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English Landscape Gardens in the 1700s: The History of English Garden Design from Classical to Natural Style

© Kirk Johnson

Before the eighteenth century, English gardens tended to follow French and Dutch fashions, often employing French or Dutch garden designers.

During the latter half of the seventeenth century, English gardens were formal, as almost all European gardens had been for over a thousand years.

The Trasition from Formal Traditional Style to Natural Style

The desire for more “natural” gardens was first expressed by writers. Sir William Temple’s essay Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, first published in 1692, praised what its author imagined to be the Chinese Manner of garden design. Temple’s essay helped to open European minds to the possibility of creating non-traditional gardens.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was an English poet, essayist and literary critic who had a considerable influence on the ideas behind the English landscape garden. In an essay in the Guardian (1713), he urged a return to the “amiable simplicity of unadorned nature” in place of the formal garden; and he proclaimed, "In all, let nature never be forgot . . . Consult the genius of the place."

Indeed, the wooded parts of English gardens had been losing some of their formality during the late seventeenth century. The 1671 plan for the garden of Ham House shows the principal walks of its “wilderness” as being broad and straight, but between them are narrow paths which wind through the woods.

William Kent's Influence on English Garden Design

While the English landscape garden was inspired by vague ideas about Chinese gardens, the visual look of these gardens was mainly inspired by European landscape paintings. The English landscape style was dominated by three designers: William Kent, Lancelot (Capability) Brown and Humphrey Repton.

Trained as an artist, William Kent (1685-1748)'s landscape gardens were inspired by ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the paintings of Claude Lorraine, Gaspar Poussin and Salvator Rosa. Horace Walpole said that William Kent was ‘born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all of nature was a garden”.

This fence leaping was made possible by the use of the “ha-ha," a dry ditch with a retaining wall on the side of the garden to keep grazing animals out. From a distance a ha-ha is almost invisible, creating a vista from the house with no division between the lawn and surrounding meadows. The sheep and cattle could be kept in the meadows without having fences and walls breaking up the landscape.