Historic styles I: Renaissance to Gardenesque

Heritage gardens are living history, and every style has its own features and plants. This lesson covers four historic styles, from the Renaissance to the Victorian Gardenesque.

Renaissance gardens began in Italian villas, and show human order imposed on nature. They are laid out on a strong central axis, with symmetry either side. Terraces, steps, statues and fountains link the garden to the house. In Britain this became the Tudor knot gardens and later parterres. Planting is clipped evergreens, such as box, yew and bay, with herbs and few flowers.

The eighteenth-century Landscape style swept formality away. Designers like Capability Brown created an idealised countryside. Rolling grass runs right up to the house, with a ha-ha, a sunken ditch, keeping livestock out without a visible wall. Streams were dammed into serpentine lakes. Clumps and belts of trees, such as oak, beech and cedar, frame the views, with almost no flowers.

The Picturesque, in the late eighteenth century, wanted rugged scenes like dramatic paintings: rocky outcrops, ruins, grottoes and gnarled trees. The Gardenesque, named by John Claudius Loudon in the nineteenth century, displayed each plant as a specimen. Plant hunters' new introductions, like the monkey puzzle and Wellingtonia, filled arboreta, with bright bedding and glasshouses.

One exam tip. Match plants to the period, and say why they fit. For example, the Gardenesque. A specimen monkey puzzle on the lawn. That's the feature. It fits because the style displayed newly introduced exotics as individual specimens. That's why it fits.