Wollaton Hall Garden

An Elizabethan house (designed by Robert Smythson in 1580) with a terrace garden in what is now a large public park. The Elizabethan plan of a now-destroyed garden showed a symmetrical alignment of garden and house, influenced by Du Cerceau's Les plus excellents batiments de France (1576).
Pete Smith wrote an article on the sundial garden and house-plan mount: two gardens at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, for Garden History (Spring 2003). He superimposed Robert Smythson’s design for the garden onto a 1900 OS plan. His comment was that ‘serious doubts have always been expressed about whether this seemingly ideal design could ever have been fully realized on the hilly site’. His conclusion is that the design would have fitted and the site and that there is evidence that much of the plan was built.