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The landscape garden was considered a uniquely English, uniquely modern art form—a uniqueness derived in part from the intensity of immediate tasteful experience that places like Stowe elicited. The first of three sections shows that William Gilpin’s Dialogue Upon the Gardens of…Stow seeks to join spontaneous pleasure at Stowe with sense of nationalistic destiny, but comes to recognize the gap between them can never be quite closed. The second demonstrates that Joseph Warton’s poem The Enthusiast uses Stowe to represent the corrupting history of British taste, yet his alternative, the sensory immediacy provided by nature, gains meaning only within the corruption narrative that Stowe helps him tell. The third section argues that while Horace Walpole only indirectly looks at Stowe in his seminal History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, it models an immediacy of affect for all modern gardens that distorts and finally demolishes his attempt to narrate their past, present, and future.

This chapter explains how follies represented genteel ambitions, and in larger estates, functioned as explicit indicators of wealth. In an English landscape garden, the designer revealed these buildings not all at once, but incrementally, training the plants and molding the landscape to maximize the delight in discovering the previously hidden treasure of a little temple ensconced in nature. These eye-catchers led the viewer through the landscape and provided respite, shade, and covering in case of rain. Viewers may have felt they were exploring with autonomy, but follies helped define the path through the landscape. While appearing natural, English landscapes were man-made, with trees pruned to maximize views and streams dammed to create artificial ponds.

This chapter explores the similarities between Smith and Rousseau’s moral philosophy through a discussion of the Smithean aspects of Rousseau’s 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse. Focussing the analysis on the motif of the eighteenth-century English landscape garden, this chapter reveals the extent to which Rousseau’s novel reflects Smith’s principles of arriving at moral behaviour and true virtue. The author argues that it is within the space of Julie’s garden that Rousseau and Smith’s theories are reconciled in order to produce a blended social model in which Smith provides responses to Rousseau’s failed utopia. An examination of La Nouvelle Héloïse alongside Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments demonstrates that the symbol of the landscape garden in Rousseau’s novel is an experimental setting in which Rousseau and Smith’s theories are merged, and it is through Rousseau’s fiction that the complicated relationship between the two thinkers’ thought can be most evidently sourced.

This chapter describes how Grove Hill formed the backdrop for a lavish and sociable event for more than eight hundred invited guests in May 1804, two months before Dr. John Coakley Lettsom's daughter's wedding. Beginning in the house, a suite of seven rooms were thrown open to the invited throng. It cites an anonymously penned report detailing the party that was published in The Gentleman's Magazine. The chapter looks at how the bowered and rusticated space is based on familiar features of the eighteenth-century landscape garden and was designed to be used as the backdrop for a concert, a ball, and a supper. It highlights ingenious methods of incorporating the theatrical garden features that were also a key element of the gastronomic experience.

William Adam, the pre-eminent Scottish architect of his generation, was also important as a designer of gardens and formal landscapes, many of which were created for his country house patrons. This chapter investigates how his work relates to contemporary and earlier fashions in British garden design, including the work of Sir John Vanbrugh and contemporary treatises by Stephen Switzer and others. Particular reference is made to the recently-defined ‘Scottish Historical Landscape’: the importance of the use of vistas to historic sites and topographical landmarks, which is explored both in Adam’s work and in other gardens of the period.

The 18th-century landscape garden movement in England and on the Continent developed new powers of expression and artistry which eclipsed those of earlier examples. Drawing extensively on literary and pictorial sources (the ‘sister arts’), the more illustrious ‘landskips’ adapted from them narrative and other artistic devices which combine to produce aesthetically pleasing effects. In tandem with the arts in general developments can be identified among the works selected here, ranging from classicism to the cult of sensibility, an early form of romanticism, which brought with it such features as the ‘picturesque’ and a heightened appeal to the emotions of the (usually solitary) garden visitor as ‘audience’. In the finest examples the expressive and the emblematic modes alternate and while allegory is often not far away the range and scope of reference and ingenious integration of the artistic elements bring these into the range of ‘total works of art’.

This chapter examines the belvedere. Here, the notion of the view and its attendant power dynamics in the building type of the belvedere, and prospect towers generally, are subjects largely unexplored by architectural historians of nineteenth-century America. These ornamental structures appeared in England in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. Settings for prospect towers in the United States included gardens, parks, rural cemeteries, and tourist attractions: in other words, anywhere an elevated view was desirable. In general, the architectural styles of belvederes ranged from the neoclassical to the more exotic Gothic and Chinese, and took the form of many different building types, including lighthouses, pagodas, obelisks, and castellated towers. What they shared in common, however, was the inherent power embodied in looking down from on high.

In May 1725 Robert Dundas (1685–1753) was forced to resign his post as Lord Advocate, the government’s chief legal officer in Scotland, for his opposition to Sir Robert Walpole’s controversial Malt Tax. This turbulent event seems to have prompted thoughts of retirement from politics and retreat to his ailing father’s estate at Arniston in Midlothian. With the prospect of spending more time with his expanding family, Dundas commissioned William Adam to carry out an extensive classical remodelling of the Arniston towerhouse and its surrounding designed landscape in the manner of a Roman villa. This chapter reviews the fragmentary documentary and physical evidence of the first thirty years of the new Arniston, focussing on the garden and landscape, but in the context of a closely integrated scheme for the house and a broader revival of interest in the culture, art, architecture, and gardens of Ancient Rome.

This chapter explores Addison’s attempt at opening new perspectives for the convocation of the work of imagination in the production and reception of representation. Developing a new, dynamic understanding of the concept of pleasure, he explains how the works of nature and art acquire more value as they allow the imagination or the fancy some scope for the picturing and mapping of new territories. The chapter then suggests how some of the new forms of expression in Enlightenment England (the novel, the landscape garden, Hogarth’s series of images), all based on a form of sequentiality similar in many ways to that present in the periodical essays, proposed progressive, enhancing apprehensions of nature which allowed the emergence of a more dynamic, less abstract sort of beauty, designed to create pleasure in the meaning defined by Addison.