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| Petworth, West Sussex, designed by Brown in
1752, has been described by the National Trust as 'one of the
supreme achievements of eighteenth century landscape gardening in
Europe' |
Blenheim, Oxfordshire, is one of Brown.s most
famous and successful schemes. The gentle 'nature' he sought to
'imitate' was that of the English lowlands with its flowing
curves. |
During the eighteenth century estate owners, no longer content
merely to dream of an 'earthly paradise', set about giving reality
to the dream. They brought about what has been described as a
'great revolution in taste'. Some authors have tried to single out
one factor, such as 'love of nature', 'a revolt against formality',
'Romanticism' or 'Chinese influence' as the cause of the
revolution , but this is misleading. The objective was to make an
ideal landscape and it is not surprising that ideas were collected
from many sources to build up the ideal. They came from philosophy,
art, politics, economics, horticulture, agriculture, forestry, and
science; from Greece, Italy, Holland, England, France, and China.
The grand coalition was then
assembled in an English garden.
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It appears that the political genius who first brought the
coalition together was Charles
Addison. Dobree describes him as
'a very able, very well-read, and intelligent populariser of
astonishing literary skill' who made known 'the most advanced
thought of his time, both philosophically and aesthetically'.
Addison's essays of 1712 on the Pleasures of the Imagination
contain most of the key ideas which went to make up the ideal. The
assembly of the following ideas is particularly significant: rural
retirement, Neoplatonism, Lockeian empiricism, landscape painting,
and the idea that a country estate can be improved by gardening,
forestry and agriculture. None of the ideas was new but several
were new bedfellows in 1712. The coalition gained strength from
Addison's clear formulation and the resultant impetus launched
garden and landscape design onto a path of dynamic change.
Many landscape designers who have been influenced by the ideal
have given verbal expression to the objectives of their art. The
following quotations have been selected from authors who have
written in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some
of the authors alternate between ideals and practicalities in true
Virgilian style. Most of the quotations are concerned only with the
making of gardens but the last two are from designers who have an
interest in gardening but whose work extends well beyond the garden
wall.
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Stephen Switzer (1682-1745) summarised his
philosophy in two lines of 'rustic verse' which he borrowed from
Horace's Ars Poetica. They are quoted here in the original
Latin and in Christopher Hussey's translation:
Utile quimiscens, ingentia Rura,
Simplex Munditis ornat, punctum hic tulit omne.
He that the beautiful and useful blends,
Simplicity with greatness, gains all ends.
Lancelot Brown (1716-1783) was remiss in not
leaving us a full account of his objectives, but a letter has been
found by Dorothy Stroud which gives some idea of his opinion on how
to make a landscape: In France they do not exactly comprehend our
ideas on Gardening and Place-making which when rightly understood
will supply all the elegance and all the comforts which Mankind
wants in the Country and (I will add) if right, be exactly fit for
the owner, the Poet and the Painter. To produce these effects there
wants a good plan, good execution, a perfect knowledge of the
country and the objects in it, whether natural or artificial, and
infinite delicacy in the planting &c.
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Sir
Uvedale Price, (1747-1829) was a critic of Lancelot Brown's
style but the following quotation makes it clear that he would not
have disagreed with Brown's objectives. It is a most charming
statement of the landscape ideal: The peculiar beauty of the most
beautiful of all landscape painters is characterised by il
riposo di Claudio, and when the mind of man is in the
delightful state of repose, of which Claude's pictures are the
image - when he feels that mild and equal sunshine of the soul
which warms and cheers, but neither inflames nor irritates - his
heart seems to dilate with happiness, he is disposed to every act
of kindness and benevolence, to love and cherish all around
him.
Humphry Repton (1725-1818)
was not as confident of his theoretical abilities as of his design
skills, and gives rather a conventional description of his
professional role: the 'whole art of landscape gardening may
properly be defined, the pleasing combination of art and nature
adapted to the use of man'.
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Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) made few
references to the eighteenth century theorists in her writings but
the following passage shows how well she understood their
importance: The free school........teaches us to form and respect
large quiet spaces of lawn, unbroken by flower-beds or any
encumbrance; it teaches the simple grouping of noble types of hardy
vegetation, whether their beauty be that of flower or foliage or
general aspect. It insists on the importance of putting the right
thing in the right place, a matter which involves both technical
knowledge and artistic ability...... It teaches us to study the
best means of treatment of different sites; to see how to join
house to garden and garden to woodland. Repton says most truly:
'all rational improvement of grounds is necessarily founded of a
due attention to the character and situation of the place to be
improved; the former teaches us what is advisable, and the latter
what is possible to be done'.
Patrick Geddes (1854-1930) was a
contemporary of Jekyll's and became the first British designer to
use the professional title 'landscape architect'. He believed that
'City improvers, like the gardeners from whom they develop, fall
into two broadly contrasted schools, which are really, just as in
gardening itself, the formal and the naturalistic' . The following
quotation from his book Cities in evolution is interesting
for its use of the word 'landscape' instead of his own word
'eutopia' to describe the objectives of the planning process: Such
synoptic vision of Nature, such constructive conservation of its
order and beauty.......is more than engineering: it is a
master-art; vaster than that of street planning, it is landscape
making; and thus it meets and combines with city design.
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Ian
McHarg (b 1920) is a Scots-American landscape architect who
shares Geddes' objectives and also makes use of his famous
survey-analysis-plan sequence. The first quotation reveals McHarg's
Virgilian objectives and the second his Geddesian approach to
bringing about a state of harmony between man and nature: This book
is a personal testament to the power and importance of sun, moon
and stars, the changing seasons, seedtime and harvest, clouds, rain
and rivers, the oceans and the forests, the creatures and the
herbs. ..... Such is the method - a simple sequential examination
of the place in order to understand it. This understanding reveals
the place as an interacting system, a storehouse and a value
system. From this information it is possible to prescribe potential
land uses - not as single activities, but as associations of these.
