English Garden Style
Our Story of Gardens now moves to 18th century England, and completely changes direction. At the start of the century, almost every country house had laid out and planted its own extravagant, Renaissance-style formal gardens like the ones at Hampton Court. But by the 1730s they had gone right out of fashion, and people were thinking about gardens in a totally different way. The new approach that came out of this new thinking was described in various ways (e.g. ‘picturesque’, ‘sublime’, ‘landscape’) As it originated in England it is called the ‘English Garden’ style, but it became popular throughout Europe and the world.
All Change. But Why?
The 18th century was known as the Age of Enlightenment, a time when all the old ideas about Art, Beauty, Man, God and Nature were up for debate. There was as much theorising about gardens as actual gardening.
Our British gardeners, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in Cones, Globes and Pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every Plant and Bush
Joseph Addison, in 'The Spectator', 1712, criticising the artificiality of the formal garden.
Also, the formal gardens were expensive to maintain. They produced little and were boring as they were the same throughout the year. People were ready for a change
Wealthy, landowning people were travelling more, on the ‘Grand Tour’, which always included Italy. Here they saw wild landscapes with classical ruins, and they wanted to recreate this look at home
Artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorraine and Salvator Rosa were very popular. They painted familiar stories in idealised landscape settings, where trees, rocks, ruins and water were carefully arranged. People wanted their real landscapes to look as beautiful as these pictures.
The idea comes to life
An artist, William Kent, first made the transition from thinking that gardens had to be artificial and formal, to realising they could be ‘natural’. He began designing gardens deliberately to look like beautifully composed landscape pictures.
"At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, ...leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden."
Horace Walpole, 1750, in "The History of Modern Taste in Gardening2.
HA HA!
A simple invention helped to blur the distinction between the surrounding landscape (Nature) and the garden (Artifice). Instead of a visible wall, hedge or fence to separate the fields from the garden, estate gardeners started using ‘invisible’ ditches. These still stopped the animals coming right up to the house and eating the flowers, but from the house it looked as if the garden and the countryside were all part of a single landscape. The locals thought these were so odd that they called them Ha-Has!
‘Capability’ Brown
The most famous name associated with the ‘landscape’ style was Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. He got this nickname as he told his clients that ‘their estates had great capabilities’. Soon everyone wanted their estate to be a Capability Brown landscape. He even worked for King George III and was given apartments at Hampton Court.
The ‘Brown’ landscapes
Brown completed over 100 landscapes, and there are many others in his style. They are composed of four elements-water, trees, sky and earth, with curving and sinuous lines. In practice, they were more than beautiful scenes; they provided timber and coppice, cover for game (grouse and pheasant), fish from the lakes and grazing for deer, sheep and cattle.
Dorothy More describes a conversation she had with Brown in 1782. It helps us understand how he saw garden design.
...Never was such delicious weather! I passed two hours in the garden the other day as if it had been April with Mr Brown.
He illustrates everything he says about gardening by some literary or grammatical allusion. He told me he compared his art to literary composition.
"Now there", said he, pointing a finger, "I make a comma. And there, "pointing to another spot, "where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon, at another part, where an interrruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject".
Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) The Judgement of Paris
Artists like Lorrain, Claude and Rosa painted idealised landscape settings for Biblical and classical scenes. These popular pictures influenced garden ideas.
© Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool
Studley Royal Water Garden, N Yorkshire:
John Aislabie redesigned his estate after being sacked as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1720. Landowners were influenced by classical architecture seen on the Grand Tour.
© E Bennis
Castle Howard, N. Yorkshire:
Vanbrugh created a classical landscape for the Earl of Carlisle with a temple, bridge, pyramid and ‘a mausoleum that would tempt one to be buried alive’. [Horace Walpole]
Painshill Park, Surrey:
View of ruined abbey and vineyard. Visiting other peoples’ gardens, reading about them or looking at pictures was popular in the 18th century.
Barratt and Gilpin, 1772.
Garden Case Studies
