Art of Culture : Garden Design Style

This is the period when botanical interest was so great that lavish publications in parts such as Curtis's Botanical Magazine, Andrews's Botanists' Repository, and specialist works such as Andrews's monograph on Heaths and Sweet's on Geraneaceae, had many subscribers; the period when the type of cheap gardening magazine written by professional gardeners for enthusiasts of the artisan and middle classes first appeared; it was the era of the encyclopedic publications of Loudon himself. It was because even Loudon realized that people did not think of gardening as an `Art of Taste' but only as an `Art of Culture' that he planned a series of reprints. He collected Repton's works in 18401 and prepared also to reprint selected works on the Geometric Style, the Landscape Style, and the Picturesque Style, but was prevented by his death in 1843. The straw of Loudon's reprint plan showed that the wind of self-criticism was gently stirring again amongst the hot-houses and frames and collections of this and of that. His own notions on landscape gardening can best be extracted from his Arboretum et Fruticetum Britannicum (1838): `A residence laid out in the modern style, with the surface of the ground disposed in imitation of the undulations of nature, and the trees scattered over it in groups and masses, neither in straight lines, nor cut into artificial shapes, might be mistaken for nature, were not the trees planted chiefly of foreign kinds not to be met with in the natural or general scenery of the country. Everything in modern landscape gardening, therefore, depends on the use of foreign trees and shrubs; and, when it is once properly understood that no residence in the modern style can have a claim to be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved varieties of indigenous ones, the grounds of every country seat, from the cottage to the mansion, will become an arboretum, differing only in the number of species which it contains.'