摘要：On the television show Backyard Blitz, household gardens are designed and built in a couple of hours. In Britain in the eighteenth century people were prepared to take a bit longer. As Tim Blanning notes: ‘No one baulked at planting vast woods that could not possibly mature for two centuries.'
Gardens feature prominently in Blanning's monumental The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648 to 1815. The gardens at Versailles in France were formal, regular, linear and arranged on an axis that had at its centre the royal palace. There wasn't much left to chance-everything was planned and rational. The Versailles garden was making a political statement. The attempt in 1661 of Charles II to bring Andre Le Notre, the designer of Versailles to London was regarded by many English at the time as another example of Stuart efforts to impose an absolutist regime on the nation.
