The English landscape garden is a style of garden design that developed in England in the 18th century. The preceding main style was the French garden, epitomised in Le Notre’s works such as Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte and copied in royal palaces as well as country estates all across Europe. In the 18th century, however, there was a desire to sweep away the strict geometric features and formality, leading to a more ’natural’ style of landscape design. The dramatic change from the earlier formal gardens with absolute order and symmetry, perfectly trimmed topiary and sophisticated parterres, to the rolling lawns, curving paths and asymmetrical clumps of trees, was also the result of a wider social, aesthetic and political development.
Firstly, in the 18th century there was an increased interest in rural and natural landscapes, which were also becoming more accessible due to infrastructural development. So-called country living became fashionable among the upper classes, who built themselves impressive country mansions. According to Girouard (1978), both the roads and carriages were improved at the time and travel became quicker and less uncomfortable. This led to a change in the social life of the country gentry: they were now visiting each other more often and moving between the city and the countryside. Not only did new fashions and influences spread faster, making it possible for the new style of gardening to gain a strong foothold, but the gardens also had to be modified so that visitors could be taken on carriage rides around the garden.
18th century England is characterised by the lack of religious enthusiasm, the focus being the industrial and scientific revolutions instead. (Lambert, 2015) Girot (2016) suggests that the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment in general influenced the birth of the landscape garden. With the discovery of the Newtonian equation, man was no longer the unquestionable master of nature, as the law of gravity was a law of the nature itself and could not be interfered with by humans: ”Although Newton had discovered only a general law that was inherently natural, its application to society meant that our attitude towards nature, inherited from the Greeks and held right up to the Baroque period, had to be completely reassessed.” Compared to the French formal garden, which represented the power of not only a monarch over the society but also of a human over nature, the English landscape garden became a means for living – at least seemingly – in harmony with nature. (Zgarbova, 2014)
As for the philosophical movements of the time, Rationalism was establishing itself on the continent while Empiricism prevailed in Britain. Rationalism supports the idea that human is the lord of nature and combines well with the ideas of the French formal garden, while Empiricism provides the kind of liberal mental context (complemented by the more liberal society-wide situation) needed for the development of the English landscape garden. (Zgarbova, 2014) According to Müllenbrock, Palladian architecture was favoured in the gardens to express these liberal ideas (both philosophical and political).
Another major change in the society was the development of the capitalist economic form which, along with the 18th-century enclosure wave, caused most of the small farms to disappear from England. The new vast units used primarily for sheep farming guaranteed the unity of ownership as well as made possible the compositional and aesthetic principles of the landscape garden. The nobility and the landowners, who were the commissioners of these gardens, were favoured by the new constitutional arrangement of power. (Müllenbrock, 1984; Zgarbova, 2014) Stowe, for example, was extended over time so that it swallowed three of the nearby villages.
An important reason for the landowners to choose a landscape garden over a French-style formal garden was the financial aspect: the building and maintenance costs of the former were much lower and fewer gardeners were needed. (Zgarbova, 2014) Müllenbrock (1984) also points out that ”the landscape garden in no way primarily represents the product of a new aesthetic orientation”, and that the utilitarian and financial principles were very important in its creation. The English country gentry had an interest in the economic exploitation of their land, and the landscape garden could be used for sheep breeding, whereas a formal garden was in no way productive or profitable. Sheep breeding still takes place in most of the landscape gardens, for example in Bramham and Stowe.
As the land was used for breeding sheep, or for raising cattle as in Rousham, and at the same time the aesthetic taste required uninterrupted views to the countryside, sunken ha-ha walls became a common feature of the landscape gardens. They were by no means a new innovation for keeping animals out of the garden, but in the landscape gardens they were also used for optical illusions and for manipulating perspective. For example the ha-ha in Rousham hides the river and the valley, providing an unobstructed view to the fields beyond, and the ha-ha in Bramham makes the central axis appear shorter than it actually is (an example of a ha-ha in Figure 5).
From a political point of view, the French garden was seen as a symbol of monarchy whereas the new English landscape garden stood for liberty and freedom, the values of the liberal Whig party which was very powerful at the time. Therefore the choice of one’s style of garden design also became a political one.
