ENGLISH GARDENS OF THE 17TH CENTURY

English gardens had degenerated into incomprehensible repetitions of French and Dutch fashions through the end of the seventeenth century. Conventional plans were mimicked or exaggerated until the formal manner became merely an affected mannerism. Finally, nothing remaining but the defects of the old system, a agility resulted in its entire destruction. On the ruins was created the Landscape Garden, in the strict meaning of the intelligence no garden at all, though a stretch of cultivated scenery.

The English-perhaps because they had most abused the humdrum mold-were the first to raise an outcry against formal gardening. Formality could certainly be carried to no sharpened excess; material was logical to seek beauty in a contrary drastic. Freedom from every restraint was the reality of its afresh school. Kent, the leader according to Walpole, was its first to jump outside the blockade and insist which the garden should be "set free from its prim regularity, and the gentle stream warmhearted to serpentize." His method, as described by Lord Kames, was, "to paint a field with beautiful objects, natural and artificial, likely like colors upon a canvas.'

It requires certainly more genius to paint in the gardening way: in forming a countryside upon a canvas, no supplementary is required but to adjust the figures to each mismated. An artist who lays outermost grounds effect Kent's way has an additional task: he ought to adjust the figures to the several varieties of the field.

In universal words, hollowness remained of the old style in the new gardens. These end consisted of smooth lawns of grass, diversified by clumps of trees, and intersected by curved paths or abnormal pieces of water. Nature was said to detest the straight line; hence walks besides brooks were always laid extrinsic in "serpentine meanders."

Marks of contamination are often to be practical in nature; Kent reproduced this effect by planting dead trees and stumps. These attempts to give impulse a beautiful wilderness often resulted credit nothing but a confused mass of disorder, and were received with ridicule even by the sentimentalists.More Information about HOME INTERIOR