French style

History

French style was used primarily after the turn of the nineteenth century to describe gardens laid out in a geometrically regular style. It was used synonymously with the terms formal, geometric, and ancient style. In landscape design discourse, the word “French” refers to the style of the gardens by André Le Nôtre, the seventeenth-century designer of Versailles and Vaux le Vicomte, the great royal gardens of France. In America, it was a style derivative of Le Nôtre’s work and was characterized by straight paths and symmetrical parterre beds, ornamented by clipped shrubs, statuary, and garden buildings.1 At least three treatises brought to the American colonies exemplified the principles of this style. The first treatise, Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault’s L’Agriculture et maison rustique (1564), was published in English in 1600 by Richard Surflet as the Maison rustique, or The countrie farme and brought to New England by the first settlers. A.-J. Dézallier d’Argenville’s The Theory and Practice of Gardening (1712), which codified the practice of the Le Nôtrean school, was translated into English by John James in 1712, and was also available in the colonies. The third treatise was The Compleat Gard’ner, or Directions for cultivating and right ordering of fruit-gardens and kitchen gardens (1693), John Evelyn’s translation of a French work by Jean de La Quintinie, “Chief Director of all the gardens of the French King Louis XIV.”2

Many of the nineteenth-century citations gathered here come from broadly distributed garden periodicals and treatises in which the French style was generally presented as a retarditaire mode [Figs. 1 and 2]. Many of the images, however, come from southern gardens, particularly in New Orleans, where the French influence was well established and never went out of fashion [Fig. 3]. One traveler from New York visiting a New Orleans home in 1801 described the French style there as the “old formal style”: “A very fine garden belongs to this house—at least as to Trees—Orange & etc. But not great taste as yet prevails in the design of any garden—I have seen all that have any pretensions that way, being disposed in the old formal style—the border and circles kept up with strips of boardwh[ich] have a very mean effect.”3 An explanation for the entrenchment of this style in New Orleans was offered by a writer in 1849 who explained that in a region where there was a luxuriant, almost rampant, growth of plants, the artifice and control exhibited by the French style was preferred. This regional preference for the style was contrasted with the northern preference for the English ideal, which was more easily attained in the milder northern climate. Specifically, it was difficult in the hot southern climate to achieve a velvet green lawn, a key feature ofthe English style; this problem, the argument continued, motivated garden designers in Louisiana to continue relying upon the French style.4

By the late eighteenth century, a bias among several American garden writers clearly developed against the French style as being old-fashioned. In 1796, when the English architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe visited Mount Vernon, he exclaimed, “I saw here a parterre, clipped and trimmed with infinite care into the form of a richly flourished fleur de Lis: the expiring groans I hope of our Grandfather’s pedantry.”5 Latrobe satirized the French style in a sketch entitled “Taste Anno. 1620,” in his “An Essay on Landscape,” written in 1798–99. Latrobe’s accompanying quote explained the cartoon [Fig. 4]: “In an age, in which the elegant forms of the Ladies were cooped up in Whalebone stays, and fenced in by the vast circumference of a hoop, when the Men were confined by ten dozen buttons, and smothered by enormous wigs; it would be unreasonable in the trees to have complained of being cut into Cones and Pyramids, twisted into spires, and clipped into Lions and Elephants.”6 During the early republican period in which Latrobe wrote, there may have been a resistance to the aristocratic style of the French court associated with the geometric garden.7 In spite of his outspoken criticism, Latrobe in 1819 made a proposal for a public square in New Orleans that had a circular basin and symmetrically disposed allées of trees [Fig. 5]. This highly geometric scheme was in a style that previously Latrobe had criticized, favoring the irregular natural style of landscape gardening. For public space, however, the geometric regular style seemed to have been preferred. Latrobe’s neoclassical square implied a politically and socially homogenous body. A. J. Downing expressed this prevailing sentiment thirty years later in A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1849), when he wrote about the fashion in “parts of France where . . . nature was tamed and subdued, or as some critics will have it, tortured into every shape which the ingenuity of the gardener could suggest; and such kinds of vegetation as bore the shears most patiently, and when carefully trimmed, assumed gradually the appearance of verdant statues, pyramids, crowing cocks, and rampant lions, were the especial favorites of the gardeners of the old school.”8 Downing castigated the French as despots who achieved their layouts “with little study or theory upon the subject.”9 His Anglophilia drove him to link “natural beauty” with the English style of landscape gardening. In the French or Italian garden (which he believed to be very much alike), Downing claimed one could see and feel only the effects of art, only slightly assisted by nature.10

Although Downing’s aversion to the French style of gardening was consistent throughout his writings, he did commend France as having a model social life as exemplified by the display of such customs in French “Public Parks and Gardens.” He wrote, “These great public parks are mostly appendages of royalty, and have been created for purposes of show and magnificence quite incompatible with our ideas of republican simplicity—but . . . no longer held for royal uses . . . are the pleasure grounds of the public generally.”11

-- Therese O'Malley