(tranquil music) ♪ (man) You simplify nature in order to make it suitable for human use.

(man) I think all good gardens are actually about personalities.

They're a type of designer whose personality is just on the boil so strongly that it can fill a landscape quite easily.

I would say that we have a very good ability to steal things from other countries and then still produce our own English interpretation of those things in a way that you can say is English and unique.

(man) There were major phases where we did do things differently, and that's particularly in the 18th century.

(woman) Many of our landscapes may well be sculpted, and nowadays, when they've grown in after 250, 300 years, we may not even recognize the hand that created them.

(man) I'm always amused that the French describe English landscape gardens as Anglo-Chinois, but I think probably because the French find it difficult to think that the English could have a cultural movement of their own.

♪ (birds chirping) (piano music) ♪ We're neither too hot nor too cold, which means we can grow a very, very wide range of plants.

There's usually about 75,000 different plants that are available, which is amazing to have that range of plants for which you can then base a garden design on.

(man) It's very easy to grow plants here.

It has a really interesting combination of growing conditions.

To have a garden in the UK, it's a dream, because you can do so much and plants can look so good, and I think that has been a part of it also.

(narrator) The Chelsea Flower Show is one of the key social events of the English spring and summer calendar, a symbol of this nation's love of all things gardening.

Here in the grounds of the Chelsea Royal Hospital where the event takes place every year, a display plots the history of how the show came to be founded by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1833.

But this is only part of the story of the English garden, which had its beginnings thousands of years earlier.

(soft music) ♪ (man) There was a highly developed Celtic civilization here before the people who made Stonehenge, and that was a Neolithic civilization.

So they made gardens, if you want to call them gardens.

They were enclosures in which they dug with sort of digging sticks and wooden plows, and then they planted.

And so it was a planted enclosure, but they probably grew grain in it rather than horticultural produce, because the difficulty for them was living through the winters.

(tranquil music) ♪ (narrator) The ancient world has always fascinated the English.

Roman occupation 2,000 years ago brought the first gardens to this island.

The Roman gardens were pleasure gardens rather than food gardens, and that's an enormous distinction.

It's a characteristic that you find very notably in Pompeii, and probably inspired by Egyptian gardens.

(narrator) The Roman gardens that we know the most about are those of the large villas and palaces similar to those discovered and now reconstructed in the ruins of Pompeii.

♪ (Tom) It's best represented in the frescoes, and so probably a courtyard garden and a place to sit out with a fountain and some sculpture.

A pleasure garden, a place to sit and enjoy the sun and the birds and the flowers.

That came with the Romans for sure.

(mellow music) (narrator) Near Chichester in West Sussex, one of the landing points the Romans selected for their invasion of Britain, archaeologists have unearthed the ruins of a large palace.

♪ Among the finds here are beautiful mosaic floors and dozens of skeletons of those buried here.

This is also the site of the country's only reconstructed Roman garden.

♪ The Fishbourne Roman Palace Gardens show a carefully symmetrical formal planting of low box hedges split by graveled walks.

The hedges are punctuated by small niches, which probably held ornaments like statues, urns, or garden seats.

There is also a small kitchen garden, which is planted with fruits and vegetables, many of which were introduced by the Romans to Britain.

This is a trend of adopting foreign plants that would last for centuries.

♪ (Tom) With the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and the withdrawal of the Romans from Britain, chaos ensued.

(narrator) We know very little about the gardens of Anglo-Saxon England, which is another way of saying that the warlike Anglo-Saxons, whose culture prevailed for several centuries after the Romans left, probably did not hold gardening to be important.

(flute music) ♪ It was not until the Middle Ages that gardens once more became important in British life.

Monasteries, such as the Cistertian Forde Abbey in Dorset had both kitchen gardens and herb gardens to provide food and medicine.

(Tom) Civilization, insofar as it did survive, became associated with the monasteries who carried forward the arts of learning and science and technology, generally.

And so gardening was part of that.

♪ (narrator) And monastery cloisters, such as this at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, provided an open green space surrounded by covered walks.

♪ (dramatic music) ♪ Castles were preoccupied with security and overlooked an often wild and unkempt landscape beyond high walls and a moat.

