CHAPTER XII 



LANDSCAPE GARDENING 



" . . . So will I rest in hope 

 To see wide plains, fair trees, and lawney slope ; 

 The morn, the eve, the light, the shade, the flowers ; 

 Clear streams, smooth lakes, and overlooking towers." 



i Keats. 



IS there anything more shocking than a stiff, regular 

 garden P" 1 What a revolution of the taste in gardening 

 these words reveal ! Yet such a complete change in fashion 

 had taken place that this was the opinion held by all the 

 garden designers of the latter half of the eighteenth century. 

 Nor were they content to lay out new gardens to suit the 

 prevailing style, but they freely destroyed, and abused, where 

 they could not obliterate, the work of former generations. 

 The leader of this new departure in garden design was Kent. 

 He was the successor of Bridgeman, and at first made gardens 

 on the same plan. Soon, however, he went so far beyond him 

 as to entirely leave the formal garden, and substitute for it the 

 landscape style. Walpole considers the first step towards this 

 revolution to have been the introduction of the, sunk fence. 

 And certainly he there touched the key-note, for as soon as 

 walls and enclosures were dispensed with, any piece of natural 

 and rural scenery could be included in the garden. " The 

 capital stroke," 2 he wrote, " the leading step to all that has 

 followed, was (I believe the first thought was Bridgeman's) 

 the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of 

 fosses ... an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the 



1 Batty Langley, New Principles of Gardening, 1728. 



2 Essay on Modern Gardening, by Horace Walpole, 1785. 



243 16 — 2 



