Sacred landscape: Signs of religion in the eighteenth-century garden

Abstract

We have been discovering for some time how damaging narratives of garden history based on notions of style can be, yet our understanding of the problem seems to have little effect on our practice. At a recent symposium in California entitled Modern Garden and its contexts for example, during the plenary session the question posed from the audience, What is the modern garden?, and it could not be answered. I believe that it could not be answered because it the wrong question. The questioner expected to be able to link very many-no doubt hundreds - of diverse gardens through some notion of overall spatial organization, and it is simply not possible. Yet the questioner had derived this expectation from garden history. She prefaced her question with the phrases, know what the French garden was, we know what the Italian garden was