(Tom) The Normans brought the idea of making castles to England, they didn't exist before that time, and it was their means of maintaining control of the country.

(man) The problem with a castle garden is, of course, what comes first is the military architecture.

So you've got a slot in your garden where you can and a bit of free space.

(Tom) In making a castle garden, one of the problems was in time of war, when the castle had to be defended, the space between the outer wall and the keep, it was full of troops and soldiers and food and firewood and mud, and so the gardens that they made were probably temporary.

They probably trampled out when the castle was really in action, and so it was almost like a temporary space.

You know, small, rectangular enclosure.

♪ (narrator) Castles sometimes made room for small courtyard gardens.

Other common features of medieval castle gardens include high mounds or mounts, which provided a view over the castle walls.

♪ (Tom) As times became more settled and their control of England was established, they began to bring their families.

The women and children of the house also used the wall walk on the top of the battle mounts, which was built for defensive purposes but no longer needed.

And so they used it as a place for fresh air and exercise.

It was known in French as an aller and in English as an alley, and it's through that that the allées in a later generation of gardens took their name.

It was a place to walk, originally on top of a wall, and then when it was safe to go outside the castle and make a garden, to make a walk in what we would call a park.

(solemn music) ♪ When England became safe, they started taking land outside the castles and making the kinds of garden that were made everywhere else.

There was no need for protection any longer, and so instead of having an allée walk on top of the walls, they started putting walks in the grounds and, originally, square compartments with a cross of walk and statues on the grass plats, and later they developed into flower gardens.

During the 16th century, with the establishment of the Tudor monarchy and much more settled and prosperous times in England, they began looking, again, to Continental Europe, and they saw then the Renaissance garden, which had developed to its full extent in Italy.

The Tudor kings, they saw themselves as Renaissance princes, men who were cultured in music and the arts, painting and gardening and architecture rather than simply military leaders and commanders, which they had to be before that time.

♪ The important thing about Elizabethan gardens is they represent the first English reaction to the Italian Renaissance.

(harpsichord music) ♪ (narrator) Hampton Court, the palace of Henry VIII on the banks of the Thames outside London, became a showcase for this new Tudor style.

♪ (Tom) The geometry of a Renaissance villa became projected into the garden to make a rectangular enclosure often divided into compartments with a cross again.

And so that was the key feature that came in the early days of Renaissance gardens in England.

(narrator) The most recognized feature from this period is the knot garden.

Beds of interlacing patterns usually within a square frame designed to be seen from above and filled with herbs and favorite flowers.

Mounts, an artificial hill for viewing, were often situated at the corners of the garden to provide views both of the garden and the landscape beyond.

Fountains and automated water features animated the garden, reflecting an interest in hydraulics.

(soft music) In the vast grounds, deer parks were not only living larders providing meat for the household, but also a symbol of wealth and status.

♪ (Tom) Hunting was always the sport of kings in Europe, in India, in China.

And the hunting parks, which Henry VIII made, extended from his Whitehall Palace into what are now St. James's Park, Green Park, Hyde Park, I think Richmond Park, too.

They now form a network of green space in London, which is wonderful, but for him, they were just hunting parks for exercise.

And as well as enjoying the exercise, they also wanted, of course, to show off their prowess to the women folk, and so it was common to have a mount or a gloriette or a gazebo we would call it on the garden wall where the women could gather and take delicacies and watch the men galloping past chasing deer.

As well as being for hunting and perhaps more to the point, it was a supply of fresh meat throughout the year.

It was their equivalent of a deep freeze.

(harpsichord music) (narrator) Large and showy English country houses such as Burleigh House in Lincolnshire were known as prodigy houses and were built by courtiers and other wealthy families with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm.

All her hosts cultivated showpiece gardens.

(soft dramatic music) ♪ The prodigy houses were built during the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architectural ages, a period of about 50 years from 1570 to 1620.

♪ Built in 1598, when English architecture was moving from the medieval gothic to the Renaissance classical, Montacute House is one of the few prodigy houses to survive almost unchanged from the Elizabethan era.

♪ (mellow music) One of the most famous Elizabethan gardens is Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire.

