A Bestowal for Stowe

'Tennis courts out, eighteenth-century vista in', was a condition set by the anonymous donor whose £2 million gift last year made it possible for the National Trust to acquire what are arguably the most important eighteenth-century landscape gardens in Britain. At Stowe in Buckinghamshire, they were laid out by leading Whig magnate Richard Temple. Viscount Cobham, and pioneered the change from total formality into that judicious combination of seemingly natural planting with sweeping vistas and architectural setpieces which the world came to admire as 'the English garden'.

The Stowe landscape – which was partly an expression of Temple's anti-absolutist Whig politics – drew upon the skills of many eminent designers, including royal gardener Charles Bridgeman, Sir John Vanbrugh, William Kent and James Gibbs, not to mention Lancelot ('Capability') Brown, Stowe's head gardener from 1741 to 1751. Its chief glory is the subtle relationship of 'mini-landscapes', such as the so-called Grecian Valley and Elysian Fields, and longer vistas, with the thirty-two surviving setpieces – temples, columns, fountains, bridges, ruins, grottoes and the like.