Müllenbrock (1984), however, criticises this theory by pointing out that Alexander Pope, for whom one of the first English landscape gardens was created, was a Tory. Instead of having been created by Whigs to express Whig ideas, he says that their creation was rather related to ”the growth of a national consciousness of liberty, which can in large measure be attributed to the Whig party”.
Perhaps the best example of a garden expressing political ideas is Stowe in Buckinghamshire. It was laid out by Richard Temple, who later became Viscount Cobham, from 1717 onwards. A number of renowned landscape architects have worked on the garden, including William Kent and Capability Brown. Stowe was first designed to be very formal, with straight paths, parterres and an octagonal lake, but as fashion changed these were replaced by the lawns and clumps of trees that we see today. There are statues and monuments along the different paths of the garden revealing Cobham’s beliefs about politics and morality of the day (see Figure 1). It was common to have features in the garden that represented not only political ideas but also the beliefs of the owners in general. Legends, myths and stories of Greek or Roman origin were told by means of landscape design, architecture and sculpture to highlight the education of the landowners and to entertain and impress visitors.
The Grand Tour, a trip across continental Europe taken by aristocratic young men to finish their education and to develop ’a good taste’, also had a big influence on the creation of the landscape garden. The landscape paintings by Dutch or French masters such as Claude or Poussin, the rolling hills of the Tuscan countryside, the classical architecture of Rome and the somewhat crumbling and overgrown renaissance gardens all seen on the Grand Tour began to shape a new concept of beauty. Paintings and art influenced the garden designers a lot as they strived to achieve the picturesque beauty of the combination of natural forms, open green space framed by big trees, water gleaming in the middle distance and a classical or gothic structure catching the eye (for an example see Figure 2).
Bramham Park in West Yorkshire is essentially a product of the Grand Tour made by Robert Benson, who later became Lord Bingley, in 1697. Bingley was inspired by Le Notre’s works in France as well as Tuscan villas and after the tour he built himself a Palladian mansion in a landscaped park (Figure 3). His taste changed over the 30 years that he was working on the garden, starting formal and becoming more naturalistic, which led to the gardens being somewhere between the formal and the picturesque. There is a formal main axis lined with clipped hedges and rectangular ponds, but there are also follies placed on rolling lawns against a backdrop of trees. The eye-catchers were added later on according to the current fashion, and instead Bingley’s original design included a parterre. This same kind of movement towards a more and more informal and natural layout can be seen in Stowe, but on a larger scale and during a longer period of time.
A common feature of the English landscape garden is the above-mentioned use of eye-catchers, often in the form of real or fake ruins or architectural structures built in either a classical or a Gothic style. The inspiration for them came mostly from the renaissance gardens and rural landscapes seen on the Grand Tour in Italy, where it is not uncommon to have real classical ruins as part of a garden. In Britain the purposes of these structures were many: to draw the eye to the horizon as well as to create a certain atmosphere and to convey ideas and tell stories. They are very similar in all of the landscape gardens, perhaps because many of them were designed by the same architects, had the same sources of inspiration or were directly borrowed from another garden like the Round House in Bramham, which was very much inspired by the Temple of Ancient Virtue in Stowe (Figure 4).
The construction of fake ruins may seem odd for today’s visitor, but it needs to be taken into account that in the eighteenth century an emotional imagining of the past was valued over historical accuracy. Questions of authenticity were largely ignored while ”the object’s apparent ability to offer unmediated access to an imagined past” was valued. In addition to functioning as eye-catchers, ruins were seen as capable of providing melancholic contemplation and reverie. (Bending, 2016) This way of thinking can be seen in how real and fake ruins were mixed and almost equally appreciated in Studley Royal, which is, in fact, one of the few gardens in Britain with real ruins. The ruins of Fountains Abbey act as the supreme eye-catcher of the garden, but fake ruins known as follies are also placed all around Studley Royal.
The owners of the landscape gardens had many things in common: they all had large country estates, were wealthy, had a classical education, had taken the Grand Tour to Italy and were patrons of the arts as well as members of the Whig party. The early landscape gardens, such as Studley Royal and Bramham, were designed by the landowners themselves, building on their own education, taste and Grand Tour experiences. Later in the 18th century the profession of landscape architect started to develop, and it became more common to employ a professional to do a fashionable garden design. Two of the most influential and famous landscape architects of the era were William Kent (1685-1748) and Lancelot ’Capability’ Brown (1716-1783). Rousham is mainly the work of Kent while their joint efforts can be seen in Stowe.
