HAMPTON COURT - London - page 311

If you're coming from the State Apartments, you'll probably emerge onto the magnificent
Broad Walk, which runs along Wren's austere east front and is lined with superbly main-
tained herbaceous borders. Halfway along is the indoor Royal Tennis Court , established
here by Henry VIII - if you're lucky, you might catch a game of this arcane precursor of
modern tennis.
Fanning out from the Broad Walk is the Fountain Garden , a grand, semicircular parterre
featuring conical, overgrown dwarf yew trees. To the south of the palace is the more formal
Privy Garden (£5.20; free with palace ticket) which features magnificent wrought-iron
riverside railings by Jean Tijou. The Pond Gardens , originally constructed as ornamental
fish ponds stocked with freshwater fish for the kitchens, feature some of the gardens' most
spectacularly colourful flowerbeds. Further along, protected by glass, is the palace's celeb-
rated Great Vine , grown from a cutting in 1768 by Capability Brown and averaging about
seven hundred pounds of Black Hamburg grapes per year (sold at the palace in September).
Close by stands the Wren-built Lower Orangery , now home to Andrea Mantegna's lumin-
ous richly coloured masterpiece, The Triumphs of Caesar . Painted around 1486 for the Du-
cal Palace in Mantua, these heroic paintings are among his best works, characterized by an
accomplished use of perspective and an obsessive interest in archeological and historical ac-
curacy. Access to the Lower Orangery is from the Base Court.
The most famous feature of the palace gardens, however, is the deceptively tricky
trapezoidal yew hedge Maze (£4; free with palace ticket), planted in the 1690s. Mazes, or
labyrinths as they were called at the time, were originally designed for pilgrims, who used to
crawl along on hands and knees reciting prayers as penance for not making a pilgrimage to
the Holy Land. They were all the rage among the eighteenth-century nobility, who used
them primarily for amusement, secret conversations and flirtation. The maze was originally
planted with hornbeam, but with the onset of the tourist boom in the 1960s the hornbeam
took quite a battering and had to be replaced with yew.