English gardens had degenerated into meaningless repetitions of French and Dutch fashions by the end of the seventeenth century. Conventional plans were mimicked or exaggerated until the formal manner became merely an affected mannerism. Finally, nothing remaining but the defects of the old system, a reaction resulted in its entire destruction. On the ruins was created the Landscape Garden, in the strict meaning of the word no garden at all, but a stretch of cultivated scenery.
The English perhaps because they had most abused the conventional system were the first to raise an outcry against formal gardening. Formality could certainly be carried to no greater excess; it was logical to seek beauty in a contrary extreme. Freedom from every restraint was the gospel of the new school. Kent, its leader according to Walpole, was the first to jump outside the fence and insist that the garden should be “set free from its prim regularity, and the gentle stream taught to serpentize.” His method, as described by Lord Kames, was, “to paint a field with beautiful objects, natural and artificial, disposed like colors upon a canvas.
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