Ignore the title and view this, if you will, as a composition of curving lines and shapes in harmonious colours: it need be nothing more. The image is in fact completely imaginary but I had clearly in my mind as I painted the idea of parkland sensu the park around an English country house, with its plantations of different trees and dates, artificial water features, park pales (boundary banks or walls) and evidence in the landscape of alterations and additions to the plan. Additionally, as is the case in so much of the English landscape, the planned landscape is overlaid on features from earlier land-uses, here represented by (prehistoric) ring-ditches as crop-marks (white circles/ovals) and remnants of pre-emparkment field patterns (top right).

So this image can be viewed as an abstract or like looking at a map or vertical air photograph of a country-house park and its surrounds. But where is the house? – you may well ask. It’s off to the left, just beyond the other half of the kitchen garden.