The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden, 1620-1820

by John Dixon Hunt (Editor), Peter Willis (Editor)

A garden classic, The Genius of the Place reveals that the history of landscape gardening is much more than a history of design and style; it opens up a wide perspective of English cultural history, showing how landscape gardening was gradually transformed over two centuries into an art that has been widely imitated throughout Europe and North America. The English landscape garden is richly documented in this anthology. Over 100 illustrations accompany writings that range from Francis Bacon to Jane Austin; from the early 1600s, when Englishmen began to determine their own concept and form of the garden, through the first half of the eighteenth century when its distinctive feature emerged, to the heyday of the landscape garden under "Capability" Brown and the reactions to his pure formalism under Repton and Loudon in the 1800s. This edition contains a new introduction and bibliography covering the many developments in garden history during the last dozen years.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published May 24, 1979

About the author

John Dixon Hunt is an English landscape historian, whose academic career began teaching English literature. He became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 and served as the department chair of landscape architecture and regional planning until June 2000, now being emeritus.