This plan for a garden was drawn by John Claudius Loudon (1783 - 1843) in the style which he called "gardenesque". Note the round and comma (or tadpole) shaped beds on the triangular lawn below the side of the house. Loudon felt that such shapes were perfectly suited to gardenesque gardens because they were obviously created by man rather than nature.
By the end of the 18th century, landscape gardens in the English style were being created throughout Europe. Capability Brown had been the dominant figure in the landscape movement for 30 years until his death in 1783. Brown's designs were composed of lawn, water, and groups of native trees. The many plants which were being introduced from around the world were mainly grown in walled gardens which, like the walled vegetable gardens of the period, were usually located in a sheltered spot well away from the main house. Brown's successor, Humphrey Repton, designed gardens in a style very similar to Brown's, but he did introduce formal elements, such as flower beds and planted terraces, next to the house.
After Repton's death in 1818, none of the major garden designers or writers were promoting landscape gardens in the style of Capability Brown. His smooth lawns studded by clumps of trees were felt to be unnatural and rather boring. There were now three main approaches to garden design: some wanted to return to the formal tradition which had dominated the gardens of Western Civilization since ancient Egypt, while others wanted gardens to evoke the beauty of untamed nature, but with a landscape painter's sense of composition. A third group wanted to continue an informal approach to garden design, but they didn't see why gardens needed to imitate nature.
John Claudius Loudon (1783 - 1843) embraced all three approaches during his 40 year career as a garden designer and writer. He began as a passionate champion of picturesque gardens. He almost seemed to feel that gardens should be designed by landscape painters rather than garden designers or horticulturists. By 1811, Loudon had saved enough money to finance a tour of European gardens. After visiting many of Europe's great formal gardens, he could appreciate that formal gardens were as beautiful as informal gardens. In his Encyclopedia of Gardening, which was published in 1822, Loudon expressed his feeling that "to say that landscape gardening is an improvement on geometric gardening, is a similar misapplication of language, as to say that a lawn is an improvement of a cornfield, because it is substituted in its place. It is absurd therefore, to despise the ancient style, because it has not the same beauties as the modern, to which it never aspired. It has beauties of a different kind, equally perfect of their own kind as those of the modern style."
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