Italian, French or English? How to tell historic garden styles apart

The three great European traditions of the garden followed one another, and each grew out of the last. The Italian villa garden took shape between about 1450 and 1600; the French formal garden was perfected by André Le Nôtre between the 1650s and 1700; the English landscape garden replaced it in England between about 1715 and 1780. Each was then copied, revived and mixed for the next two centuries, so that a garden may be in one style and of a much later date. Three questions sort most of them: what the ground does, what the water does, and whether the plants are clipped.

The ground

Italian: a slope, often steep, cut into level terraces held by retaining walls and joined by stairs and ramps. The terraces give views out over the country and down the garden.

French: level ground, or ground levelled at great cost, treated as one wide plane seen in perspective from the house. Changes of level are shallow and often hidden, so that the view along the axis seems continuous.

English: the natural roll of the land, smoothed and exaggerated, with no terraces and no walls. Rises are crowned with trees; hollows are filled with water.

The water

Italian: water in motion, brought from a spring or river above the garden and let down through it: jets, cascades, water organs, grottoes, the stepped catena d’acqua of the Villa Lante. French: water at rest, in long canals and still basins that reflect the sky and the house, with fountains on the axes. English: a lake of irregular outline made by damming a stream, its ends hidden so that it seems a river.

The plants

Italian: evergreens clipped into architecture and set against stone: box and myrtle in low hedges round geometric beds, cypress in avenues and as single dark spires, holm oak and bay clipped into walls, lemons in terracotta pots. Flowers are few and mostly in the walled giardino segreto.

French: the same clipping on a vast scale. Dwarf box draws the scrolls of the parterre de broderie on coloured gravel by the house; hornbeam is clipped into green walls, palissades, along the allées; lime and elm make the avenues; yew is cut into cones and obelisks along the parterres; and the blocks of trees, the bosquets, hide green rooms and fountains.

English: nothing is clipped. Oak, beech, sweet chestnut and elm grow to their full forms in clumps, singly on the grass and in a belt round the park, with cedars of Lebanon near the house. The boundary is a ha-ha. Flowers are walled away out of sight.

Side by side

What confuses them

The Dutch and English formal garden. Between about 1660 and 1720 the French manner was built in the Netherlands and England on a smaller scale, with more flowers, more topiary, narrow canals and lead statues: Het Loo, Hampton Court, Westbury Court, Levens Hall. It looks French in plan but is intimate and enclosed, and it was nearly all swept away by the landscape garden. What survives in England is often restored.

The Victorian Italianate garden. From the 1830s Charles Barry and others built terraces with balustrades, urns and fountains at Trentham, Harewood and Cliveden, and filled them with bright bedding. They look Italian in their stonework and French in their parterres, but they sit on gentle English ground and are planted with tender flowers no Renaissance gardener knew.

The Edwardian revival. Around 1900 architects such as Harold Peto, Reginald Blomfield and Edwin Lutyens revived the Italian and English formal gardens, with terraces, pergolas, clipped yew and rills. These are Arts and Crafts gardens: the planting, borders of hardy flowers in drifts of colour, gives them away.

Layers. Many gardens hold all three. Blenheim has Brown’s park round a formal water terrace of the 1920s; Chatsworth has a cascade of 1696, a park by Brown and Paxton’s Victorian works; Stowe has Bridgeman’s straight lines under Kent’s and Brown’s curves. Look for the oldest trees, the line of the walls and the shape of the water, and date each part separately.