The gardens created by Kent and Brown were based on four principles of design: lines of grace, views to the surrounding landscape, incorporation of architectural monuments and Chinese irregularity. A line of grace is a gently curving line, something between the rigid and the vulgar, which is believed to be the most beautiful and interesting for the eye. Lakes, streams and paths particularly in Stowe and Rousham have this slight curve, whereas Bramham and Studley Royal, which were created earlier, have more straight lines (see Figure 5). The surrounding landscape is effectively borrowed in Rousham and Bramham, making the gardens seem larger, while Stowe is so huge that there is no need to buy into the surroundings. Chinese inspiration led to for example the positioning of trees in clumps instead of in rows.
William Kent, who is known as the father of modern gardening, had a background as a painter and a theatre set designer. He spent almost 10 years in Italy studying painting and visiting and sketching gardens and architectural sites, and then later in England he attempted to recreate the sceneries and atmosphere of those golden years. ”He was a prime example of that persistent phenomenon, the Englishman whose visit to Italy forever afterwards holds him in its thrall.” (Hunt, 1987) Rousham is the only one of Kent’s gardens that has survived almost intact, and one of the most influential and appreciated English landscape gardens. Kent’s theatre background is clearly visible in how he creates a series of scenes and how he uses light, sets backgrounds and uses the element of surprise. The Italian influence is also very strong: it is as if he has translated old Rome into modern England.
Capability Brown ”was born at a time when English gardening was undergoing a radical change”. (Stroud, 1950) He was the successor of Kent and is known as the man who transformed the English countryside. In contrast to Kent, he compared his work rather to literature than to paintings or theatre. Starting as a gardener’s apprentice and eventually joining the gardening staff at Stowe, he quickly gained reputation as a proponent of the new English style. He developed a formula that he used on over 170 parks across Britain, and depending on the viewpoint either destroyed or impoved the existing gardens. His works are often mistaken as nature, when in fact they are completely artificial and no such scenery naturally exists. The works of Brown and Kent still have an effect on how we understand nature, and this image of ’natural nature’ has been exported worldwide.
During the late 18th century the landscape garden spread across Europe and influenced the designs of country estates as well as public parks in France and Germany and as far as Russia. The style arrived in Finland through Sweden in the 19th century. This was in the romantic era, so the landscape gardens in Finland were designed to be quite romantic and to evoke certain feelings. They were also much smaller and fewer due to a lack of resources. In addition, they were mainly not designed by professionals but relied on the skills and knowledge of the landowners, and the follies in them served as storage space or even as restrooms. (Frondelius) A good example is the Sinebrychoff park in Helsinki, which was created by the wealthy businessman Nikolai Sinebrychoff in 1842. The park has all of the typical elements of an English landscape garden, complete with a folly tower as an eye-catcher. The English influence is clearly visible in most 20th century parks in Helsinki as well: they all have huge lawns dotted with trees and pavilions and have alleyways curving in a line of grace, although sometimes the English trees are replaced by evergreens more suitable to the climate.
When the landscape garden style had finally reached faraway countries such as Finland, a new style had already emerged in England. The Arts and Crafts style was a movement against industrialisation and an attempt to recreate lost values such as craftsmanship. Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire is an excellent example of this, because the materials of both the house and the garden were locally sourced and hand worked by local craftsmen. The style of planting was natural, and in contrast with the earlier landscape gardens, flowers and fruit trees were common (Figure 6). A feature which was adopted from Kent’s and Brown’s designs was the ha-ha, which allowed unobstructed views out to the countryside. Inspiration was drawn from an idealised lost past and from the Middle Ages, and a medieval style formal layout with a kitchen garden can also be seen in Rodmarton. The topiary and clipped hedges of the Arts and Crafts gardens resemble the French formal gardens, but the ideals behind those two are completely different. By understanding the context and relationships of all these different garden styles we are able to see and appreciate them and their influence in a whole new way.