I first visited Stourhead on a beautiful May day, when a blanket of snow covered blossoms on Rhododendron ponticum planted there since the late 18th-century. I went to see this great garden, & it was an amazing sight. I immediately understood why it is one of the great landscape gardens in the world. The house was not why I came, but it captivated me as well. The Stourhead garden was created in the valley behind the 1725 Palladian mansion house by a wealthy English banker Henry Hoare II (1705-1785) who had been off buying works of art in Italy at the time he inherited the Stourhead estate. A group of the smallest works of art in Stourhead is this collection of continental miniatures from the late 1500s to the early 1600s.
