8. Britain

Abstract

‘Britain’ considers the garden history of the British Isles through the Renaissance to the present day. The burgeoning of English gardens in the 18th and 19th centuries often obliterated earlier gardens on the same sites, so earlier English gardens are usually known only from written and pictorial documentation, or from earthworks. The impact of key gardens and garden designers throughout this time are discussed: Salomon de Caus; Inigo Jones; William Shenstone’s The Leasowes; the great landscape designers Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton; Sir Joseph Paxton; Hidcote Manor; Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter; Gertrude Jekyll’s Sissinghurst; Beth Chatto; and the Eden Project in Cornwall.