Richmond Gardens, Queen Caroline & English Landscape Gardening

In 1718, the Duke of Ormonde's property was forfeited after his support of the unsuccessful Jacobean Rebellion. George, Prince of Wales, and his wife Princess Caroline, having been banished by George I from St. James's Palace after a quarrel , moved into Ormonde House and gave it back its former name of Richmond Lodge. A map, attributed to Charles Bridgeman and dedicated to the Prince and Princess of Wales, shows the landscape at Richmond Lodge at the time. When her husband was crowned George II in 1727, Richmond Lodge and its associated grounds were given outright to Queen Caroline.

The English Landscape style of gardening developed in England in the 1730s and spread across Europe into the wider world. In essence the style rejected geometry and regularity. Stephen Switzer (1682-1745) is generally accepted as being the first practitioner of this style, while Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716-1783) and Humphry Repton (1753-1818) are closely associated with its later use. The development of the English Landscape Garden involved many other designers, such as Charles Bridgeman (died 1738), who worked at Richmond, and William Kent (1684-1748) who worked at both Richmond and Kew Gardens. That great man of letters, Horace Walpole, said of Kent that he was "born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden".

Queen Caroline is acknowledged to be a patron of English Landscape Gardening, and, in her own words, her concern was to set about "helping Nature, not losing it in art". The move to Richmond Lodge offered her a landscape prime for development in her favoured style.

The area surrounding the Lodge consisted mostly of fields, with formal avenues installed by William III and Ormonde, together with Ormonde's Riverside Terrace and woodland walks. Wishing to move away from the rigid high formality of the era and embrace the developing informality of the more naturalistic English Garden Movement, Queen Caroline held a meeting of critics and designers at Richmond Gardens in 1719 to discuss her gardens. She subsequently employed two of its leading proponents, Charles Bridgeman and William Kent. The results of their collaboration at Richmond have been described as a "geometrical 'ferme ornee' "

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