One of the most helpful books was The Principles of Gardening by Hugh Johnson, copyright 1979. The following quotation is from this book, "Successful gardens that we remember and return to when we can, have a strong sense of place, a powerful identity which unites their various parts. They may agree with the landscape round about, sharing it's views, it's landform and it's trees, or they may have to shun it, shutting out a city or a desert and starting afresh to create a fantasy world. To be convincing, though, gardens must be coherent. They must settle on a theme and follow it all the way. They must not be waylaid by irrelevancies or seduced by decorations. They may change key for a passage; certainly they must vary their rhythm. But as music respects the dominant, so they must return to their basic style."
By "style" he didn't necessarily mean an established style which everyone recognizes as a certain style. He was writing about developing a personal style. It is usually best for a personal style to evolve out of a traditional style, by creating within an established tradition; you benefit from the mistakes that earlier designers have made. It is very rare for a garden style to suddenly appear in it's "perfect" form with all of it's elements in total harmony with each other; this develops over time as possibilities are tried and accepted or rejected.
Creating within a tradition is not the same as just imitating the gardens of the past. One of the reasons why I find garden design so fascinating is because so many plants were introduced during the 19th and early 20th centuries that all of the possible ways of integrating these plants into a unified garden have not been thoroughly explored. Another reason for not copying the gardens of the past is that we don't live the way that people lived at the beginning of the 20th century, let alone the way that people lived in the 16th century. Gardens should be a product of how we actually live.
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