The English invention of the eighteenth century: the walls thrown down and the garden made to look like idealised countryside, first as a sequence of pictures with temples and inscriptions (Kent, Stowe, Stourhead), then as the open park of grass, trees and water that Capability Brown made round some two hundred country houses.
The landscape garden began in argument. Addison in The Spectator (1712) and Pope in The Guardian (1713) mocked topiary and the geometry of the Dutch garden; Shaftesbury and the Whig writers linked the clipped garden with absolute monarchy and the free-growing tree with English liberty. Pope’s Epistle to Burlington (1731) gave the new garden its first rule: to consult the genius of the place (Consult the genius of the place).
Charles Bridgeman, royal gardener from 1728, kept the straight walks but opened the garden to the country with the sunk fence or ha-ha, a ditch with a wall on the garden side that keeps out cattle without breaking the view (The ha-ha: a boundary that cannot be seen). William Kent, a painter who had studied in Rome, then broke the straight lines. At Chiswick, Claremont, Stowe and Rousham (1737–41) he composed the ground as a painter composes, with groups of trees, light and shade, a winding stream, and temples placed where they would be seen across water, after the paintings of Claude and Poussin (The garden as a picture). Gardens of this first generation were walked as a circuit, with buildings and inscriptions that carried meanings: the Elysian Fields at Stowe, with the Temples of Ancient Virtue and of British Worthies, are a Whig political argument; Stourhead (from 1741), round its lake, recalls Aeneas’s journey.
Lancelot Brown (1716–1783), called “Capability” from his habit of telling owners that their land had capabilities, was head gardener at Stowe in the 1740s and set up on his own in 1751. In thirty years he made or remade some two hundred parks, among them Croome, Petworth, Bowood, Blenheim, Burghley and Chatsworth. He wrote no treatise, but his manner is plain from the parks themselves and from Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). Grass runs right up to the house; the ha-ha keeps the cattle and deer off it. A lake is made by damming a stream, its ends hidden so that it seems a river. Trees stand in clumps on the rising ground and in a belt of woodland round the edge of the park, with a drive inside it (Lawn to the door, clumps on the rises, a belt round the edge, A lake that seems a river). There are few buildings and no flowers near the house; the kitchen garden and flower garden are walled and out of sight.
Brown’s trees were mostly native or long naturalised: oak, beech, elm and sweet chestnut in the clumps and belts, with Scots pine for shelter and, as single specimens near the house, the cedar of Lebanon, introduced in the seventeenth century and prized for its spreading layers. He planted with nurse trees, larch and fir, to be thinned as the hardwoods grew: he was planting for a hundred years ahead.
The landscape garden was copied all over Europe as the jardin anglais or englischer Garten: at Ermenonville and Wörlitz, in the Englischer Garten in Munich, at Pavlovsk, and in America at Monticello and Mount Vernon. In England it was soon attacked as bare and monotonous by Price and Knight, the champions of the Picturesque, and defended and modified by Humphry Repton.