landscape gardening

landscape gardening Arranging gardens to produce certain effects. Broadly, there are two main traditions: the Sino-English, with its retention of the informality of nature; and the Franco-Italian, with its geometric patterns in which nature is trimmed to art. The second tradition arose in Italy during the Renaissance. It is best exemplified in the parterres of Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre. In England, the naturalist style developed in the 18th century, with the work of William Kent, ‘Capability’ Brown, and Humphrey Repton.

landscape gardening The 18th‐cent. English landscape garden or park was a major contribution to European art. It replaced the earlier fashion for highly formal gardens and presented an effect of natural, rolling grassland coming right up to the house, with distant clumps of trees.

The expansiveness of such landscapes undoubtedly encouraged a sense of power and superiority in the minds of their aristocratic owners, although they were also held to demonstrate the spirit of British liberty. Pioneers of the new taste in gardening, favoured by the poet Alexander Pope, were Stephen Switzer (1682–1745), Charles Bridgeman (fl. 1709–38), the latter credited with the invention of the ‘ha‐ha’, and William Kent (1685–1748). Such schemes often had complex, symbolic ‘programmes’ based on literary or political allusion, as at Stowe (Bucks.). The extensive gardens there were laid out mainly from 1713 by Viscount Cobham and his successor Earl Temple. Again, the scheme was initiated by Bridgeman and developed by Kent; a process of simplification and enlargement was begun by Lancelot Brown, c. 1749.

The final phase of the English landscape garden began late in the century, Picturesque theorists having rejected what they saw as the repetitive, over‐formulaic approach of Brown. Thus Humphry Repton (1752–1818) adopted a more varied approach, involving the effect of ‘accidents’ of nature and a more organic relationship between buildings and landscape.