Visions of Nature in the Eighteenth-Century English Landscape Garden

Abstract

Relationships with what is called “nature” are often fundamental to the understanding of our experiences of the world, and therefore of our politics, our knowledges, and our everyday lives. The historical examination of these relationships and their meanings for certain people can therefore be a critically important archeo- logical means for exploring the origins of how we today think about these relationships. The English land- scape garden, intimately imbued with “natural” meanings and experiences, offers one site for such an exam- ination. It was the product of a set of philosophies and theories—aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, and political—that were foundational to the experience of the eighteenth-century gentleman, and therefore to the history of ideas in the Western world.