The transformation of the concept of the old English garden and interpretations of garden history during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

The expression ‘regular English garden’ even nowadays sounds like an oxymoron, although the rehabilitation of pre-landscape gardens started in Great Britain nearly a century and a half ago, hand-in-hand with the study of their history. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, garden history turned into one of the most important constituents of design theory; the main sources of information were collected and the premises of its later study were laid. Garden historiography throughout this time was closely connected with different cultural tendencies, and thus the identity of the English garden and its history were continually contested and revised. This process, as witnessed in the changing concept of the 'old' garden, has not yet become the subject of separate research, although it is doubtless of value not only as a way of generalising historiographic facts, but also as a means of explaining and better understanding the garden art of the 1880s-1930s when interpretation of garden history occupied an important place in garden design discourse. Although aspects of this question have already been addressed by Mark Girouard, David Watkin, Brent Elliott, Michael Waters, David Ottewill and Anne Helmrcich,2 the evidentlack of overall research on this topic forces this article to be rather bibliographical.