The English landscape park
A park of the eighteenth century round a Palladian house. In Brown’s manner the lawn runs to the house, a stream is dammed into a serpentine lake, trees stand in clumps and in a belt round the edge, and a ha-ha keeps the cattle off without a visible fence. Kent’s manner has temples and looser planting by a winding river; Repton’s brings back a terrace and a flower garden beside the house; the Picturesque wants rough ground, rocks and shaggy trees.
The rules it illustrates
Consult the genius of the place. Let the character of the site direct the design: whether the ground should be raised or lowered, a view opened or closed, water led or stilled. Prefer variety, surprise and concealed bounds to symmetry.
The garden as a picture. Compose the garden as a painter composes a landscape: in groups of trees for light and shade, with water winding through the hollows and a temple or bridge placed where it will be seen across it, so that each turn of the walk opens a new picture.
Lawn to the door, clumps on the rises, a belt round the edge. Bring grass up to the walls of the house and keep the cattle off it with a ha-ha; plant trees in clumps on the rising ground and as single specimens on the lawn; and enclose the park with a belt of woodland, with a drive inside it from which the park is seen.
A lake that seems a river. Make the lake by damming a stream in its valley, give it a winding, irregular outline with promontories, and hide both its ends behind trees, a bend or a bridge, so that it seems a river flowing through the park.
The four requisites of landscape gardening. Show the natural beauties of a place and hide its defects; give it an appearance of extent and freedom by disguising the boundary; conceal every interference of art, so that the whole seems natural; and remove or hide whatever serves only convenience and cannot be made ornamental.
The approach to the house. Let the approach be the natural road to the house, without needless turns; let it show the house first at an angle, so that two sides are seen, and not head-on down an avenue; and make it plain that the road leads to this house and nowhere else.
A terrace and flower garden at the foot of the house. Do not bring the park up to the walls of a house: give the house a terrace, steps and a flower garden in formal lines between it and the park, because the house is a work of art and must be joined to the landscape by art.
Roughness and sudden variation. Value in a landscape the qualities painters seek, roughness, sudden variation and irregularity, which are neither beautiful nor sublime but picturesque; keep old trees, broken banks and intricate views, and do not smooth everything into lawn and clump.
Where it appears in the book
In the styles English landscape garden, The Picturesque.
In the chapters Gardens and Landscape.