Garden History – Landscape Movement

Back to Europe for more garden history (recall when last in Europe, we studied Renaissance and formal gardens of the seventeenth century, both on the continent and in England). Fast forward to the eighteenth century, and to the emergence of the landscape movement. For sources, I’m using The History of Gardens, by Christopher Thacker, and The Story of Gardening, by Penelope Hobhouse.

Gardeners in England adopted some elements of the Renaissance and formal gardens, but they resisted full scale adoption. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, authors began to question the tightly clipped and manicured formal gardens, and to rediscover classical Roman ideas, which emphasized nature and retreat to bucolic country life. They were intrigued by the writings of Father Matteo Ripa (1682 – 1746), who described the gardens he observed during his 13 years in China; and were inspired by paintings of the Italian countryside by artists such as Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665) and Claude Lorraine (1600 – 1682).

In 1719, the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) wrote to a friend “when laying out a garden, one should consider the genius of the place”; and in a poem described “all gardening is landscape painting…just like a landscape hung up”. They were also entranced with plant discoveries that were pouring in from the Americas, and from all over the world.

Pastoral Landscape, by Claude Lorrain (1648)

From these influences, a new garden style emerged. The landscape movement did not take hold at once, it was influenced by several generations of gardeners, each improving on the work of predecessors. Hobhouse identifies three main phases:

• Phase 1 (1720 - 1740s): Charles Bridgeman and William Kent (influenced by Pope), mixed formal and informal styles, provided views to the country side, and incorporated temples, pavilions and various buildings in the garden design.
• Phase 2 (1750 – 1780s): Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and his followers created landscapes that emulated nature. The green garden flowed uninterrupted from the house to the distant landscape. The garden was often indistinguishable from nature (nature was “edited” to achieve this).
• Phase 3 (1780 – 1810s): critics of the tame garden parks called for a wilder, more naturalist approach. They designed landscapes that incorporated beauty (elements that are smooth, regular, delicate, and harmonious), and the sublime (elements that also move us aesthetically, but are rough, gloomy, violent, and gigantic, such a volcanoes, storms, cataracts, and primitive beauty). As Hobhouse  describes “genuine romantic wildness typified by asymmetry, distant moors or mountains, rushing torrents, and crumbling ruins”.

Under these influences, the English landscape garden became indistinguishable from the real country side.