The Importance of the Chinese Connection: The Origin of the English Garden

In the first half of the eighteenth century landscaping fashions in England changed drastically from the formal to the informal or from an obedient conformity with classical art to an enthusiastic association with nature. Even before the process was completed in the 1750s, however, the idea of its origin began to bother those English writers who were most passionate about the subject. They were annoyed not only to hear that their prized English ingenuity had an alien origin, but to find that the perpetrators of the idea were French. "Whatever may have been reported, whether truly or falsely, of the Chinese Gardens," a vexed Richard Cambridge wrote in 1756, "it is certain that we are the first Europeans to have founded their taste." ¹ Cambridge, who is often quoted to show that the English denied any debt to Chinese design from the very beginning, here casts doubt on the Chinese connection by characterizing the supposed Chinese origin of the new English garden as nothing more than a rumor. It was "a little difficult for the English observer to see," Olver Impey later recalls of the typical response, "just why the English landscape garden or park should have been called, in France, the jardin anglo-chinois." ² "Indeed," as John Dixon Hunt likewise points out, "many in the eighteenth century would have claimed that, like Liberty, with which it was often compared, the landscape garden was an English invention." ³ In retrospect, Cambridge and others were not entirely unjustified in their grievances. After all, the standard features of an English garden had just then begun to take on the uniform imprint of Lancelot (Capability) Brown: an open and undulating grass lawn, a serpentine river or lake, strategically placed groves of trees, and ornamental structures in the Palladian style. Carefully staged for appreciation on a peripheral circuit or for a visually stunning experience from a distance, the English pleasure ground indeed bears no visual resemblance to Chinese practices. Yet, then as now, the categorical denial of any Chinese connection has obscured the origin of the new English landscape design and the radical promise of a very different arcadia or Eden.

To see how much is at stake here, it is important to remember that the gardens of England were not always distinct from those of continental Europe. Laid out geometrically and symmetrically as the extension of a similarly molded residential construction, the typical garden in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century was a copy of European fashions that had been adapted in their turn from renaissance Italian and ancient Roman examples. Axial formalism, or the horticultural representation of the mathematically determined world order as inculcated by the intellectual principles of Pythagoras and Plato, was then the thing to do. Flowers were planted in square or rectangular beds (parterres); shrubs were cut into geometrical, animal, or human shapes; and not only trees but everything else was lined up as in military ranks. In the 1780s, Horace Walpole would celebrate the English garden as what is suited only to "the opulence of a free country, where emulation reigns among many independent particulars." ⁴ To associate the formal garden—such as Versailles—with autocracy or despotism by implication was his way of getting even with the French for "calling [the English] taste in landscaping art le gout Anglo-Chinois" and for "ascribing the [English] discovery to the Chinese" (35). Having been echoed ever since, such a nationalistically slanted and ideologically charged contrast is immensely flattering to the English psyche. In reality, however, all through the 1640-1700 period the English had closely followed the formalist trends of France and Holland in gardening. Neither Protestantism nor Whig politics made any horticultural difference.

No matter how similar English gardening designs were to those of the continent at the beginning of the eighteenth century, well before the 1750s they had become recognizably different. One...