Middleton Place

Henry hired an English garden designer, who seems to have been working in Charleston at the time. The designer's name has been forgotten, but he was obviously very talented. When people think of English landscape gardens, they tend to picture Capability Brown's informal compositions of lawn, water and trees - an idealized form of nature, but the garden at Middleton Place reflects the landscape gardens of the early eighteenth century, when English designers began to soften the grand French style of LeNotre into a style that would be seen as English.

It is difficult to believe that the designer of Middleton Place's garden was unfamiliar with the garden at Studley Royal. This is widely recognized as the most beautiful formal watergarden in England and was created by John Aislabie between 1722 and his death in 1742. Middleton Place's twin butterfly lakes could almost have been designed by Aislabie. Of course, there were probably more English gardens in the style of Studly Royal, it is just that most of them were transformed into informal gardens during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The 1740's were a decade of transition in the English landscape style. The garden of Middleton Place was in the latest style when it was begun in 1741, but by the time that the construction was completed a decade later, it was already old fashioned. This makes its survival especially important, because only a few gardens in this style have survived in England.