning are the large places in historical styles that have rows upon rows of horticultural bric-a-brac surrounding their front facades: trees, shrubs, low clipped shrubs, annual flower plantings, etc. None of which looks very good or well thought out. When a relative sought the supposedly most celebrated local landscaper for a huge PA colonial farmhouse-replica style on 10 acres, he proposed a ridiculous front planting of 2 rows of shrubs, one along the foundation and one about 20 feet in front, blobs of azaleas in various colors, beds of annuals, columnar hornbeams blocking the expensive stone facade...etc. etc. It was preposterous. I guess they assume most people will be snookered by more=better.

Again, if you have the highest level of plant design, you can be a little busy. Consider Chanticleer in Wayne, PA, which even some garden enthusiasts I know on the west coast admit is the most elegantly landscaped country garden in the United States. The front of the mansion does have shrubs, but is in a highly decorated landscaped courtyard and because of that the whole thing feels like an urban forecourt garden, even though it's in the country. The effect is very different than an obnoxiously over-landscaped McMansion. It contrasts the interior, "gardenesque" with the huge vista of a multiacre, "picturesque" field just beyond the courtyard.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 15:09

So I searched England stately homes and lots of pics popped up of houses indeed without any planing in front. Don't know if I like them..

This post was edited by ttonk on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 22:46

" I do feel though (plz let me say this just once..) that they look like prison facilities."

(edit: I caught ltonk before he or she made an edit. But that's a fine opinion to express if you're not used to the look, which, clearly most people in the US wouldn't be)

Well, obviously, the British aristocracy would disagree with you. I don't see any razor wire fences, guard towers, concrete block batiments, etc. Are you sure you've actually seen a prison in your life? FWIW the first picture is the back of Castle Howard, here's a better overview: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/north_yorkshire/3624511.stm Of course the ones that actually _were_ castles were in a sense a reverse prison at one time. But I don't think that's the reasoning behind the way they may or may not be planted. I think it's more a mindset about what landscaping, gardening, and architecture all actually are, and mean. There's an utterly fascinating essay I have somewhere...unfortunately I've downloaded 1000s of pdf files of interesting articles and papers over the years, and it's hard to find one I need at a moment's notice - about the history of the concept of "culture" vis-a-vis horticulture. How "culture[d]" and "horticulture" are inexorably intertwined. Basic point is gardens always started out with a utilitarian goal in mind, but their cultural effect was recognized early on. (hanging gardens of babylon, etc) I think to really pull out occam's razor and slash this one open if I may mix metaphors, to put greens in front of one's castle would have implied one had nowhere else to grow one's food. Or something like that.

Funny that you said thatthough, as, even though I'm a bit of an anglophile and certainly a fan of English gardening culture, I was reflecting recently that such stately homes, lovely as they are, reflect the "prison" that pre-20th century society was for those who were not in the gentry and aristocracy. You could only build such places without modern machinery and run them efficiently when labor was incredibly cheap and expendable. With the # of recent examples of these piles turning back into what they once were...i.e., fully private homes that don't even need the revenue of visitors, you have to worry whether the world hasn't turned back that way a wee bit. But let's not get into economic policy. That would make a real OT mess. The two I know about are Leonardslee, the Loder Estate - home of one of the most famous collections of rhododendrons in the world - and Torosay Castle, but I'm sure I've read of at least one other in the past few years.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Tue, Apr 30, 13 at 23:22

Hahaha you got me. Yes, I deleted it thinking the image of prison building I had was the one on a TV show called "prison break". No, I haven't seen a real prison in person..

All this discussions are beyond my level of knowledge, but I do read them all very carefully with interest, and try to understand so please keep going.

Here is a link that might be useful: Fox River prison

Yes, obviously, you were saying the massive, sometimes sprawling buildings looked generally like prison buildings. Can't see much to argue with there.

They put the turrets on the house at Highclere to make it look like the Parliament complex.

It's more than just being massive & sprawling. To me it also has something to do with the color/texture/oldness of the exterior stones. Some of them look cold and cruel to me instead of being grand and majestic. For example, the exterior of the Knole House (posted above) gave me the prisonlike feeling..

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:343547}}

This post was edited by ttonk on Wed, May 1, 13 at 17:35

Of course.

Well Knole is (or was, anyway!) the largest private home in England. It ain't your cosy cottage...

Let's contact the titled nobility of Europe and inform them that their architecture AWA landscape design simply doesn't meet with our approval.

Yes Sam. I see them losing a lot of sleep over this. "Maybe we should put in some foundation shrubs after all."

I think Knole is beautiful. Highclere was never one of my favorites (I knew about it before the Downton craze) but to say that it was made to look like the Houses of Parliament is to say that Hyde Park was designed to look like the Boston Public Library. It was the same architects at work! Of course it looks the same. Carnorvan might well have thought "This Sir Barry fellow is surely the most sought after architect in England, I must secure him to design my new house." If he'd wanted a replica of Parliament he could have had one. It doesn't have a Big Ben does it? There are probably a lot of other Renaissance Revival buildings in the UK that look like Parliament, just as there are a lot of state capitols and governor's mansions in the US that look vaguely like the ones in DC.

BTW I'd read about Highclere Castle years ago because it's the namesake for the very pretty "Highclere Hollies" which are hybrids between the tender Macaronesian Ilex perado and Ilex aquifolium, but curiously are sometimes tougher and more winter hardy than the typical strains of either parent.

This post was edited by davidrt28 on Thu, Jun 13, 13 at 10:23

"Let's contact the titled nobility of Europe and inform them that their architecture AWA landscape design simply doesn't meet with our approval."

hahahaha lol