English Gardens
Before the eighteenth century, the English didn’t have a national style of gardening. English gardens tended to follow French and Dutch fashions, often employing French or Dutch garden designers. During the latter half of the seventeenth century, English gardens were formal, as almost all European gardens had been for over a thousand years.
The desire for more “natural” gardens was expressed by writers before it was attempted by garden designers. This is not surprising, since literature was more important in English culture than the visual arts were. Sir William Temple’s essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus was written in 1685 and first published in 1692, this essay praised what its author imagined to be the Chinese manner of garden design. While Temple’s essay didn’t cause Europeans to imitate Chinese gardens, it helped to open up European minds to the possibility of creating gardens which broke away from the formal tradition.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was an English poet, essayist and literary critic who had a considerable influence on the ideas behind the English landscape garden. In an essay on gardening in the Guardian (1713), he urged a return to the “amiable simplicity of unadorned nature” in place of the formal garden; and in his Epistle to Burlington he proclaimed what was to become the cardinal rule for the English landscape style ‘In all, let nature never be forgot.....Consult the genius of the place”.
Pope’s own garden was quite formal. Most of the paths were straight, although some of the woodland paths did wind in a more “natural” manner. This was nothing new, the wooded parts of English gardens had been losing some of their formality during the late seventeenth century; the 1671 plan for the garden of Ham House shows the principle walks of its “wilderness” as being broad and straight, but between the principle walks are narrow paths which wind through the woods.
While the English landscape garden was inspired by vague ideas about Chinese gardens, the visual look of these gardens was mainly inspired by European landscape paintings. The English landscape style was dominated by three designers: William Kent, Lancelot (Capability) Brown and Humphrey Renton.
The landscape designer and architect, William Kent (1685 - 1748) had been trained as an artist and his landscape gardens were often closely connected with the classical culture of ancient Greece and Rome; they were also strongly inspired by the paintings of Claude Lorraine , Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa . Horace Walpole said that William Kent was ‘born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all of nature was a garden”.
This fence leaping was made possible by the use of the “ha-ha”, which is a dry ditch with a retaining wall on the side of the garden that you want to keep grazing animals out of. The other side of the ditch gently slopes down to the base of the wall, which is tall enough to keep most animals from jumping to the top. From a distance a ha-ha is almost invisible, creating an unbroken vista from the house with no division between the lawn and surrounding meadows. The sheep and cattle in the meadows became a part of the garden, they were sometimes allowed to graze on the lawn, but they could also be kept in the meadows without having fences and walls breaking up the landscape.
The most important of the early English landscape gardens was at Stowe, where William Kent’s ideas about garden design were implemented. By 1741, Kent was still providing designs for this garden, but he was busy with other projects; there was a need for a head gardener who could execute Kent’s designs, and Lancelot Brown (1716-83) was given the position. In 1751, Brown left Stowe and became an independent garden designer. He rapidly became the dominant garden designer in England, and remained so for the rest of his life. Brown’s gardens lacked Kent’s close connection with the Classical world; instead, most of them were idealized visions of the English countryside.
Brown’s landscapes were composed of trees and lawn, with a body of water as a focal point. Cedars of Lebanon were the only non-native trees which were commonly planted and there wasn’t much of a role for flowering shrubs, let alone herbaceous flowers. This was quite frustrating for plant lovers, especially since this was a period when many flowering plants were being introduced from America and Asia.
Brown’s successor, Humphrey Repton, responded to the desires of plant lovers by allowing flower gardens next to the house. His idea was for a garden to contain a variety of features while remaining unified by the overall composition. Repton felt that his ideas were most fully realized at Woburn Abbey where he added a private garden for the family, a flower garden and an “American garden" to an existing landscape garden.
In 1795, Repton published a book entitled Scetches and Hints on Landscape Gardening, this provoked an attack from Sir Uvedale Price (1747 - 1829) in his essay The Landscape and Richard Payne Knight (1750 - 1824) in his Essay on the Picturesque. Price and Knight were close friends and neighbors who both hated the uniform compositions of trees, lawns and water which Brown and other professional garden designers were imposing on the English landscape; they favored a more picturesque approach to garden design.
The controversy between those who favored the classical English landscape gardens and those who preferred picturesque gardens lasted well into the early decades of the nineteenth century. By that the controversy had worn itself out, the landscape garden had evolved into a collection of individual gardens; the Victorian English garden with its rose gardens, rock gardens, herb gardens and shrubberies had been born.
All eighteenth century English landscape gardens are picturesque in the sense that they were intended to look like landscape paintings. There was some influence from Chinese paintings, mainly on wallpaper and ceramics; but the dominant influence was from European landscape paintings, especially the paintings of Claude Lorraine Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa.
