Landscape-gardening deals with the disposition of ground, water, buildings, trees and other plants which go to the composition of verdant landscape. Such in a broad sense is the definition of the art; for it may be employed to create a beautiful and harmonious scene where only nature in barren wildness reigned before, or to merely improve and adapt existing natural beauties and resources to the requirements of taste and convenience. Landscape-gardening has been practised from the earliest dawn of civilisation, but little of a reliable kind is known of the style or features of the gardens of the Jews, the Phœnicians, Assyrians, or even those of the ancient Greeks. All that we learn from Greek writers respecting the character of their gardens is that they afforded shade, coolness, repose, freshness, and fragrance. The Greeks cultivated the sister art of architecture so well as somewhat to neglect gardening; hence Lord Bacon's remark in his Essay on Gardens, that 'when ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely,' as if gardening were the greater perfection.
The Romans introduced landscape-gardening into Britain; but the art was lost when the country was abandoned by them to the Saxons. As, however, it had meantime been fostered in France, it was probably reintroduced by the Normans. Henry I., according to Henry of Huntingdon (Hist. lib. vii.), had a park (habitationem ferarum) at Woodstock, and it is conjectured that this park may have surrounded a magnificent Roman villa, the ruins of which—covering about 6 acres in extent—were discovered on the Blenheim estates early in the 19th century. If the conjecture is well founded, Blenheim may be regarded as the most ancient site as well as the grandest example of landscape-gardening in Britain—according to many, it is the grandest in Europe. William Kent (1684–1748) and Lancelot Brown (1715–83), better known as 'Capability Brown,' may be considered as the founders of modern English landscape-gardening. See works by London (1822), Repton (1840), F. R. Elliott (1878), and H. E. Milner (1890).