It is not a small claim, it is not a small contribution: but it
would appear that the ecological method can be employed to ......
design with nature.
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The theme which unites the above
quotations from landscape designers can be described as the
objective of creating harmony between man and his environment. The
1976 supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary has
sanctioned the use of the verb 'to landscape' to describe the
process of achieving this objective. It defines 'to landscape' as
'to lay out (a garden etc) as a landscape; to conceal or embellish
(a building, road etc) by making it part of a continuous and
harmonious landscape'. When used in this way 'landscape' is an
evaluative word and should only be applied to a particular kind of
place: a place where there is harmony between man and the land.
Unfortunately this specialised use of 'landscape' is totally
overshadowed by its descriptive use by geologists and geographers
to mean 'a tract of land with its distinguishing characteristics
and features, especially considered as a product of modifying or
shaping processes and agents' (OED 1976).
The earliest use of 'landscape' as a descriptive term is given
by the OED as 1886, when A Giekie used it in a textbook on geology.
W G Hoskins has since popularised
its use in this sense with the title of his book The making of
the English landscape .
When 'landscape' is used as a purely descriptive word meaning 'a
tract of land' it becomes difficult to comprehend the arts of
landscape gardening and landscape design. One wonders how a
landscape, or even a garden, can be made without having full
control over the sun, wind and rain, and over the movements of men,
animals and plants. If, on the other hand 'landscape' is used as an
evaluative word then landscape design becomes comprehensible. It is
simply the art of improving places by whatever means are to hand.
The shift in the meaning of 'landscape' between 1650 and 1850
was a consequence of the changes in the use of the word 'nature'
between the same dates.
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| The 'thumbnail' diagrams above show the
evolution of the styles which dominated English garden design in
the eighteenth century. |
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| The idea of forming a transition from regularity
near the house to an irregular background retained its popularity
until the mid-twentieth century. |
'Landscape' was introduced into modern English from Dutch
towards the end of the sixteenth century and at that time was
exclusively a painter's term. A 'landscape' was not something which
you could walk across or build or buy. It was a Platonic Form; an
ideal place beyond the everyday world of reality and sharing some
qualaities with paradise itself. Landscape painters hoped to paint
a perfect place on canvas after detailed observation and deep
reflection on the world as it appeared to their senses.
Instructions on how to do this were given by William Salmon in his Polygraphice, published
in 1672, 'you are to observe the excellences and beauties of the
piece but to refuse its vices', he said. And 'by designing each
part after that pattern which was perfect might at last present
something perfect in the whole'. Salmon also gives a definition of
landscape: 'Landskip is that
which appeareth in lines the perfect vision of the earth, and all
things thereupon, placed above the horizon, as towns, villages,
castles, promontories, mountains, rocks, valleys, ruins, woods,
forests, chases, trees, houses, and all other buildings, both
beautiful and ruinous'.
The OED gives 1598 as the earliest use of 'landscape' as a
painters' term but by 1616 Michael Drayton seems to be anticipating a later use
of the word. He describes the River Rothers in the Isle of Oxney
as:
Appearing to the flood, most bravely like a queen,
Clad (all) from head to foot in gaudy summers green......
With villages amongst, oft powdered here and there
And (that the same more like to landskip should appear)
With lakes and lesser fords to mitigate the heat.
Drayton is using 'landskip' as if it was a design objective and
this is exactly what it became during the eighteenth century.
Addison adopted the usage and remarked in his 1712 essays that 'a
man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions'. Walpole, looking back on sixty years of
efforts to do just this, stated in 1771, 'I should choose to call
it the art of creating landscape'. He is using the word partly in
an evaluative sense and partly in a descriptive sense. The
geographical meaning 'a tract of land' is purely descriptive and
seems to have arisen out of the belief that landscape should be
made to imitate nature. By the end of the nineteenth century
'nature' had ceased to be a Platonic ideal and since 'landscape'
was made to imitate her, she too ended up on the ground as
something formed by 'modifying or shaping processes and
agents'.
The changes in the use of the words 'nature' and 'landscape'
were a key factor in the development of new styles of garden
design. At the end of the seventeenth century garden plans were
based on the primary geometrical forms, especially the circle and
the square, which were believed to occupy the highest positions in
the hierarchy of shapes. In the course of the eighteenth century
there was a move towards serpentine and then irregular lines, as
the concepts of nature and landscape continued their path downwads
from the world of the forms. The pattern of evolution is shown on
the thumbnail style diagrams and is
described in more detail in chapters 2 and 3.
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During the nineteenth century it was recognised that all the
above shapes have a place in nature and a style developed which was
based on a transition from geometrical shapes in the foreground,
through serpentine curves in the middle distance, and outwards to
an irregular background.
The geometrical concept of a Transition has had an enormous
influence on nineteenth and twentieth century British garden
design. It is however primarily a plan style and has been overlaid
with stylistic details from a variety of sources, as will be
described in chapters 4 and 5. They include Italian Renaissance
gardens, the Arts and Crafts movement, and architecture in the
International Style.
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| The River Derwent at Chatsworth, Derbyshire, was converted
by Brown from a tumbling mountain stream into a calm serpentine
river. Repton criticised him for 'checking its noisy course, to
produce the glassy surface of a slow moving river' |
By the end of the eighteenth century Repton, and the general
public, had come to appreciate the wild scenery of the Lake
District, epitomised by Wasdale Head. This represents the sublime
'nature' which influenced garden design during the nineteenth
century. |
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