English landscape gardens are a significant contribution to architectural history. Although gardens were an invention of ancient Babylonians, refined by Roman patricians and reaching perfection in the Caliphate of Cordoba in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the English style was unique.
The French copied the ‘Jardin anglais’, the Germans the ‘Englischer Garten’. The gentlemen had been on the Grand Tour and knew their classics.
The Writer Edmund Burke (1729-1797) wrote the treatise A philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756.
The natural, unplanned, and human-intervention-free garden was based on this book, which promoted the taste for emotion, the picturesque, the sublime, and the Gothic image (in this case, ruins), in order to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape. Picturesque asymmetry rather than orderly geometric style prevailed.
The English garden did more than evoke the nobility of the classical past. It also catered to the Romantic sensibility developing at the time.
One of the best-preserved examples is the ‘Englischer Garten’ in Germany, the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel.
It shows that Europe was united by culture rather than by nationalism, ideologies, racism, and ethnic differences, as it is known from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
(Source: BBC History Magazine, Volume 11, no 8, August 2010)