In reaction to the rigid formality of the French and Italian gardens of the late seventeenth century, a new style began to emerge which was much freer. Advocates of what eventually became the irregular landscape garden opposed symmetry, ostentation, and what they regarded as the tyranny of the French style, which they in turn associated with the tyranny of French government. Thus the growing freedom of English garden design gradually became associated with the freedom of English government. Garden aesthetics took on political meaning, sometimes, as in the case of Stowe, overt political meaning.
Here are some texts which greatly influenced this transition from formal to informal garden design:
A. J. Dezallier d'Argenville, La Theorie et la Pratique du Jardinage (1709). This was translated into English in 1712. It is the first text to mention the ha-ha or dry moat, which essentially enabled landscape designers to take down walls and fences and thus free up wide areas of green space.
Stephen Switzer (1682-1745), Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener's Recreation (1715), enlarged as Ichonographia Rustica (1718). Switzer advocates a system of rural and forest gardening which unites formal garden features from French gardens with park and pasture and timber land to for a unified design. He further advocates the union of the beautiful with the useful; and he strongly urges economy and opposes gardens which are expensive to maintain. This combination of beauty and utility is close to the spirit of the aesthetic described by Pope in his Epistle to Burlington, 177-80:
Who then shall grace, or who improve the soil?
Who plants like *Bathurst, or who builds like *Boyle.
'Tis Use alone that sanctifies expense,
And splendour borrows all her rays from sense.
*Bathurst is Allen, Lord Bathurst, friend of Swift, Pope, and others; he
was keenly interested in gardening.
*Boyle is the Burlington of the poem, Pope's friend and fellow amateur gardener and architect. He is best known for his severe Neo-Palladian home Chiswick House in London.
Landscape gardeners also attempted to create ideal nature or to teach nature, in the words of Switzer, "even to exceed herself." Such idealization of nature has significant classical literary antecedents in the poetry of Horace and Virgil, which celebrates rural life and retreat from the cares of the city and public life. Also implied by this garden aesthetic is the original Garden of Eden in which man and nature are in perfect (if temporary) harmony. It is interesting (and profoundly significant) that Horace Walpole and others who advocated the new garden aesthetic also admired Milton's Paradise Lost, whose descriptions of Paradise are remarkably vivid.
The new freer style of gardening is evident at Castle Howard in Yorkshire and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Early in the century both formal and informal gardens exist side by side. By the middle of the century the new style dominated.