John Claudius Loudon (1783—1843) and the field's identity

摘要

The career of John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) is worth exploring as a sequel to John Dixon Hunt's review of early landscape architects who were not 'landscape architects'. Loudon is a pivotal figure, especially in the light of what my forthcoming book A Natural History of English Gardening reveals about amateurs, including women, and the professionalization of the field. In short, Loudon is at once terminus and departure point.Nomenclature and identity are worth exploring afresh too. What I discovered in The Flowering of the Landscape Gardening — how the term 'Picturesque' obscured our ability to read the artifice of English planting in the age of Kent and Brown — is expanded in my new book, which tackles the divide between all that is conventional 'landscape history' and that which the history of natural history usually covers. Separate fields today obscure what was a unified identity back then.