Natural Landscapes : Garden Design Style

The premise on which this remarkable doctrine was erected is briefly that all art must be recognizable as `art' and not as `nature', that as the system of laying out grounds was that of imitating nature the only way to show that your work of art was `unnatural' was to use materials which nature did not. In one way or another poor `nature' had clearly had its day, for these `natural' landscapes of Loudon are as unnatural in the English countryside as Pope's grotto was by the Thames. Loudon's first publication was Observations on Laying-out Public Squares (1803); among his last were The Suburban Gardener and Villa Companion (1836) and a work on planning cemeteries (1843). The most notable places he designed were Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Derby Arboretum, and the cemeteries of Southampton and Bath. His influence was widespread at one time he edited no fewer than five periodicals. At first glance the gardening history of the nineteenth century gives the jumbled impression of a Victorian what-not. The reason for this is the more than ordinarily jumbled nature of Victorian society. If Georgian society with its relative coherence could produce more or less concurrently three distinct styles, it would not be surprising if the Victorians because of fragmentation produced either myriads of styles or none at all. Georgian England was still, despite the rapidly changing scene, an aristocratic society in so far as the aristocracy set the cultural tone of it : Victorian England was a middle-class society. If we are to find any trace of a truly collective vision among the Victorians, the sort of vision that can produce a style, we shall find it among the relatively homogeneous and self-confident middle class and not among the older aristocracy, who were now engaged, although they did not know it, in passive self-defense. Aristocratic self-defense took the form of eclecticism.