English landscape garden

Castle Howard (1699–1712), a predecessor of the English garden modelled on the gardens of Versailles

The predecessors of the landscape garden in England were the great parks created by Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) and Nicholas Hawksmoor at Castle Howard (1699–1712), Blenheim Palace (1705–1722), and the Claremont Landscape Garden at Claremont House (1715–1727). These parks featured vast lawns, woods, and pieces of architecture, such as the classical mausoleum designed by Hawksmoor at Castle Howard. At the center of the composition was the house, behind which were formal and symmetrical gardens in the style of the garden à la française, with ornate carpets of floral designs and walls of hedges, decorated with statues and fountains. These gardens, modelled after the gardens of Versailles, were designed to impress visitors with their size and grandeur.[4]

The royal gardens at the private residence of Charles, Prince of Wales, Highgrove House, have been open to the public for 25 years. The gardens of the late 18th century home were overgrown and untended when Charles first moved in but have since flourished and now include rare trees, flowers and heirloom seeds. Current organic gardening techniques have allowed the gardens to serve also as a sustainable habitat for birds and wildlife.[5] The gardens were designed by Charles in consultation with highly regarded gardeners like Rosemary Verey and noted naturalist Miriam Rothschild.[6]

William Kent and Charles Bridgeman

The new style that became known as the English garden was invented by landscape designers William Kent and Charles Bridgeman, working for wealthy patrons, including Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, and banker Henry Hoare; men who had large country estates, were members of the anti-royalist Whig Party, had classical educations, were patrons of the arts, and had taken the Grand Tour to Italy, where they had seen the Roman ruins and Italian landscapes they reproduced in their gardens.

William Kent (1685–1748) was an architect, painter and furniture designer who introduced Palladian style architecture to England. Kent's inspiration came from Palladio's buildings in the Veneto and the landscapes and ruins around Rome—he lived in Italy from 1709 to 1719, and brought back many drawings of antique architecture and landscapes. His gardens were designed to complement the Palladian architecture of the houses he built.[7]

Charles Bridgeman (1690–1738) was the son of a gardener and an experienced horticulturist, who became the Royal Gardener for Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, responsible for tending and redesigning the royal gardens at Windsor, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court, St. James's Park and Hyde Park. He collaborated with Kent on several major gardens, providing the botanical expertise which allowed Kent to realize his architectural visions.[4]

Ionic Temple at Chiswick House

Rousham

Garden of Rousham House

Rousham House in Oxfordshire is considered by some as the most accomplished and significant of William Kent's work.[9] The patron was General Dormer, who commissioned Bridgeman to begin the garden in 1727, then brought in Kent to recreate it in 1737. Bridgeman had built a series of garden features including a grotto of Venus on the slope along the river Cherwell, connected by straight alleys. Kent turned the alleys into winding paths, built a gently turning stream, used the natural landscape features and slopes, and created a series of views and tableaux decorated with allegorical statues of Apollo, a wounded gladiator, a lion attacking a horse, and other subjects. He placed eyecatchers, pieces of classical architecture, to decorate the landscape, and made use of the ha-ha, a concealed ditch that kept grazing animals out of the garden while giving an uninterrupted vista from within. Finally, he added cascades modelled on those of the garden of Aldobrandini and Pratolino in Italy, to add movement and drama.[10]

Stowe House

Palladian bridge at Stowe (1730–38)

The Palladian bridge and Pantheon at Stourhead

Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, (1730–1738), was an even more radical departure from the formal French garden. In the early 18th century, Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham, had commissioned Charles Bridgeman to design a formal garden, with architectural decorations by John Vanbrugh. Bridgeman's design included an octagonal lake and a rotunda (1720–21) designed by Vanbrugh.

In the 1730s, William Kent and James Gibbs were appointed to work with Bridgeman, who died in 1738. Kent remade the lake in a more natural shape, and created a new kind of garden, which took visitors on a tour of picturesque landscapes. It eventually included a Palladian bridge (1738); a Temple of Venus (1731) in the form of a Palladian villa; a Temple of Ancient Virtues (1737), with statues of famous Greeks and Romans; a Temple of British Worthies (1734–1735), with statues of British heroes; and a Temple of Modern Virtues, which was deliberately left in ruins, which contained a headless statue of Robert Walpole, Cobham's political rival.[11]

The garden attracted visitors from all over Europe, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It became the inspiration for landscape gardens in Britain and on the Continent.

The Kew Gardens Pagoda at Kew, west London (1761)

The Far East inspired the origins of the English Garden via Holland. In 1685, the English diplomat in The Hague and writer Sir William Temple wrote an essay Upon the garden of Epicurus (published in 1690), which contrasted European theories of symmetrical gardens with asymmetrical compositions from China, for which he introduced the Japanese term sharawadgi.[19][20][21] Temple had never visited the Far East, but he was in contact with the Dutch and their discourse on irregularity in design, had spoken to a merchant who had been in the Far East for a long time, and read the works of European travellers there. He noted that Chinese gardens avoided formal rows of trees and flower beds, and instead placed trees, plants, and other garden features in irregular ways to strike the eye and create beautiful compositions, with an understatement criticizing the formal compositions of the gardens at the Palace of Versailles of Louis XIV of France.[22] His observations on the Chinese garden were cited by the essayist Joseph Addison in an essay in 1712, who used them to attack the English gardeners who, instead of imitating nature, tried to make their gardens in the French style, as far from nature as possible.[23]

