This is Chawton House seventy years before Jane ever set foot in it—painted by Mellichamp around 1740, when formal gardens were all the rage.

Look at those terraces stepping down from the house. The clipped evergreens shaped into spirals. The white palisade fence. The topiary animals running along the hedge. This was Thomas Knight I's vision—geometric, ordered, showing the world he had both wealth and control over nature itself.

By the time Jane visited Edward here in the 1800s? All of this had vanished.

Between the 1760s and 1780s, these formal gardens were swept away entirely. Fashion had changed. The new style was "natural"—championed by Capability Brown and his followers. Out went the terraces, the topiary, the geometric layouts. In came sweeping lawns right up to the house, carefully placed clumps of trees, a ha-ha to keep grazing animals at bay, and parkland that looked artlessly natural but was actually meticulously designed.

Jane knew the later landscape. She walked in shrubberies and the Wilderness, not formal gardens. She looked out over parkland, not terraces.

The Chawton House we know today—with its restored English landscape parkland and informal south lawn—is actually much closer to the Chawton Jane experienced than to this formal 1740s world.

Fashion changes everything. Even the landscape. 💛