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/’ 
Keats. 
“ T S there anything more shocking than a stiff, regular 
X 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 
