"On the Pleasure Train to Blenheim Palace": A Review on the Pleasure Gardens at Blenheim Palace

Located 30 minutes away (via bus) from Oxford in Woodstock sits Blenheim Palace, a monumental country house and a certified World Heritage site owned by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. Blenheim Palace is known and advertised to be the birthplace of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Designed in the English Baroque style by Sir John Vanbraugh in the 1720s, Blenheim Palace stands today as a historical monument of past grandeur with its extensive garden grounds as an evident aesthetic strength. For the purpose of optimizing time and content, I purchased the £8 concession ticket that allowed access to all the public gardens and the railway.

The Blenheim Park Railway and the miniature locomotive, tenderly named Sir Winston Churchill, seemed like a peculiar, inorganic addition to the older, historic palace grounds. Established in 1975 as a tourist attraction, the jarring modern quality of the train instantaneously draws a visitor away from the preserved Baroque atmosphere of the palace and its grounds. If not distracted by the novelty of riding a miniature train, a visitor might be forced into the realization that this monument to English architecture and horticulturist splendor has been transformed into a Disney-esque tourist attraction. However, the 10-minute train ride does provide a panoramic view of the grounds, which is essential for a visit to Blenheim.

This strained, yet whimsical juxtaposition of old and new continued to pervade the visit to the Pleasure Gardens. The first thought when entering the Pleasure Gardens was a speculation on how the word "gardens" was defined by the modern architects and horticulturists who designed the blueprints for the Pleasure Gardens. As a recent addition to the Blenheim grounds, the Pleasure Gardens seem to have been designed as an amusement park of tourist attractions, a corner of temporary diversion and profitability for those who find trees and lakes rather "boring." In fact, an older woman approached me, sensing that I was a person with reasonable sensibility or observed that I owned a map of the grounds and asked if I knew where the "actual" gardens were. We both concluded that there were no "gardens" at the Pleasure Gardens.

The Pleasure Gardens is primarily composed of the Butterfly House and the Marlborough Maze. The Butterfly House is a temperature-controlled greenhouse containing butterflies and plants native to their environment. As an aesthetic piece, the Butterfly House is a deceptively plain and homely room containing a number of exotic plants with no butterflies in sight. However, the beauty of the Butterfly House only exists through the same lens and attention to detail as those who admire Pointillism. In Pointillism, the realization of its innovation lies within the moment of epiphany when the viewer realizes that the detailed painting is actually composed of irrelevant tiny dots that create lines and color when placed close together. At the Butterfly House, the art is in the symbiotic unity of plant and butterfly in a form that is so undetectably natural. If a viewer doesn't actively search for a butterfly, its detail in the greater art scheme goes unnoticed.


The Marlborough Maze applies the same concept of Pointillism to its beauty, but observed through the reverse effect. The beauty of this piece relies not on the detail, like the Butterfly House has, but on the panoramic aerial view of the maze. From the ground view, the Marlborough Maze appears less magnificent than advertised on Blenheim's website. However, upon entering the maze, it is made evident that the Marlborough Maze contains an intricacy and complexity in its pathways. This delayed gratification of awe emphasizes the value of the piece as more than just aesthetic or visual, but also as temporal. The aerial view of the maze displays the symmetrical design of the piece, which simplifies and complicates the experience of getting lost within the maze.

As I walked away from the Pleasure Garden after hours, the juxtaposition of the modern aesthetic and the ungroomed countryside seemed less like an imposition of mass-produced entertainment and more like the inevitable union of old and new artifacts in a changing world.

All photographs are copyrighted to Lucas Loredo.