•y 



THE HISTORY OF GARDEN-MAKING 



little sense there was in the adulation of landscape gardening, as it 

 was then understood, can be judged from a sentence of Walpole's, that 

 " Kent leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden." 

 Yet Kent, despite his destruction of many interesting examples of 

 the work of his predecessors, and despite, also, the unsoundness ot 

 his artistic principle, must be ranked as a most conservative person 

 and as a most enlightened designer beside the designers who suc- 

 ceeded him. The art of gardening fell into the hands of such men 

 as Martin Brown — nicknamed " Capability " Brown — Humphrey 

 Repton, Wright, and Thomas Wheatly, who was responsible for the 

 up-rooting of what was left of the formal gardens at Nonsuch Palace ; 

 and all of these had even less sympathy than Kent with the old ideas 

 and less capacity to conceive new ones. All they could do was to 

 go on obliterating the relics of the past and wrecking everything 

 which could claim consideration on the score of respectable antiquity 

 until they had provided ample justification for the plaintive lament 

 of Sir William Chambers, that " Our virtuosi have scarcely left an 

 acre of shade, or three trees growing in a line, fro m the Land's End 



to the Tweed." j 



The rnost notable of this group of gardeners was /' Capability " 

 Brown. \ He was not, like Kent, a trained artist who worked 

 mistakenly under the impression that he was following strict esthetic 



"^o . rules, he was not even a man of culture or educated conviction. 



i^\ Ignorant and untrained, he was by interest advanced from the charge 

 of Lord Cobham's kitchen garden to be gardener at Hampton 

 Court and Windsor, and on the strength of this appointment he 

 was able to pose as an authority on garden designing in the new 

 style. His services w ere widely in request ; everyone who was 

 bitten with the craze for improvement came to him for advice and 

 assistance, and he had endless opportunities of putting into practice 

 his crude theories of naturalistic design. As a consequence he did 

 an incalculable amount of harm, destroying right and left what 

 remained of the old pleasure grounds, and replacing them by 

 arrangements of his own devising. 



l^s he knew practically nothing of his subject, and as, moreover, he 

 prided himself on knowing nothing, he adopted a set formula which 

 expressed his conception of nature, and to this formula he almost 

 always adhered. His stock materials were a belt of plantation round 

 the space he had toTTy out, a few clumps of trees " playfully," as h"e" 

 called it, dotted about the ground, and a lake or stretch of river 

 brought in, as often as not, with hardly any reference to its sur- 

 roundings. That such narrow conventionality should ever have 

 xviii 



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