Focal Points at Rousham House

For our approach to the Garden Designers Roundtable  blogfest on Focal Points, we decided to see how they have been used as a design strategy in one particular garden.

And so it was that a week ago we visited Rousham House in Oxfordshire, UK. A very particular garden!

Here, on an awkwardly shaped escarpment above the River Cherwell, 18th century landscape star William Kent created a landscape rich with classical allusion and changed the face of garden design.

Famous for 'leaping the fence'  and making nature his garden, Kent leads you bang off into the wider landscape.

A colossal statue of a lion eating a horse is framed by the view Kent wants you to see. Even the guys mowing the grass are showing you the direction. But which is the focal point? They both are! One as the leader and the other as the object.

Once there, the serene River Cherwell below you, unaltered by Kent, becomes your focus.

But Kent also takes your eye to the skyline with a sham ruin 'eye-catcher', and even the foreground building is very much a cottage ornee.

A modest gazebo to one side attracts your attention to a downward sylvan path. Intrigued, you pass from open light to enclosed shade. He is setting the scene.

Then from shade to light, drawn on here by the urns.

Kent does offer you other tempting choices, such as the Long Walk ending in the statue of Apollo.

But they are not always easy to access and so you find yourself in Kent's centrepiece,  the Vale of Venus.

Here there are different but carefully balanced objects of focus. A statue of the goddess, flanked by two swans surmounts a sepulchral niche from which water trickles to descend underground into an octagonal pond below.

There are also supplementary statues as objects of focus.

From these heavenly delights you are led away again by a secretive looking path, by light and shade, but also this time by a rill and via another, smaller  octagonal pool you arrive at where the rill begins beside another classical structure.

From here you can look and easily walk down to a gothicised bridge which  carries the road outside the property.

As you walk back along the river, and therefore at a lower level, you get different or more satisfying views of the focal points you have already passed.

You  realize that the Vale of Venus has another set of niches, which you did not at first perceive.

And that Kent is as much intrigued by the river and the water meadow beyond as by his frolicking gods and goddesses.

Once outside in the country you perceive

that Kent has perfectly integrated house, garden and countryside and made each the focus of the other!

The lessons that we took away?

How focal points can be used to make sense of awkward spaces and shapes.

The importance of setting and building  the scene for focal points using light and shade and openess and enclosure to reveal them.

The idea that focal points can both lead and be the object of the journey.

Thinking outside the box, (or the garden!) for them.

The perfection of a simple, largely green palette as their setting.

And finally that there was and is another god at Rousham - William Kent, the God of Focal Points!

R