English Landscape Garden vs French Formal Garden
イングリッシュ・ランドスケープ・ガーデン / フランス式整形庭園
Both sit in Garden Styles, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
English Landscape Garden
An 18th-century English revolution that threw out geometry and built nature-seeming scenery by artifice. Rolling lawns, serpentine lakes and temples scattered across the view shaped the land itself into a picture, and the result became the prototype of the public park.
French Formal Garden
The garden of axis, symmetry and perspective that Le Nôtre perfected at Versailles. Shears and sheets of water discipline nature into geometry, and power becomes visible as spatial order.
| English Landscape Garden | French Formal Garden | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1720s–1800s | 17th century– |
| Family | Garden Styles | Garden Styles |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Rolling lawn and lake / Temples and follies / The concealed ha-ha fence / A sequence of pictorial views | Axes running to the vanishing point / Strict symmetry / Clipped geometry / Water mirrors and the grand canal |
| Best used for | Parks and campuses shaped at scale without ever looking shaped · Grounds where the view from the building is composed as a picture | Forecourts that state the standing of the building behind them · Squares and courts meant to be seen from an upper storey |
| Type | Keep names and notices at the building, no lettering in the view | Inscriptions and statue titles sit on the axis, paired left and right |
| Composition | No straight lines or symmetry, let lawn and water curve inward | Run one axis from the building center and mirror everything across it |
| Material | A sunk fence joins pasture to garden, trees planted in masses | Clip to a level line and use water as a mirror for the sky |
| Caution | Naturalness becomes an excuse for leaving the ground alone, so neither the modeled contours nor the massed trees appear and the lawn simply goes rough. | Axis and symmetry get copied without designing the recession, and with no budget for the labor of clipping, the outlines slacken within a few years. |