A manual for the owner of a house and garden in the new suburbs, from a terrace house to a villa of ten acres, in which Loudon sets out the gardenesque: a garden planted so that each tree and shrub can grow to its full form and be seen as a specimen.
Loudon (1783–1843), a Scot, was the most productive horticultural writer of his age: the Encyclopaedia of Gardening (1822), the Gardener’s Magazine (1826–44), the eight volumes of the Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838) on every tree and shrub hardy in Britain, and much else. He invented a wrought-iron sash bar (1816) that made curved glass roofs possible, and he designed the Derby Arboretum (1840), the first public arboretum, given to the town by Joseph Strutt.
He had coined the word gardenesque in 1832. In The Suburban Gardener he explains it against the picturesque. The picturesque groups plants as a painter would, letting them run together; the gardenesque sets them apart, so that each may develop its natural shape and be admired for it, and prefers foreign trees and shrubs, because they show at once that the place is a garden and not a wild scene. Loudon took this as a general law, which he called the principle of recognition: a work of art must be recognisable as art. He grades suburban houses by size into four rates and shows how the garden of each should be laid out.
The book, part by part
I Choosing and planning a suburban residence
The site, the soil, the aspect; the four rates of suburban house and garden.
II The styles of laying out
The geometric, the picturesque and the gardenesque; the principle of recognition; the placing of specimen trees, flower beds and walks.