Abstract
Abstract The notion of Andre Le Notre's formal style as a sort of abstraction of the topography of the Ile-de-France is of course an oversimplification of history. Even so, it long remained relatively common among several historians of garden design.1 The same sort of comparison has been made, for example, between Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown's designs and the English landscape. But whereas analogies of this kind fairly soon become trite, the big question is what happens or happened when individual tendencies in landscape gardening came to be regarded as a universal language whose validity transcended national boundaries, extending into places where the basic geographical conditions were completely different. As we shall see presently, eclecticism — its purpose and meaning — is closely bound up with the same issue.
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