ABSTRACT
This chapter traces how Rydal Mount gardens were treated in nineteenth-century tourist literature towards the end of the century, Dove Cottage and its wild and rocky garden gradually supplanted the former as the focal point of Wordsworthian tourism. Rydal Mount gradually gained a celebrated reputation for its gardens. In July 1831 John Claudius Loudon, botanist, garden designer and editor of a popular garden magazine, visited the Lake District on a research trip in the north-west part of Britain. As one of the few notable gardens in the District, Wordsworth's at Rydal: Rhydal Mount is a pastoral cottage, many of the walks being of turf. Guidebooks, travel articles, letters, poems and drawings of Rydal Mount continued to disseminate the image of Wordsworth's home as a cottage embowered with green plants, and the house came to represent an ideal image of English rural domesticity even though it was now far more spacious than the original sixteenth-century farm cottage on the site.
