Garden. The sexual symbolism of the gardens.

National Trust urged to abandon garden 'prudery' | UK news | The Guardian:
The National Trust has been challenged to come clean about the passionate truth hidden beneath the smooth green curves of some of its most famous landscaped gardens.
"These gardens are all about sex, but their history is being covered up by National Trust prudery," said the architectural historian Dan Cruikshank. "This makes it impossible to understand their true significance and historical importance."

The sexual symbolism of the gardens - artificial hollows and mounds, temples and columns - would have been clear to an educated 18th-century audience steeped in classical culture, he said. The modern visitor needed a little extra help but none was offered by the guide books.

The most notorious garden, laid out as a naked woman beside a swan shaped lake to recall the legend of Leda, is primly described in the National Trust visitors' handbook as "a perfectly preserved rococo landscape garden".

Richard Wheeler, the trust's senior land agent for the region, said: "Our guide book is being rewritten. I'm sure it will be possible to incorporate a little more on the history of the garden."

Mr Cruikshank believes the censorship of the gardens reflects the blind eye turned to the sexual history of the 18th century. In a forthcoming programme in BBC2's One Foot in the Past series he stresses that tracts of Georgian London were built on the profits of the largest sex industry Britain has ever known. One in eight of adult females was a prostitute.

He suggested that the erotic gardens came not just from a time of unparalleled sexual frankness, but also from the interest in the classical culture of Greece and Rome, seen as an idyll of sexual licence and freedom as well as of great art and architecture.

The National Trust gardens at Stourhead in Wiltshire and Stowe in Buckinghamshire have temples to pagan gods, but the most blatant display was West Wycombe, laid out in the shape of a naked woman, centred on a Mound of Venus. It was created by Sir Francis Dashwood, politician, art lover, and founder of the Hell Fire Club and the Society of Dilettanti, devoted to pleasures of the flesh.

A regular guest, John Wilkes, an MP and mayor of London, fell out with the Hell Fire Club when he smuggled a baboon dressed as the devil into what was supposed to be a harmless Satanic ritual. "There is one remarkable temple in the gardens at West Wycombe, dedicated to the Egyptian hieroglyphic for **** [sic]. To this object his lordship's devotion is undoubtedly sincere, though I believe now not fervent," he wrote.

The entrance to the grotto within the mound, known as Venus's parlour, was described as The Gate of Life. Many of the most explicit aspects of the garden were swept away by the next generation of Dashwoods, who called in Capability Brown to restore order.

The temple with the statue of Venus, which tops the mound, was recently restored by the architect Quinlan Terry, commissioned by the latest Sir Francis Dashwood, who died three weeks ago and whose father gave the house and gardens to the National Trust.

In an article to be published in the New Arcadian journal, Mr Wheeler suggests that West Wycombe was planned as a parody of the nearby and far more famous Stowe, which was laid out as gardens of virtuous and vicious love: virtue was a chaste maiden pointing to a steep, stony, straight path; vice, though more picturesque, was ultimately deeply depressing.

Mr Wheeler said it would destroy the charm and mystery of the gardens to spell out their imagery in signs or guide books. "We are hiding nothing. These pleasures are here for people to stumble upon for themselves."
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