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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AOTEAROA
The ‘big P’
down under
Sir Uvedale Price’s Picturesque as applied
by Bishop GA Selwyn to Auckland’s
Symonds Street Cemetery 1842-1908s.
Text by John Adam
IT IS PERHAPS TIMELY in 2016 to
describe how the ‘Picturesque’
in Colonial New Zealand landscape design was expressed by
the relatively unknown Uvedale
Price. Capability Brown (1716-1783)
is celebrated in Britain this year
while Stephen Deed has published,
last year, Unearthly landscapes:
New Zealand’s early cemeteries,
churchyards and urupā, that is a
dismissal of the idea and practice
of the Picturesque having been
applied ‘down under’ and specifically to public cemeteries.
Bishop George A. Selwyn (18091878), a ‘high’ Anglican Church
leader, was a practitioner of the
Picturesque through the 1840s and
1860s as articulated by Sir Uvedale
Price (1747-1829) in the form of a
gift (and a tool kit) of Price’s book
to Selwyn by the Scottish artist
Montague Stanley (1809-1844). This
gift was the 1842 and second edition (first 1794) of Sir Uvedale Price
on the picturesque: with an essay
on the origin of taste, and much
original matter/ by [Sir] Thomas
Dick Lauder. Stanley had drawn
the sixty odd woodcuts for this
book found by the writer in the
1980s on the open shelves in the
Kinder Library of St John’s College,
Auckland, with a hand written note
signed by Stanley to Selwyn in the
front of a well-used book.
Our contemporary understanding of the Picturesque has been
greatly assisted internationally
by the publication in 2012 by two
Price scholars, Charles Watkins
and Ben Cowell, of Uvedale Price
(1747-1820) Decoding the Picturesque. [Boydell Press, Woodbridge,
UK.]. Fifteen properties that
Uvedale Price advised on landscape development through the
1770-1828 are detailed, including
his famous farm called Foxley.
The Symonds Street Cemetery
Conservation Plan (1996) states
that the “Cemetery contains a
mixture of created [designed]
informal deciduous woodland,
similar to many parks developed
in the English Landscape School
manner, and the indigenous forest which existed prior to European settlement in New Zealand.”
The English Landscape School
was cultivated by the likes of
Capability Brown, Humphrey Repton, Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale
Price and John Loudon.
The vegetation density and
husbandry (management) recommended by these men could
be represented and husbanded
on a scale of a wild, rough, and
bushy scene to an open pasture
with scattered groves of pollarded
trees. When Selwyn selected the
Church of England cemetery site
in 1842 the landscape was regenerating from Māori occupation