Significant Features:

• Ideas imported from Italy via France and Holland.

• This garden is an extension to the Manor House and was to human scale.

• The house is set up off the ground and has a terrace on the garden side.

• The house has a forecourt with associated buildings.

• To the sides and the front are orchards, flower garden.

• Kitchen garden is to the rear of the house.

The Tudor Garden – 16th Century

Example: Plan of a Tudor Garden – Hatfield House

Features of Tudor Gardens:

• Flower beds enclosed by hedges of yew, box, privet or thorn.

• Divided into square or oblong plots by straight walks and crosswalks at right angles.

• Grass areas and bowling greens were also common.

• Walks were shaded by trees.

• Summer houses connected to wide terraces provide places to sit with a view.

• Openings in the wall created visual link to the landscape beyond.

• Clipping of Plants to shapes was also common.

• Mazes were sometimes planted for entertainment.

• Statues and fountains were introduced.

• The orchard sheltered the vegetable, herb and flower gardens from the windward

side.

• Tall forest trees like oaks, ashes, and elms sheltered the orchard.

Examples of the French Style and the Dutch Style respectively, from where the ideas of the Tudor Gardens are derived

• The Landscape Garden was a product of Romantic Movement.

• The Romantic Movement produced poetry and paintings which extolled the beauties

of nature.

• The paintings were not actual views but compositions of typical elements selected

and arranged for emphasis.

• The elements include:

o craggy mountains, o rivers, o pastoral plains, o ruined castles, o monuments, o Lakes, o wind-blown trees and o classical temples and statues and bridges.

• The Landscape Garden was based on direct observation of nature.

The Landscape Garden – 18th Century

• Surprise, variety, concealment and the development of idyllic prospects became the

goals of the art of landscape.

• The parterre and terrace of the formal garden were replaced with rolling grassland,

clumps of trees, lakes, meandering rivers and serpentine drives.

• The shapes of the ground, the flooded river valley and perimeter tree belt are based on

serpentine curves.

Features of the Landscape Garden

Example of Landscape Garden – Blenheim Palace

• William Kent ‘s naturalistic style of design was his major contribution to landscape

design .

• Inspired by the paintings of Claude Lorrain, Salvador Rosa and Nicolas Poussin, he

proclaimed “Nature abhors straight lines”.

• He believed that the validity of the design is due to two important factors:

• Its moral integrity and

• Its classical derivations.

• The taste for the irregular and natural was thus considered highly moral.

His design features include:

o Leaped the fence in order to show the whole nature is a garden.

o Designed tall forests to play with light and shadow.

o Clumps of trees dispersed over large meadows.

o His design thus became an untamed nature in a civilized world.

• A path was laid out around the shore of the lake connecting a series of “events”, and

garden was best experienced by following the route in the prescribed direction.

• The gardens are arranged according to the rules of a landscape painting.

• As one walked, new vistas and views were revealed and the visitor was brought

obliquely to buildings and places seen earlier.

• At one point the path leads underground into a cool grotto (cave) with a moss-

covered statue, ferns and the sound of running water – it is a conscious change in

environment to evoke physiologically, as well as intellectually, images of a legendary

under water kingdom.

Sequence of Experience

The Grotto at Claremont, Surrey