The landscape gardens of Rousham House are regarded among the finest of William Kent, writes CHRIS KOENIG

One veteran of the Battle of Blenheim, whose family had been Oxfordshire residents long before the former Royal Park upon which Blenheim Palace now stands was given to the Churchills, was Lieut Gen James Dormer.

A fiery, even lascivious, old man, in the 18th century he engaged William Kent to design a garden and alter his 17th-century house at Rousham, near Steeple Aston.

Described now in the newly published Oxford Companion to the Garden as "Kent's most complete surviving garden", it was described by Kent's contemporary Horace Walpole as "the most engaging of all Kent's works. It is Kentissimo".

That stands in stark contrast to Walpole's verdict on Blenheim as: "execrable within, without, and almost all round"; though, to be fair, he made his rude remark before Capability Brown had been engaged by the fourth Duke of Marlborough to lay out the lake, set in its naturalistic and very English landscape.

But that, of course, is the point. William Kent, friend of such people as Walpole, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Jonathan Swift, was the instigator of the English Romantic garden. He followed in landscape design where they were going in literature, heeding Pope's advice: "In all let Nature never be forgot", eschewing continental ideas of straight lines everywhere.

At Rousham, Kent built the garden into its surrounding landscape, again heeding Pope, who at that time was busy translating Homer's Odyssey at Stanton Harcourt, who urged: "Consult the Genius of Place in all."

The result is that beguiling views of the surrounding countryside open up across the Cherwell Valley at points where Kent has considerately deposited beautiful benches of his own design, making the garden seem like a sort of timeless Arcadia.

I remember once, when the US air base was still operating at Upper Heyford, seeing an F1-11 framed in one of those vistas. Somehow I was no more surprised than if I had suddenly seen a hay cart and horses there.

Famously, Walpole said of Kent: "He leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden."

Perhaps it should have been a ha-ha he leaped, for some of the earliest English examples of this device are to be found a Rousham, though, surprisingly, they were designed by Charles Bridgeman, the more formal landscape gardener employed earlier by the general.

We are lucky in Oxfordshire in having a number of Kent works. There are the obelisk and octagonal temple at Shotover, built for the general's aqaintance Col James Tyrrell. Then there is the great hall at Ditchley, and, of course, the tomb to the first Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim.

And why might the general, who enjoyed a "philosophic retirement" at Rousham have been called lascivious? He was a colourful character all right, unusual for a soldier of his time in being a graduate of Merton College, who chose an erotic theme for the decoration of the Saloon at Rousham.

Before retiring to Rousham he had been a diplomat in Lisbon. Unfortunately, he returned after a row with an English neighbour there which resulted in that neighbour being beaten up.