Production, Power, and the "Natural": Differences between English and American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century

Garden historians have often emphasized the divergent development of designed landscapes in America and England in the course of the eighteenth century. This essay argues that the extent of that divergence in the period before about 1760 has been exaggerated, largely as a consequence of misconceptions about the real nature of English gardens. Only after 1760 did landscape design on both sides of the Atlantic really follow different trajectories, for reasons that were essentially social and ideological in character.