6 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE 



use. In a very real sense such work covers agriculture, for- 

 estry, gardening, engineering and the elements of architecture. 

 Landscape architecture has been denned as "a group of 

 activities which include horticulture, architecture, civil en- 

 gineering and agriculture." Humphrey Repton, a great 

 English authority on matters of this sort, says that in order 

 to carry out this line of work one must possess not only artis- 

 tic ability and taste, but "a complete knowledge of surveying, 

 mechanics, hydraulics, botany and the general principles of 

 architecture." We may well weigh his words, for Hum- 

 phrey Repton was a cultivated English gentleman of great 

 refinement and good taste. He was the first Englishman 

 from such a grade of society to undertake the planning or 

 designing of country estates. Kent, one of his predecessors 

 in this line of work, was a coach painter by trade who pos- 

 sessed some artistic taste but little culture. "Capability" 

 Brown, Repton's most famous immediate predecessor, was 

 a gardener, who, by association with men of refinement and 

 by his tact and native ability, worked his way up to an hon- 

 orable place; but Repton was a well-educated Englishman, 

 who had traveled and studied much. Repton, however, 

 called himself a landscape gardener, as did all of the ethers 

 at that time, but Mr. Olmsted chose to avoid that term for 

 several reasons. In the first place, these workers in land- 

 scape design in England had confined their efforts almost 

 entirely to the design of country estates. The term, land- 

 scape gardening, was, I believe ; first used by the poet Shen- 

 stone to mean particularly an informal or picturesque treat- 

 ment of the grounds of an estate, as distinguished from the 

 older style of formal treatment that had been in vogue and 

 carried to such excess. In the early part of the eighteenth 

 century formality had been pushed to the point of puerility. 

 A reaction set in, due to numerous causes, and the "new 

 style," or so-called "English style," was introduced by Kent 

 and others, who, as Sir Horace Walpole enthusiastically ex- 

 claimed, "leaped the wall and saw all nature was a garden," 

 and so in fact it is in those delightful parts of old England in 

 which they labored; those country estates with their deer 

 parks and pleasure grounds. These men made a practice of 

 designing country places in an informal or naturalistic 

 manner, and termed this landscape gardening. They were 

 in favor of abolishing all formality, and they themselves 

 carried their theory to excess. 



