This work is a history of Moor Park, a listed Grade I Palladian house surrounded by a large park in Hertfordshire, England. The estate originally had a palace nearby and was built for the abbots of St. Albans. Henry VIII gave it to Cardinal Wolsey, and the King was entertained there. Katherine of Aragon was banished there when she was replaced by Anne Boleyn.

In 1670 it became the property the Duke of Monmouth who began to build a house in the current position. The Duke was the illegitimate son of Charles II. He would later lead a rebellion against his uncle, King James II. The estate’s gardens were made famous by Sir William Temple in the seventeenth century, who described them in his ‘Upon the Gardens of Epicurus’, one of the key early modern works on gardening. He called Moor Park “the sweetest Place […] I have ever seen in my Life, either before or since, at Home or Abroad”. He even renamed his own estate Moor Park.

In the nineteenth century, the park became famous for its fruit and to this day retains its orangery. Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park’ refer to the “moor park” apricot as a sign of wealth. Moor Park is also credited with cultivating the commercial strawberry, a hybrid between the European variety and a Chilean species.

The owner of Moor Park at the time of this book’s publication was Robert Grosvenor, Baron Ebury who is pictured in this book. All eight photographs in this work are by Henri Victor Leménager (1822-1912). Born in Paris, he had a photographic studio nearby in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and later emigrated to the United States. Helmut Gernsheim (1984) ‘Incunabula of British Photographic Literature: A Bibliography of British Photographic Literature, 1839-75, and British Books Illustrated with Original Photographs’, 528; M. L. Gothein (1979) ‘A History of Garden Art’, I, p. 457; S. Jeffrey (Winter 2014) ‘The Formal Gardens at Moor Park in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,’ in ‘Garden History’, vol. 42, no. 2, pp. 157-177.