run straightforward, but fluctuated. From the geometric gardens of
Lenotre, England passed to the opposite extreme; in the full tide of
periwig and hoop petticoat, minuets, beauty-patches and rouge,
Addison and Pope were banishing everything that was not strictly
natural from the garden. Addison would even have everything grow wild
in its own way, and Pope wrote:

To build, to plant, whatever you intend,
To rear the column, or the arch to bend,
To swell the terrace or to sink the grot,
In all let Nature never be forgot.

William Kent made allowance for this idea; but, as a painter, and
looking at his native scenery with a painter's eye, he noted its
characteristic features--the gentle undulations, the freshness of the
green, the wealth of trees--and based his garden-craft on these.

The straight line was banished; in its place came wide spaces of lawn
and scattered groups of trees of different sorts--dark fir and alder
here, silver birch and grey poplar there; and flowery fields with
streams running through them stood out in relief against dark
woodland.

Stiff walls, balustrades, terraces, statues, and so forth,
disappeared; the garden was not to contrast with the surrounding
landscape, but to merge into it--to be not Art, but a bit of Nature.
It was, in fact, to be a number of such bits, each distinct from the
rest--waterfall, sheltered sunny nook, dark wood, light glade. Kent
himself soon began to vary this mosaic of separate scenes by adding
ruins and pavilions; but it was Chambers the architect who developed