ABSTRACT
You must know, sir, that I look upon the pleasure which we take in a garden as one of the most innocent delights in human life…. It is naturally apt to fill the mind with calmness and tranquility … and suggests innumerable subjects for contemplation.’ 1 The attraction which gardens held for eighteenth-century tourists did not derive merely from the visual satisfaction to be gained from fine planting and successful landscaping but from the stimulus to the imagination and the literary and philosophical ideas they were expected to evoke. Thus they criticized the actual design of the gardens, and then, if they found it aesthetically satisfying, settled down to enjoy the beautiful or the sublime effect produced by the association of ideas it aroused. As the century progressed landscape gardening drew increasingly closer to the principles of painting and the direct copying of nature until the natural wilderness was encouraged to come up to the very doors of the house. Those tourists who had learnt their lesson well and now sought only nature untrammelled by art were harsh in their judgements upon anything which they felt fell below the strict canons which the modern taste demanded.
