- Simplicity and sensitivity to "organic" or natural appearing growth;
- Curves and gentle lines
- Naturalistic arrangements of planting.
Once more, although somewhat less precisely than with formal styles, we can trace the evolution of informal design principles through several national style developments. The Chinese, as population increased and cities became larger, kept for the most part to their original naturalistic ideas, but scaled them down to "Lake and Island Gardens," nature in miniature. The Japanese, emulating the Chinese, developed very structured and controlled gardens of romantic naturalism.
The wonderful highly architectural and tightly controlled Italian Renaissance gardens were literally let go in the 17th century. They began to be overshadowed by areas of wild wood and the naturalistic grottoes that were all the rage.
By the middle of the 18th century, ideas were drifting into France from Asia where nothing in a garden was symmetrical, and from England where gardens were being remodeled on naturalistic lines. However, after the French Revolution, the style that can be termed Anglo-chinois hit France with force. No mingling of styles was too bizarre. The English style, le jardin anglais, has co-existed, for better or worse, with the French style ever since.
Meanwhile, in England, the Landscape Gardening Movement was gathering force and in about 1730, William Kent figuratively "leaped the fence." The point of view was that there was neither beginning nor end to a garden; it was all to be idealized as an earthly paradise with flowing lines and a strong appreciation to what should appear to be the natural landscape. This technique was then overlaid with strong classical suggestions. As a result, a fairly simple formula was worked out to mold the English countryside to this ideal, the most famous of these gardens is Stourhead in Wiltshire.
Lancelot "Capability" Brown worked at Stourhead with Kent and began his career in 1751. The list of his works includes half of the great country houses of England, and he has been ostracized as a destroyer both during his time and now. Interestingly, Brown's vision of the English parkland is now accepted as natural and right.
Brown's successor Henry Repton "allowed" terraces and flowers to edge into the foreground from which Brown had banished them. His writings on design theory, The Art of Landscape Gardening (1807), are still among the best. However, in the before and after paintings Repton executed for prospective customers, Victorian romanticism appears to be creeping in.
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