The fullest contemporary description of the English landscape garden at the height of Brown’s career: the materials of gardening (ground, wood, water, rocks and buildings) treated one by one, then the kinds of scene, with descriptions of Stowe, Hagley, the Leasowes, Painshill and Blenheim.
Thomas Whately (d. 1772) was a politician, secretary to the Treasury under George Grenville, and wrote this book as a private study. It was widely read in England and in France, where it was translated in 1771, and Thomas Jefferson carried it with him when he toured English gardens in 1786.
Whately does not mention Brown by name, but he describes the gardens Brown and his rivals were making, and his rules are the clearest statement of their practice: that ground should flow in easy undulations; that wood is to be disposed in clumps, groves and woods, with outlines broken and irregular; that water should seem natural, a river whose ends are hidden or a lake whose edges are varied; and that buildings should be few and suited to their place.
The book, part by part
I The materials: ground, wood, water, rocks, buildings
How each is to be shaped, planted or placed; the forms of clumps, groves and thickets; the river and the lake; the character of buildings.
Rules: A lake that seems a river · Lawn to the door, clumps on the rises, a belt round the edge
II Of art, of character, and of scenes
Emblematic and expressive character; the farm, the garden, the park and the riding; descriptions of Stowe, Hagley, Painshill, the Leasowes, Woburn Farm and Blenheim.