Canal (garden history)

In the history of gardening and landscaping, a canal is a relatively large piece of water that has a very regular shape, usually long, thin and rectangular.

It might be wholly artificial, created by diverting and damming a stream, or based around a natural water feature which is landscaped.

[9] A "canal-like feature" was created for Baptist Hicks, 1st Viscount Campden at Chipping Campden before 1629, but the English history of the garden canal really begins with the English Restoration of 1660, when Charles II and his loyal courtiers returned from an exile mostly spent in the Netherlands, or in France.

[12] Of these, the very long and thin canal (775-metre by 38-metre, or 850 by 42-yards) in St James's was later expanded and remodelled into the current lake, with some filled in to allow for an expansion of Horse Guard's Parade.

The Hampton Court one remains intact, with a narrow semi-circle added at the palace end by William III in 1699.

[14] The Dutch engravers Jan Kip's and Leonard Knijff's aerial perspective views in various prints and books culminating in Britannia Illustrata, or Views of Several of the Queens Palaces also of the Principal Seats of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain, published in London in 1709 and later in an expanded French edition, shows many leading houses and their gardens at a point near the peak of the trend, which really "took hold" in the 1690s.

[17] The Serpentine in Hyde Park in London, a royal project of the 1730s, was one of the earliest artificial lakes designed to appear natural, with an irregular curving shape.

[18] A number of more regular serpentine canals were dug "from the late 1720s", following a fashion established for garden paths and walks some years before.

[21] Many were converted to more natural-seeming shapes; for example the canal at Culford Park in Suffolk was described as "new" in 1698, but in 1795 was filled in to create a larger lake, crossing it at right angles.

They tended to be placed as the centre of a thickly-planted flower garden, rather than being flanked by regular avenues of trees, as the larger original ones often were.

[24] The classic placement of a canal was at right-angles to the centre of the garden front (normally the rear), allowing uninterrupted views to and from the house.

At Longleat, with a sloping site, the "first big commission" of London and Wise, the effect of a canal was achieved by a series of connected pieces of water of different sizes and shapes running parallel to the main garden facade (in fact at the side) quite near the house.

[27] At Studley Royal in Yorkshire, where John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer during the South Sea Bubble, retreated in disgrace (after a period in the Tower),[28] the extensive water gardens do not include a canal on a strict definition, as the small River Skell was used as it passed through the grounds, including "canalizing" it in two straightened sections.

In 1711 Jonathan Swift still thinks the sport might be unfamiliar to his "Stella": "Delicate walking weather; and the Canal and Rosamund's Pond full of the rabble and with skates, if you know what that is.

These came to include 14 gondolas, some built on site and others presented (with gondoliers) by the Republic of Venice, small rowing boats, and reduced-sized warships, both oar-powered galleys and sailing ships.