A handbook of garden design and planting by a London surveyor and writer of builders’ books, with plates of designs for wildernesses and labyrinths with winding walks, and a set of general directions for the laying out of a garden after a more grand and rural manner than the formal gardens before it.
Batty Langley (1696–1751) was the son of a gardener at Twickenham. He became the most prolific writer of pattern books for builders in Georgian London, among them The City and Country Builder’s and Workman’s Treasury of Designs (1740), and later tried to give Gothic its own orders.
The New Principles sets out general directions for a garden: the house to open on a lawn, groves and wildernesses of trees cut through by serpentine walks, the walks to end in views of woods, ruins, buildings or the country, and no clipped evergreens or regular figures where nature would do better. The book stands between the formal garden of London and Wise and the landscape garden of Kent.
The book, part by part
I General directions for laying out gardens
The lawn before the house, the groves at its sides, the wildernesses and their walks, the views that end the walks.
II Fruit, forest trees and kitchen gardens
The raising of fruit and forest trees, evergreens and shrubs; the herbs and plants of the kitchen garden.