William Mason's "An Essay on the arrangement of Flowers in Pleasure-Grounds"

• Autores: Stephen Bending
• Localización: Studies in the history of gardens and designed landscape, ISSN 1460-1176, Vol. 9, Nº 4, 1989, págs. 217-220
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The library at Stanton Harcourt Manor in Oxfordshire possesses two bound volumes of autograph letters each entitled "Mr. Mason". These volumes contain the letters sent to George Simon, 2nd Earl Harcourt (1736-1809) by William Mason (1724-1797), the poet, amateur gardener and designer of the flower garden at Nuneham Courtenay, the home of the Harcourt family. A large number of these letters were to appear in The Harcourt Papers, published privately between 1880 and 1905. Inserted with the letters of the first volume, however, and not mentioned in The Harcourt Papers, are ten folio sheets of paper sewn so as to make twenty quarto pages, sixteen of which contain a manuscript work entitled "An Essay on the arrangement of Flowers in Pleasure-Grounds. By Mr. Mason". While the essay is not in Mason's hand, the title page bears a bookplate reading, "George Simon, Earl of Harcourt", which, in conjunction with Mason's comments on the arrangement of flowers in his poem The English Garden (1772-1783)1, I take to be sufficient ground for attributing the piece to the poet. As a close friend of Mason's, and as a co-designer of the flower garden at Nuneham, the 2nd Earl of Harcourt would almost certainly have known the provenance of the essay. It seems unlikely, moreover, that a work which was clearly in the hands of the Earl at some point - the bookplate makes this certain - would be mistakenly placed amongst his carefully collected letters from the poet.