ENGLISH GARDENS & LANDSCAPES

is a style of "landscape" garden which emerged in England in the early 18th

century, and spread across Europe, replacing the more formal, symmetrical French
formal garden which had emerged in the 17th century as the principal gardening
style of Europe

The English garden presented an idealized view of nature.

The English garden usually included

• a lake,
• sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees, and
• recreations of classical temples, Gothic ruins, bridges, and other picturesque
architecture

designed to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape.

The English landscape garden was usually centered on the English country house
 ENGLISH GARDENS & LANDSCAPES
The 18th-century English garden was influenced by a desire to rid the
landscape of the rigid order indicative of French absolutism. These
forms were no longer appropriate in England after a constitutional
monarchy and a formalized parliamentary system were established
following the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Common pastures were “enclosed” by acts of Parliament to increase

agricultural productivity.

In the second half of the 18th century, English gardens became poetic
constructions.
 ENGLISH GARDENS & LANDSCAPES

In addition to their productive agricultural function,

the newly enclosed parks were developed by their
owners as pleasure grounds to conform to the new
ideal of pastoral life.

English garden designers shaped lakes and hills and

used trees as visual frames.

To create the anti-Versailles, they deconstructed the

stiff boundaries that separated garden from park.

The ha-ha (a sunken fence or ditch) and the tree

cluster (variations of belting, clumping, and dotting)
were important elements in the transition to the
naturalistic style.

An organic design vocabulary—gently rolling hills,

free-form lakes, and groves of trees—unified site
plans.
ENGLISH GARDENS & LANDSCAPES: STOURHEAD GARDEN

Stourhead Landscape Garden has a good claim to

being ‘England’s greatest landscape garden’.

Henry Hoare’s aim was to recreate the

landscape of antiquity

The design of Stourhead was begun by its

owner, Henry Hoare II, in 1735. He set the
garden in a deep valley around a 20-acre
lake, which he constructed by damming a
stream
the garden at Stourhead focused inward, on
intimate views across the central lake. The
path leads the visitor in a counterclockwise
direction, relating a sequence of events
from Virgil’s The Aeneid—the story of the
voyage to Rome by Aeneas and the Trojan
survivors. From the Temple of Apollo, the
ultimate stop on the itinerary, the whole
garden becomes visible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYUCUZ9YCdE
ENGLISH GARDENS & LANDSCAPES:
ENGLISH GARDENS & LANDSCAPES:
 AMERICAN PARKS

America in the 19th century was subject to the same impulses

toward industrialization as Europe. People embraced
technology as a means to achieve a comfortable lifestyle. The
impact of industrialization was more immediate for the urban
dweller.

As the century wore on and the frontier drew nearer, people

reexamined their relationship to the landscape. The important
contributions to the history of landscape architecture in 19th-
century America were the public park and the idea of a
wilderness aesthetic. What is particularly American about
these land uses is the fact that citizen initiative was integral to
their creation.

Between 1821 and 1855, New York City's population nearly

quadrupled. As the city expanded northward up Manhattan
Island, people were drawn to the few existing open spaces,
mainly cemeteries, for passive recreation. These were seen as
escapes from the noise and chaotic life in the city, which at
the time was almost entirely centered on Lower Manhattan.
 AMERICAN PARKS

CENTRAL PARK

is it the first public park built in America

In the 1840s the increasing urbanization of Manhattan prompted

the poet-editor William Cullen Bryant and the landscape
architect Andrew Jackson Downing to call for a new, large park to
be built on the island.

Olmsted teamed up with Calvert Vaux to enter the competition

for the design of Central Park in New York City. Their winning
entry, the Greensward Plan, preserved the wooded area and
exposed bedrock in the middle part of the site, south of the
reservoir, which they called “The Ramble.” Extensive site
engineering was necessary to create the many lakes and sloping
lawns within the park. They included a formal pedestrian mall
and terrace to accommodate society’s need to see and be seen.
The perimeter they screened with trees. The total area of
parkland eventually covered 843 acres— an area about 2–1/2
miles long, and 1/2 mile wide.
 AMERICAN PARKS
Central Park is split into three sections: the "North End"
extending above Reservoir; "Mid-Park", between the
reservoir to the north and the Lake and Conservatory Water
to the south; and "South End" below the Lake and
Conservatory Water

South end Mid park North end

AMERICAN PARKS

The park has natural-looking plantings and landforms,

having been almost entirely landscaped when built in the
1850s and 1860s.

It has eight lakes and ponds that were created artificially

by damming natural seeps and flows.

There are several wooded sections, lawns, meadows, and

minor grassy areas. There are 21 children's playgrounds,and
6.1 miles (9.8 km) of drives.

The lake

The wooded areas

AMERICAN PARKS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z520TWV_4qw