Dating from the 12th century, it was remodeled in grand Elizabethan fashion by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who was presented the castle by Elizabeth, who regarded him as her favorite.

(John) Kenilworth is a great royal castle with, already by Elizabeth's time, it had a great heritage to it.

Her tours were an important part of the role of a monarch, and this is a way that they could actually get out and be seen by their people.

It would allow Elizabeth to be seen by her people and her courtiers.

I imagine, if you were on your way up in society, this could be very advantageous for you, but Elizabeth stayed here for 19 days.

It wasn't only the cost of Elizabeth, but it was the cost of the whole court that was staying and all of their servants.

(narrator) The queen visited here four times, and for three weeks on her last visit in 1575.

Then, this grand castle was surrounded by a giant lake and a moat.

The lake was drained after the castle was destroyed by Parliamentarians during the Civil War.

The garden the queen enjoyed has been painstakingly remodeled according to its original lines based on archaeological evidence and descriptions at the time by Robert Langham, a minor court official who was there.

(John) You've got a garden that's divided into four quarters.

Then there are knots, planted knots within those four quarters, and the knots are laid out in sort of similar structures that you might see in Elizabethan ceilings as well.

These are based on Italian pattern books of that time.

(narrator) In a letter to a friend, Langham wrote detailed notes describing the layout of the garden and its various features, including its obelisks in the center of each knot, the aviary, and the garden centerpiece, a giant water fountain made of Italian marble.

♪ (John) This was not designed to be a garden that was useful, and that was its absolute luxury that this was here for pleasure.

This sort of garden was called a privy garden, meaning it is a private garden.

If you think this whole garden was enclosed, so it was only a select few that could've come into the garden.

But even then, once you're in the garden, there is further sort of selection, because the four quarters are enclosed and gated, so you then had to be invited in to those separate quarters.

So you had to be one of the select few of the select few to see that.

Gardens were always important both for spies, for lovers, and also for courtiers.

This is a reconstruction of that garden from 1575, based on that very, very detailed letter and on archaeological excavation, and the archaeological excavation found the most expensive part of the garden that was described, and that is the fountain, a fountain of eight sides and made out of a white marble.

The letter then goes on to describe that in the middle of this pool was a column with two Atlases, one facing east, one facing west, holding a ball, which we've interpreted as a ball of which there were lively pipes distilling water into the pool below with a ragged staff on top.

The measurements that we've given, we've reconstructed that fountain that you can see today.

(narrator) Panels on the original base of the fountain were carved with scenes from the Roman poet Ovid's narrative poem, The Metamorphoses, which weave the lives and loves of mortals and describe their transformations often into animals and plants.

Another feature of the garden is the aviary.

The structure displayed the initials of Robert Dudley, and carvings were embellished in the framework to resemble precious stones.

Inside were rare birds from exotic places such as the Canaries.

♪ (John) There are roses.

In spring, there's the scent of stocks and wallflowers, and in summer and July, when Elizabeth would have been here, it's the scent of the pinks and the roses.

We know that pinks and carnations were particularly popular at that time.

(narrator) After the Civil War, the castle was pillaged and fell into ruin, its ghostly outline captured by various artists over the centuries, including Turner, who painted it in 1830.

(bright music) ♪ (gunfire) ♪ The first half of the 17th century was a period of political conflict and religious and scientific turmoil.

♪ And gardens reflected this.

Exotic plants and animals were much in vogue as foreign adventurers discovered new flora and fauna that had never been seen before in their homelands.

♪ (David) One of the biggest changes in the Elizabethan/Jacobean age was the introduction of bulbs.

Before that, you had an annual cycle for gardens, which is much like the agricultural cycle.

That is, you plow it all up in the winter and you sow in the spring, and then you harvest in the late summer, and that was fine for Elizabethan garden plants, but when you get bulbs, of course, you've got to plant them in the autumn.

So you can't plow over the winter.

So it's a completely different annual cycle, and so you get the flowering in the spring rather than the summer.

So what happened was they had to reinvent a new form of garden, a garden for bulbs, which was completely different from any form of garden before with a different cycle and a different rhythm to it.

(John) We've all heard about the tulip craze that was going on in Holland.

