The History of Garden Design

All gardens are the product of leisure. There is no point in looking at garden design in a society which needs all its energies to survive. As soon as a society has time and energy to spare, some of the excess is devoted to enjoying the residual aspects of enclosure, of cultivation, and of unhumanized landscape, and this leads us to garden design. Ideally, a garden is a place of contemplation, meditation, and relaxation. In modern terms, biofeedback is the reaction of our bodies to our environments.

Garden Design Reflects the Person
A garden is man's idealized view of the world; and because most men are representative of the society of which they are a part, it follows that fashionable gardens of any community and any period betray the dream world which is the period's ideal. All history is one. Gardens cannot be considered in detachment from the people who made them. It is because no history of gardens has been written primarily from this point of view that this web site has seemed worth attempting. An account of the changes of taste in gardening considered only as the fluctuation of fashion is not really history, for history explores causes and relates effects, anything less is a chronicle.

Seeing Garden Design in Historical Perspective
I must try to make clear two things which follow from this approach: the first, that garden design taken as an exampls has to be the most influential in own their time and not necessarily ones that survive; and the second, that a plan or picture or description of a garden as it was first conceived is far more to our purpose than a photograph of an overgrown fragment which, however attractive now, may bear little relation to the intentions of its maker.

Defining the History of Garden Design
This is not a history of gardening as a craft, it is the history of garden design. Such things as the importation of plants are only of importance in this web site when they have bearing on the palette of the gardener. A history of the art of painting would be thought strange if nine-tenths of it were devoted to the introduction of new pigments, and to the lives and adventures of the chemists who discovered them, and yet, nowadays, it is very often this type of information which passes as a history of gardening. The cause of this lies in the contemporary popular approach to garden design which enabled a distinguished modern writer (who should have known better) to say that a garden was essentially a place in which to grow plants... But I am not to be trapped into a definition. It is enough to say that it is the garden as a work of art which concerns us here.

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