The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening

Horace Walpole's delightful essay on garden design is perhaps the most famous and influential piece of writing on the English landscape garden. Written between 1750 and 1770, it was first published in 1780 as part of Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England. Walpole captured the attention of his 18th-century audience with his memorable turns of phrase and, more importantly, for his claim that England had invented a modern and "natural" style of laying out gardens - a style that was, indeed, the culmination of garden design. The essay champions William Kent (who "leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden") and his successor Lancelot "Capability" Brown, while he satirizes earlier styles - especially formal, geometrical, and regular gardens. The fundamental assumption that informs Walpole's essay on gardening is that the English landscape garden was the direct result of the growth of British political liberties. And this assumption underlies his disparagement of monarchical antecedents and gives a particular glee to his dismissal of French formal gardening and a note of scorn for French misunderstanding of English innovation. The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening was the first attempt at a narrative of modern English garden design and through it Walpole has exercised a profound influence on subsequent generations of historians and garden writers.