Well, that fashion also influenced planting here in England.

♪ (regal music) (narrator) The main development of gardens in the Stuart period is that of scale, as they were influenced by the vast formal gardens of France, such as those at Versailles, and later, in a more sober fashion, Holland.

♪ Gardens in England were mostly slavish reproductions of French magnificence.

They were designed to be symmetrical with long, axial walks and rides stretching into the woods and parks beyond, resulting in the advent of the avenue.

Great expanses of water were brought to life by dancing fountains.

Peach trees form the boundaries around the garden and elaborate free-flowing parterres replaced the Tudor knot gardens.

Topiary was used to create formal shapes out of evergreen shrubs in the ultimate expression of man's control over nature.

They were mostly geometric and rectangular in layout and divided into squares or quarters called compartments.

(David) It's more a matter of use of plants in Stuart times.

You've got the introduction of large-scale topiary.

So to make a parterre for William of Orange, you'd need several miles of box plant, you need hundreds and hundreds of yew trees, and you use them in ways that haven't been used before.

You clip them to shapes that they haven't been clipped to before.

So it wasn't new plants as much, but new ways of treating the plants.

(lively music) (narrator) At Hampton Court, Charles I had built this massive lake, one of the defining features of grand gardens in this period.

(man) The Catholic monarchy in the early 17th century are looking to those French gardens, and they'd like to have something a bit like it.

The early 17th century you see first, a good example of it is the long water at Hampton Court, which was created by Charles I.

He's looking at these French gardens, he thinks they're good, and in a fairly unreconstructed way, he'd like something a bit like it, so he makes the long water, this big, formal water feature in front of his house in what is otherwise a very irregular landscape, so it's quite a strange gesture, but so he does it.

(narrator) After his victory in the English Civil War, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell moved in to Hampton Court and had all the statues removed, giving the gardens a much plainer outlook.

♪ (soft music) It's still possible to see grand country houses with traces of gardens from the Stuart era.

Chastleton House in the Cotswolds was built of Cotswold stone between 1607 and 1612 for Walter Jones, who made his fortune from the law, although his family were originally wool merchants.

It's famous for an episode from the English Civil War in which a loyal wife duped Roundhead soldiers to save her husband, who was hiding in a secret cupboard.

Later owners also invented the game of croquet here.

The walls that enclose the garden are 17th century, and archaeological evidence suggests that the garden has been laid out the same way for the last 400 years.

♪ The gardens at Ham House in West London by the Thames offer another good example of this style.

Built in 1610, the house was gifted by Charles I in 1626 to his whipping boy, William Murray.

Murray had been educated with Charles, and they remained friends into adulthood.

A whipping boy was a boy educated alongside a prince or boy monarch who received corporal punishment for the prince's transgressions in his presence.

The formal layout and topiary favored by Stuart gardens are still in evidence in the private garden favored by Murray's daughter, the Duchess of Lauderdale, who created the gardens here.

The garden remains much as it did 400 years ago.

♪ (mellow music) As we have heard, London Royal Parks were originally royal hunting grounds, taking in Hampton Court, Richmond Park, and today's Hyde Park, much favored by Henry VIII in particular.

But during the Civil War, these royal hunting grounds became neglected.

Cromwell even contemplated selling them.

It was Charles II who began this transition from hunting ground to park.

Starting with St. James's Park, he commissioned a Baroque layout to change it from hunting area into originally what we would call a formal garden with avenues.

It was changed later, but that's where the conversion took place from hunting park to ornamental ground.

(narrator) Charles had taken refuge in France during the Civil War, which overthrew his father, and it was a French influence he brought with him when he returned to England during the Restoration.

He began by introducing the concept of avenues, lines of trees, a signature of French royal parks, and these can still be seen today here in Hyde Park, one of the old royal hunting parks that stretched across London.

Early in the 18th century, Charles Bridgeman, the son of a gardener, and an experienced horticulturalist became the royal gardener.

Bridgeman's work in the royal parks here can still be seen today, combining the grand symmetrical formality of French gardens with the first hint of the more naturalistic classic English landscape to come.

