INTRODUCTION

Far from being a bland, explanatory foreword to the text, Whately's introduction is bold, assertive and in some respects novel. He has no hesitation in pushing landscape gardening to the fore, ahead of landscape painting, and in claiming that, as a result of imagination and taste, the best possible aspects and views of nature are now accessible through garden design. Nature is therefore seen as the heart of the landscape garden. Whately's division of garden, park, farm and riding is his own (to be queried by some): there could be less quarrel with his categorising of nature's four materials (ground, wood, water and rocks), though William Marshall subsequently excluded rocks as a separate material. Buildings are then added, which confirms Whately's structured modus operandi. Walpole, while not criticising Whately's divisions, preferred to take a historical line which led him to three basic categories, the garden connecting with a park, the ferme ornée and the forest or savage garden, Painshill being the perfect example of the last. Shenstone reduced landscape gardens to a single head, which he called ‘landskip, or picturesquegardening’, while acknowledging that garden scenes ‘may perhaps be divided into the sublime, the beautiful, and the melancholy or pensive’. He, like Whately, based this on Burke.

OF GROUND

Whately's approach is predominantly visual, with his emphasis on variety and contrast revealing an aesthetic in tune with the Picturesque. He is particularly concerned about making a flat area interesting to the eye, and illustrates this by showing how the owner of Moor Park, Hertfordshire, planted to break up the evenness of a vast lawn and added hillocks to ‘convert a deformity into a beauty’. In this practical example Whately is in effect showing not just what a successful attempt looks like but how it was achieved.

What brings us up short is the sudden disparagement of the ha-ha, normally reckoned (by Walpole and others) to be the masterstroke in bringing the countryside into the garden. Many landscape gardens, especially Brown's, relied on the device to provide a seamless transition. But Whately has no time for what he calls a ‘fosse’ – that is, a sunken ditch or ha-ha.