Throughout the trip we visited many landscapes. It was very impressing to see Stourhead and then visit Kew Gardens the next day. It was a great way to compare both landscapes and see what makes them unique and what qualities they have that makes them somehow similar. Since I’m interested in pursuing landscape architecture, looking at Stourhead was fascinating. The use of sunken paths is allowing the landscape to continue, which allows the visitors the view of the whole surrounding panorama. Then the monuments are starting to be used as a frame for one another and as a “sequence” of the landscape. I feel like the use of several lakeside paths, the unarranged placed of monuments/temples, and the incorporation of grottoes starts to confuse the garden’s chronological order, which I thought was very interesting.
On the other hand, Kew Gardens is another landscape that was just a wow factor from all the places we have visited. As well as Stourhead Kew Gardens is a man-made landscape. It does not follows a chronological order for the conservatories and all of its features, which I also found really amazing. The different types of plants makes you feel like you’re going through a series of different environments all in a single place. For such a huge garden, I found that Kew Gardens didn’t have that many follys as I thought it would have, but instead it creates a different mood to see how more vegetation and conservatories serves as the spotlight of the landscape. Overall both landscapes were spectacular and beautiful!
Peacock in Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens
Palm house
Last view of Stourhead as I’m leaving
Stourhead
View out to the landscape from the grotto
I would agree that both Stourhead and Kew Gardens are beautiful landscapes! I think it is interesting the way the two landscapes interact differently with the architecture that is present on each landscape. I had not considered the comparison of Kew Gardens being more about the many types of plants until reading your post and find it very fascinating. I think one reason for this may be that Kew Gardens was developed for the purpose of studying plants. Therefore, the architecture on the site was designed with this in mind. On the other hand, Stourhead was created for purely aesthetic reasons. Because of this, the architecture at Stourhead was placed where it needed to be in order to tell the story. The relationship between landscape and architecture at Stourhead is meant to be viewed from a distance; whereas at Kew Gardens the landscape is meant to continue inside the architecture.
I agree with your comparison of Kew Gardens and Stourhead. While designing a landscape most landscape architects have a story or certain aspect they want a person inhabiting the space to experience. Most of the time unless people aren’t told about the certain story they often miss it but can end up experiencing something complete different that you as a designer never realized. In the case of Stourhead if someone who maybe stumble upon the garden and entered might not realized the story it tells but they might realize that maybe the certain follies or planting’s realitied in a certain way. Kew is different from Stourhead in that way because there are set paths for people to follow but these paths don’t necessarily tell a story more than just getting you through the garden the fastest way. These path even though they were paved and made you want to walk on them they aren’t always the paths people should take. While walking through the gardens we took many “Desire lines” or just walked of the path to look at certain things. I like doing this because usually when you get off the path you see something you never would have seenin the same area. Like with the lily pond if we would have stayed on the path we would have still had an amazing view of the pond but we probably would have never seen the peacock. Since you are think about pursuing landscape architecture, keep this in mind to design with a purpose but leave gaps for people to come up with their own experiences.