(James) Bridgeman is very interesting, 'cause he is the person who begins to take that plainness, that Englishness, that desire to sweep away detail and fuse it with the ideas of the French garden, the grand axes, the water bodies, and the formality, and that is what you see at Kensington Gardens.

It's like a French garden seen through the filter of Englishness, and the elements are really stripped down, so you just have grass, trees, and water, and that's pretty much it, and that goes for most of Richmond's gardens.

But you have the French scale, the epic scale.

There was a little stream running through it, the Ladbroke.

They turned it into the Serpentine Lakes.

It was a kind of ruggedy, hilly place.

They flattened out the plateau of about 20 acres in the middle of it.

They must have moved thousands and thousands of tons of soil to create what we see there now, and actually, the thing is totally intact, strangely enough.

So what distinguishes him from what comes before is that epic scale and ambition that goes with that.

What distinguishes him from what comes after is that his gardens are still very strongly geometric in the sense that we associate with a French garden.

When the money stops, so the change stops.

So at Kensington Palace, the palace ceased to be an operating royal palace in the sense that the garden was part of the courtly business of the building in the middle of the 18th century.

So that's shortly after Bridgeman was operating.

The gardens were made in about 1726.

And therefore, there was no reason to keep investing in the garden.

So very unusually, nobody messed up Bridgeman's garden that he created there, but the reason was simply that there was no vested interest, there was no point in spending money on it, so it became like a fossil left right in the middle of London.

Very weird.

(soft dramatic music) ♪ (narrator) Bridgeman's innovations would soon be eclipsed by a new, picturesque garden movement.

The greatest English architect of the Baroque era after Sir Christopher Wren was Sir John Vanbrugh, who became famous for designing Castle Howard in Yorkshire and then Blenheim Palace.

Vanbrugh was one of the first to embrace a new style, which became known as picturesque, and this is in evidence in the landscape of Castle Howard.

Over time, these changes throughout the 18th century would even be described as England's single greatest contribution to European culture.

♪ (Tom) The idea that took shape at the end of the 18th century was that a designed landscape could be organized on the principles of a landscape painting, hence the word "picturesque," like a picture, with a foreground, a middle ground, and the background.

The idea was that the foreground should be beautiful using beautiful as an aesthetic category, and therefore geometrical and a terrace.

And so terrace with urns and planting beds and steps, and then the steps went down to a landscape park, and that formed the middle ground, which was an intermediate stage in a transition to a background which should be sublime.

Sublime in the sense of wild, natural, dramatic.

♪ (narrator) Instigators of this garden design revolution were intellectuals and esthetes such as Alexander Pope, Lord Burlington at Chiswick, Lord Viscount Cobham at Stowe, and professional designers like William Kent, a colleague of John Vanbrugh.

Now, they were supported in the early 18th century by Alexander Pope and others, who argued that trees should be allowed to grow into natural shapes, and by the artist William Hogarth, who pointed out the beauty of a wavy line, and by a new attitude that nature was good.

(birds chirping) ♪ This new English garden was a revolt against the architectural garden, which relied on rectilinear patterns, sculpture, and the unnatural shaping of trees.

♪ In the English garden, a more natural, irregular formality was achieved in landscapes consisting of expanses of grass, clumps of trees, and irregularly shaped bodies of water.

♪ The revolutionary character of the English garden lay in the fact that man's work was regarded as most successful when it was indistinguishable from nature's.

A feature of the new landscape garden was a French invention known as a ha-ha, a sunken ditch that allowed easy separation of livestock from the pleasure grounds.

(David) The French called it an "ah-ah" rather than a "ha-ha."

It's a wall with a ditch so that if you're on the park side and you're a deer, it's too much to surmount, you can't get into the garden, but if you're on the garden side looking out into the park, you've got an uninterrupted view.

The first ha-has were just as wide as this courtyard, and then they got longer and longer and longer, and in the end, you find the English making ha-has several hundred yards long and then even miles long.

The very first ha-ha was French, but the way it evolved was English.

(narrator) An impetus to this new style came when in the 18th century, English aristocrats were among those who embarked on journeys to the continent.

The so-called Grand Tour, uncovering the wonders and enchantments of the ruins of the ancient worlds of Rome and Greece.

