Beautiful > Landscapes & Gardens > Intro

Landscape gardeners were quick to adopt Burke’s ideas of beauty to their own work. The clear lakes and open prospects of Capability Brown’s designs and the waving and serpentine lines that characterize the early Picturesque garden are examples of Burke’s Beautiful. Thomas Whately, in a famous 1770 book on gardening, contrasts the sublime and the beautiful in the way trees are used in a landscape: “The prevailing character of a wood is generally grandeur…But the character of a grove is beauty.” In other words, trees left in more nearly their natural wild state are likely to produce “grand” or sublime effects, while trees planted intentionally in “groves” or groups are more likely to be beautiful.