How has the English landscape garden developed?

Romantic wilderness

As the picturesque came to be valued in the later eighteenth-century, the pastoral gave way increasingly to the wild and Romantic. Humphry Repton (1752–1818) and his contemporaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to add artificial ruins and wildernesses to the gardens at Blaise Castle and Woburn Abbey.

Later developments

The landscape garden continued to evolve over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the Arts and Crafts movement’s turn toward the cottage garden, which combined function with aesthetic appeal. This culminated in Gertrude Jekyll’s designs at Munstead Wood and in Vita Sackville-West’s garden at Sissinghurst Castle.

Landscapes of meaning

At every point in the history of English landscape design, the garden was invested with political meaning. To garden in the informal style after the Glorious Revolution was to state opposition to Stuart tyranny, whilst Capability Brown’s eighteenth-century pastoral gardens expressed the polite civility to which England’s landed classes aspired.

Repton’s Romantic landscapes embraced the savage freedom of the natural world, which hinted at social and political disruption. The Arts and Crafts garden style was a rejection of industrial England and an attempt to restore the landscape to a pre-industrial ideal.

Trusted source

This article contains contributions from Allison Adler Kroll from the University of Oxford who specialises in English literature, history, and culture from 1800 to the present day, and also has research interests in political history and theatre. Allison is a contributor to the Trusted Source project.