The style of the English landscape garden was dominated by three designers: William Kent, Lancelot (Capability) Brown and Humphrey Repton. All three tended to create similar landscapes which were composed of trees and water and smooth lawns. By the 1790s there was a reaction against their rather bland compositions; a number of thinkers began to promote the idea of picturesque gardens.
The leader of the picturesque movement was the Reverend William Gilpin (1724 - 1804). He was an accomplished artist who did sketches of the natural landscapes of the various parts of the British Isles that he visited. Like many romantics, he preferred untamed nature over gardens; he felt that the professional landscape designers, especially Capability Brown, were imposing stereotypical design solutions onto the landscape, instead of responding to the natural topography.
When he became Vicar of Bouldre in 1778, Gilpin became fascinated by the surrounding forest. In 1791 he published his Remarks on Forest Scenery, in which he wrote about the picturesque appeal of twisted trees, exposed roots and irregular land forms. In 1792 Gilpin published an essay in which he wrote that while beauty is usually associated with the smooth and the neat, such as the gently sculpted landscapes of Capability Brown with their smooth lawns leading down to placid lakes; picturesque beauty tends to have a wilder quality with rougher textures. In Gilpin’s view, the gardens of Brown and his followers “are never picturesque. They want the bold wildness of nature. A principle beauty of our gardens, as Mr. Walpole justly observes, is the smoothness of turf; but in a picture, this becomes a dead and uniform spot; incapable of light and shade”.
Gilpin didn’t dislike all landscape gardens, he felt the garden of Stourhead showed “greatness of design”; he also wasn’t really Capability Brown’s enemy, he admired the “nobility” of Brown’s landscaping at Longleat house. Humphrey Repton was influenced by Gilpins ideas, especially the idea that the design of a garden should harmonize with the surrounding landforms; it was a bit of a shock for Repton when he found himself embroiled in a heated controversy about picturesque gardens versus the typical gardens of Capability Brown. Repton was quite open about how much his designs owed to Capability Brown, and by the early 1790s he was becoming Brown’s successor, so he was the perfect target for those who disliked Brown’s gardens.
In 1795, Repton published a book entitled Sketches and Hints, this book was under attack before it was even published. Sir Uvedale Price (1747 - 1829) and Richard Payne Knight (1750 - 1824) were close friends and neighbors who were united in their disdain for the bland smoothness of Capability Brown’s gardens. They seized upon some ideas in Repton’s book and lashed out in a pair of essays which were both published in 1794: Knights’s The Landscape and Price's Essay on the Picturesque. Repton became aware of what they were doing in time to add a footnote to Sketches and Hints in which he defended his designs: “While mouldering abbeys and the antiquated cottage with its chimney smothered in ivy may be eminently appealing to the painter... in whatever relates to man, propriety and convenience are no less objects of good taste than picturesque effects”.
Repton’s career wasn’t hurt by the picturesque controversy, and he certainly didn’t reject the fashion for things Gothic. In 1799 he recommended that an estate owner build “a castle which by blending a chaste correctness of proportion with bold irregularity of outline”. He went on to say that the Gothic style” has infinitely more picturesque effect than any other stile of building”.
Repton probably didn’t have Fonthill Abbey in mind when he wrote about “a chaste correctness of proportion”; but then, its owner, William Beckford, was never one to fuss much about propriety Fonthill Abbey (begun in 1796), with its 300 foot tall tower, was not created for convenience; it was an attempt to inspire the sort of sublime feelings that Medieval cathedrals can evoke. It is hardly surprising that the builder of such a theatrical house would respond to the ideas expressed in Price’s Essay on the Picturesque; the garden at Fonthill Abbey was inspired by the rugged landscapes in the paintings of Salvator Rosa rather than the placid compositions of Kent and Brown. It was also more of a collector’s garden than earlier landscape gardens, featuring an alpine garden and an “American garden. William Beckford said that he regarded the creation of the flowering wilderness around the Abbey as his greatest achievement. In 1825, the tower fell, destroying much of the Abbey; more of the wilderness survived and still can be visited.
The picturesque style was always dominated by architecture, not just castles, but also such exotic extravagances as the Royal Pavilion at Brighton (begun in 1787). From 1795 to 1800, Repton worked in partnership with one of the most fashionable architects of the period, John Nash.This partnership has caused many writers to describe Repton’s gardens as picturesque, since a number of them were designed as settings for picturesque buildings. In 1797 Repton was summoned to Brighton and asked to come up with ideas about how to improve the gardens of the Royal Pavilion. Repton’s ideas were never implemented, but his designs for this garden still exist.
Along with the fashion for castles and pseudo-Indian buildings, the picturesque movement promoted the rustic beauty of cottages. A number of thatched cottages were designed by important architects, including Nash. The romantic English cottage garden, with its billowing masses of roses, really dates from this period, earlier cottage gardens were more practical. Since romantic cottage gardens are still being created; it could be said that the picturesque movement is still alive.