This was to have a massive influence on the course of arts in Georgian England and English garden design still apparent today.

(David) What it did was gave people knowledge of the classical world, or so they thought, and this made them more confident reinvoking the classical world back in England.

So things like painting, sculpture, these were all imported.

(soft music) (narrator) William Kent-- architect, painter, furniture designer, and soon-to-be garden designer-- was a key player in this movement.

Kent's inspiration came from Palladio's buildings in the Veneto, and the landscapes and ruins around Rome.

He lived in Italy from 1709 to 1719, and brought back many drawings of antique architecture and landscapes.

♪ His gardens were designed to complement the Palladian architecture of the houses he built and emulated characteristics of ancient classical gardens.

(David) It was more the legend of William Kent, really, that made the difference, because he had his admirers who pumped him up to be the great--the Calvin of the Reformation of Gardens, he was called.

He's been, perhaps, over-eulogized as in the 19th century, he was disregarded.

His reputation has gone wildly up and down.

He found a way to express the rural instincts of the 1730s.

He was basically an architect of garden buildings, and his garden buildings were often gothic or rustic, and he wanted the appropriate setting, so he wasn't afraid to plant ragged trees on top of his buildings, you know?

So it was completely different from classical structures.

Everything became the rustic look.

(John) William Kent said that he jumped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.

So he brought lawns right up to the house with grazing animals, ha-has, lakes, trees, and follies within the landscape.

(narrator) Kent created one of the first true English landscape gardens here at Chiswick House for his friend, the Earl of Burlington.

(mellow music) Kent met Burlington in Europe when he too was on his Grand Tour, and Burlington erected his Palladian villa here in 1716 when Kent was still in Italy.

The first gardens that he laid out between 1724 and 1733 had many formal elements of a garden à la française, including allées forming a patte d'oie and canals.

But they also featured a folly, a picturesque recreation of an Ionic temple set in a theater of trees and a river.

Between 1733 and 1736, Kent redesigned the garden, adding lawns sloping down to the edge of the river.

For the first time, the form of a garden was inspired not by architecture, but by an idealized version of nature.

Lord Burlington's garden at Chiswick was one of the first to include garden buildings and ancient statues, which were to symbolically evoke the mood and appearance of ancient Rome.

It was even said that some of the statues had come from Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli outside Rome.

English estates quickly filled up with similar classical features as the upper classes competed to affirm their wealth and cultural authority.

(Tom) People talk about the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

The glory of Greece was democracy and classical temples and originality.

The grandeur of Rome was projecting it on an enormous scale.

And then we had what's dismissively called the Dark Ages, when everything collapsed.

With the Renaissance, both in Italy and later in England, poets, artists, sculptors, they all wanted to look back to the myth of a golden age.

They were recreating the landscape of antiquity.

And they thought, furthermore, that that was a time of justice, honor, truth, beauty.

All the good qualities were associated with antiquity, and so they wanted to recreate the legal system, to reestablish the democracy, to--Renaissance means "rebirth."

They wanted to see the rebirth of classical civilization in the modern world.

(orchestral music) (narrator) The classic example of this transformation was at Stowe in Buckinghamshire.

The monumental scale of Stowe is announced by its grand approach.

From this colossal Corinthian arch built in 1765, you can view the equally grand Stowe House, where building started almost 100 years earlier.

It's now part of Stowe Public School.

It was here that the greatest of England's formal gardens whilst by stages turned into a landscaped park under the influence of Kent.

He was responsible for beginning the wholesale transformation of the old formal parterres into this new fashion.

Kent worked here throughout the 1730s, working for its owner, Viscount Cobham, who was a leading Whig politician.

♪ Charles Bridgeman, who had collaborated with Kent on several major gardens, provided the botanical expertise which allowed Kent to realize his architectural ambition.

But Bridgeman's more formal style here, as elsewhere, was already falling out of fashion.

♪ The temples and buildings echoed the owner's love of classical, in particular Greek, legends.

Their gods and virtuous heroes are reflected in the temples and other monuments, constructed in the newly created landscape.

Kent created these themed classic experiences with buildings based on what was called the paths of virtue, vice, and liberty.

