What influence does John Claudius Loudon have on garden design and planting?

Loudon was the most prolific and the most influential garden and landscape design theorist of the nineteenth century. This came about through:

1. The knowledge of and enthusiasm for the plants he learned about when lodging with Dicksons in Edinburgh and working as a draughtsman in Walter Dickson's Leith Walk Nursery.
2. The admiration for the works of Price, Knight and the Picturesque that Loudon acquired when studying under Dr Andrew Coventry at Edinburgh University.
3. Loudon's considerable disappointment in the style of Lancelot Capability Brown. Though people said it was a 'natural' style, Loudon thought it stiff and unnatural.
4. The observation, during his European Tours, that what Loudon called the 'Ancient or Geometrical Style', had high aesthetic and design qualities. This guided the Great Turning Point in English Garden Design
5. Quatremère de Quincy's argument that if a 'garden' was indistinguishable from wild nature then it could not be 'recognised' as a work of art.
6. Integrating these five influences, Loudon invented a new term and a new approach to garden design. He called it The Gardenesque Style. It's Three main applications were to geometry, planting and management. 

Gardenesque geometry

Gardens can be made recognisable as works of art by making use of straight lines, circles, squares and other man-made geometrical forms. This consideration influenced what garden historians used to describe as the Victorian 'return to formality'. Loudon made use of these shapes in his published designs for planting beds. Loudon had a particular enthusiasm for circular planting beds.

Gardenesque planting

Never forgetting his love of the 'irregular' lines, shapes and forms of wild nature. This plan form can be seen in (1) the plan of the northern section of the Birmingham Botanical Garden (2) the elevation and planting schedule for his front garden in Porchester Terrace: the massing is picturesque/naturalistic and the planting is exotic/botanical. This approach achieved its fulfilment in the work of William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll. Today it is best seen in herbaceous planting, mixed borders and the great woodland gardens of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Gardenesque management

As a plantsman of unequalled talent in his own day, Loudon liked plants to be grown in a way that would let them display their natural forms - without being 'pressed upon' by their neighbours. He believed this style of garden management to be especially appropriate for arboretums and botanical gardens. His followers' description of this approach was the use of 'specimen trees'.