Wedding Photographer Painshill Park — Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden, the Crystal Grotto and the Cedar of Lebanon
Painshill Park near Cobham in Surrey is one of England’s finest and most completely restored eighteenth-century landscape gardens — a 158-acre designed landscape created from 1738 by Charles Hamilton, a younger son of the Earl of Abercorn, whose combination of the artificial lake, the Gothic Temple, the Ruined Abbey, the Turkish Tent, the Hermitage, the Crystal Grotto and the extraordinary collection of specimen North American trees transformed a heathland hillside above the River Mole into one of the most imaginatively varied and most picturesque eighteenth-century landscape gardens in England. For Painshill Park wedding photography, the combination of the lakeside follies, the Crystal Grotto’s sparkling interior, the Cedar of Lebanon grove and the Surrey heathland panorama provide a landscape picture sequence of extraordinary variety within a single designed landscape.
The Crystal Grotto, the Gothic Temple and the Ruined Abbey
The Crystal Grotto — the underground grotto chamber at the lake’s edge, whose walls and ceiling are encrusted with minerals (calcite, quartz, gypsum and selenite) collected by Hamilton from Continental mineral dealers and set to catch the light from the grotto’s single water-level window — provides one of the most unusual and most spectacular interior portrait settings of any landscape garden in England: the chamber’s mineral encrustation creates a photographic environment of sparkling crystalline texture quite unlike any garden building. The Gothic Temple above the lake — the triangular-plan eighteenth-century flint-faced Gothic building on the high ground — provides lakeside elevated portrait settings looking north across the lake. The Ruined Abbey — the artificially created medieval-style ruin of flint-faced Gothic arches in the woodland — provides a romantic ruin portrait setting of Gothic landscape garden character.
The Cedar of Lebanon Grove, the Serpentine Lake and the Surrey Heathland
Painshill’s Cedar of Lebanon grove — the collection of mature specimen Lebanese Cedars planted by Hamilton in the 1740s, now among the largest and most anciently established in England outside of institutional botanical gardens — provides a portrait setting of cedar canopy and ancient tree shadow available nowhere else in Surrey’s designed landscape. The serpentine lake — the 14-acre artificial lake formed by Hamilton with a dam at the Mole’s crossing, with the follies reflected in its surface and the rhododendrons of the pleasure grounds visible on the far bank — provides lakeside reflective portrait settings at multiple viewpoints around its perimeter. The Surrey heathland beyond the park boundary to the north and east — the remnant Cobham Heath, accessible for golden-hour sessions — provides an open heathland portrait setting of the Surrey lowland heath character.