The path of virtue was set in what Kent called the Elysian Fields, the paradise of classical mythology.

Here we discover the Temple of British Worthies, an installation containing niches housing the busts of 16 great Britons.

Eight men of ideas on the left, and seven men of action and one woman on the right.

♪ Later, in the middle of a nearby constructed lake, a memorial was erected to the great Captain Cook.

A plinth topped by a globe commemorates his voyages of discovery, which ended in his slaying in the South Seas.

And in the path of vice, Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect of Castle Howard, designed some more modest garden buildings, including the Rotondo built in 1721.

A gilded statue of the Medici Venus, the goddess of sex, stands beneath the dome.

And in the path of liberty, architect John Gibbs designed this gothic temple in 1741, and this Palladian bridge earlier in 1736.

The Temple of Friendship designed in the early 1740s by Gibbs was dedicated to male friendship.

It was damaged by fire, and it's been roofless since the 1840s.

It was also at Stowe that a new face in English gardens, Lancelot Capability Brown, was brought in for landscaping.

His first major commission included the introduction of winding serpentine waterways and planted groves, which furthered the fashion for naturalization.

He was involved in shaping the Elysian Fields, the small valley that contains the greatest concentration of Kent's garden monuments.

(James) Very often you'll find underneath a Kent landscape a Bridgeman landscape, and underneath the Capability Brown landscape, a Kent landscape and Bridgeman landscape.

So actually this comes back to what we were talking about earlier about the flow of money.

The flow of money was such that you could have a garden by Bridgeman, and 20 years later, you think, "Well, it's time for a change.

We need to update our ideas.

We'll do one by Kent."

And 20 years after that, you've still got so much money, you've got a garden by an absolute genius and these would have been fabulous gardens, but still this feels a bit out of date.

You get rid of it.

You get Capability Brown in and he eradicates that.

(narrator) Brown became head gardener here for 10 years on his way to establishing himself as one of England's most famous gardeners.

(woman) The 18th century landscape garden has become synonymous with just the landscape nowadays.

We often don't recognize the hand of people like Lancelot Brown in the landscape because it's become so natural.

And I think it has had a huge impact on the style that has gone after it in terms of creating what we artfully call "natural."

(David) We improved upon ideas and, through William Kent and others, created a new form of garden, which has been exported so that the English idea has started to spread across Europe and North America.

(narrator) The gardens at Stowe also contain the first garden building in the Chinese style, erected in 1738.

Considered an example of Confucian virtue, Chinese tea houses and garden buildings were very fashionable in the 1730s.

This one has survived for three centuries.

It was originally in the Elysian Fields, and this beautiful building has now been completely restored.

Stately homes and gardens across England feature similar structures, like this at Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset, and at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the architect John Chambers erected this giant pagoda still here today.

(serene music) ♪ As the 18th century progressed, England's interest in the old classical world of Europe would expand to encompass Asia and the New World beyond.

♪ (Richard) Symbolically, what it did and what a number of these structures did was, in effect, create the tour of the world at Kew, and it was about saying, well, okay, Kew is a royal garden.

The influence of Britain spread far and wide across the world, and almost the pagoda at the far southern extremity of the site was the length of extent of influence of England at the time.

So it sort of was symbolic in that way, saying, well, okay, we deal with China in trade and therefore it's the furthest away, that's as far as we go.

But there was a fashion at the time, and I think Chambers was probably responsible for some of it, of that chinoiserie, the use of Chinese motifs, Chinese furniture.

A lot of people copied this pagoda.

A lot of people said it wouldn't stay up, of course.

They said there's no way that that is structurally sound.

It was finished in 1761.

It's just been restored, actually, and the dragons have been put back on it, which were originally on it.

Perfectly sound building, and it's an absolute icon in garden architecture around the world.

(bright music) (narrator) The Age of Empire would see foreign plants and icons inhabit what became unique British landscapes.

♪ Next time, we look at how the landscape garden changed the face of gardens throughout England and the wider world beyond.

♪ (David) If you go to any public park in Australia, North America, India even, all parts of the globe, you find the picturesque tradition is being still used even today.

♪