The novelty and exoticism of Chinese art and architecture in Europe led in 1738 to the construction of the first Chinese house in an English garden, in the garden of Stowe House. The style became even more popular thanks to William Chambers (1723–1796), who lived in China from 1745 to 1747, and wrote a book, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils. To which is annexed, a Description of their Temples, Houses, Gardens, &c. published in 1757. In 1761 he built a Chinese pagoda, house and garden in Kew, London, as part of Kew Gardens, a park with gardens and architecture symbolizing all parts of the world and all architectural styles. Thereafter Chinese pagodas began to appear in other English gardens, then in France and elsewhere on the continent. French and other European observers coined the term Jardin Anglo-Chinois (Anglo-Chinese garden) for this style of garden.[21][24]

The Gothic temple on Hawkwelle Hill at Stowe House

In the 1750s, classical architecture and Chinese architecture were joined by Gothic revival ruins in English gardens. This was largely the result of Horace Walpole, who introduced Gothic revival features into his house and garden at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham.[25]

At Stowe, Capability Brown followed the new fashion between 1740 and 1753 by adding a new section to the park, called Hawkwelle Hill or the Gothic promenade, with a Gothic revival building.[26]

The English Grounds of Wörlitz were one of the largest English parks in 18th-century Europe

Descriptions of English gardens were first brought to France by the Abbé Le Blanc, who published accounts of his voyage in 1745 and 1751. A treatise on the English garden, Observations on Modern Gardening, written by Thomas Whately and published in London in 1770, was translated into French in 1771. After the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, French noblemen were able to voyage to England and see the gardens for themselves, and the style began to be adapted in French gardens. The new style also had the advantage of requiring fewer gardeners, and was easier to maintain, than the French garden.[27]

One of the first English gardens on the continent was at Ermenonville, in France, built by marquis René Louis de Girardin from 1763 to 1776 and based on the ideals of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was buried within the park. Rousseau and the garden's founder had visited Stowe a few years earlier. Other early examples were the Désert de Retz, Yvelines (1774–1782); the Gardens of the Château de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, west of Paris (1777–1784); The Folie Saint James, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, (1777–1780); and the Château de Méréville, in the Essonne department, (1784–1786). Even at Versailles, the home of the most classical of all French gardens, a small English landscape park with a Roman temple was built and a mock village, the Hameau de la Reine (1783–1789), was created for Marie Antoinette.

The monopteros in the Munich Englischer Garten

The new style also spread to Germany. The central English Grounds of Wörlitz, in the Principality of Anhalt, was laid out between 1769 and 1773 by Prince Leopold III, based on the models of Claremont, Stourhead and Stowe Landscape Garden. Another notable example was The Englischer Garten in Munich, Germany, created in 1789 by Sir Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814).

In the Netherlands the landscape-architect Lucas Pieters Roodbaard (1782–1851) designed several gardens and parks in this style. The style was introduced to Sweden by Fredrik Magnus Piper.

In Poland the main example of this style is Łazienki Park in Warsaw. The garden scheme owes its shape and appearance mainly to the last king of the country Stanisław August Poniatowski (Stanisław II Augustus). In another part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth the Sofiyivka Park (Zofiówka), now Ukraine, was designed by Count Potocki so as to illustrate the Odyssey and the Iliad.

The style also spread rapidly to Russia, where in 1774 Catherine the Great adapted the new style in the park of her palace at Tsarskoe Selo, complete with a mock Chinese village and a Palladian bridge, modeled after that at Wilton House. A much larger park was created for her son Paul in the neighbouring estate of Pavlovsk. The Monrepos Park is sited on the rocky island of Linnasaari in the Vyborg Bay and is noted for its glacially deposited boulders and granite rocks.

1803 painting of English garden's elements

The continental European "English garden" is characteristically on a smaller scale. Such gardens usually lack the sweeping vistas of gently rolling ground and water, that in England tend to be set against a woodland background with clumps of trees and outlier groves. Instead, they are often more densely studded with "eye-catchers", such as grottoes, temples, tea-houses, belvederes, pavilions, sham ruins, bridges, and statues. The name English garden—not used in the United Kingdom, where "landscape garden" serves—differentiates it from the formal Baroque design of the garden à la française. One of the best-known English gardens in Europe is the Englischer Garten in Munich.

The dominant style was revised in the early 19th century to include more "gardenesque"[28] features, including shrubberies with gravelled walks, tree plantations to satisfy botanical curiosity, and, most notably, the return of flowers, in skirts of sweeping planted beds. This is the version of the landscape garden most imitated in Europe in the 19th century. The outer areas of the "home park" of English country houses retain their naturalistic shaping. English gardening since the 1840s has been on a more restricted scale, closer and more allied to the residence.

The canonical European English park contains a number of Romantic elements. Always present is a pond or small lake with a pier or bridge. Overlooking the pond is a round or hexagonal pavilion, often in the shape of a monopteros, a Roman temple. Sometimes the park also has a "Chinese" pavilion. Other elements include a grotto and imitation ruins.

A second style of English garden, which became popular during the 20th century in France and northern Europe, is the late 19th-century English cottage garden.[29]

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  Pinetum at Bowood House
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  View from Capability Brown's grotto at Bowood House
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  Bridge and mausoleum at Castle Howard
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  Sheffield Park Garden
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  Hawkwell Hill with Gothic temple, Cobham monument and Palladian bridge at Stowe House
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  Eyecatching pantheon at Stourhead estate
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  Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, showing the late 18th century "Temple of Aesculapius", built as an eyecatcher in the manner of the lake at Stourhead
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  Royal Castle of Laeken
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  The "Temple of Friendship" in Pavlovsk Park
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  Felseninsel Stein and Villa Hamilton in Wörlitzer Park

Wikimedia Commons has media related to English gardens.

• The English Garden Magazine website
• The English Landscape Garden (1600-1818)