The English Landscape Garden

18th century England saw a shift in the style of gardens. The beginning of the century was dominated by countless cookie-cutter baroque gardens, and they became something commonplace. That, coupled with increasing feelings of hatred between the French and the British, led the Brits to radically redesign the garden.

This revolution first began with Charles Bridgeman. He was the pioneer of free form landscape gardening, and was a key transitional piece. Bridgeman's landscapes followed an overarching structured form, similar to geometric baroque gardens, but he played with curves within the constructs of a structured garden.

His more naturalistic, wandering designs can be seen in this 1720 aerial drawing of Stowe. While the garden is still dominated by straight lines, the meandering paths it did have were a completely new idea in England at the time. Sadly, many of his original landscape gardens were redesigned by the likes of William Kent and Capability Brown as this style of garden became more popular, and no pure Bridgeman design still exists. 

William Kent was the next of influential persons to work with English landscape gardens. He was many things, including an architect, painter and a gardener. He picked up where Charles Bridgeman left off, and went 10 steps farther. While he was not a horticultural genius, he was a genius when it came to landscape design, and often designed the landscapes and let others carry them to fruition.

This picture of the Vale of Venus at Rousham shows how Kent designed gardens in a way that brought landscape painting to life. He utilized natural forms and colors to create spaces that illicit emotional responses, and this is still true even today in the gardens like Rousham where his work can still be seen. 

Capability Brown was the last great English landscape garden designer. He worked after both Bridgeman and Kent, and began by first working under Kent at Stowe. He created more than 170 landscape gardens for estates and country homes during his career. His style was dominated by sloping meadows of grass, which seemed to effortlessly incorporate the homes into the scenic panorama.

Brown's landscapes can be experienced at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, and in many other places across England. His landscapes were developed to be beautiful to the eye, without the viewer necessarily realizing they were looking at a carefully designed space. Use of hidden dams to create naturalistic lakes and gently sculpted hills elicit emotion from the landscape, and this really is the ultimate purpose of the English landscape garden.

Sources:
http://faculty.bsc.edu/jtatter/sleepwood.html (Bridgewater)
http://www.rousham.org (Kent)
http://www.blenheimpalace.com (Brown)