Garden-Craft Old and New — A Reader’s Guide

An Architect's Polemic Against the Landscape School

Sedding positions himself as 'advocate of old types of design,' arguing that the formal, architectural garden—with clipped yew hedges, terraces, and sundials—is superior to the so-called 'Naturalesque or Landscape style' championed by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown and his followers. He quotes Repton's claim that 'Nature was to be our only model' with evident irony, and dismisses Brown's fashion as one that 'might have been expected to endure as long as Nature should exist!' The book's central conflict is between art and nature: Sedding insists that a garden is a work of art, not a slice of wilderness. He targets the 'sham architectural features' and 'would-be artistic subterfuges' of gardens like Kent's at Stowe, where an octagon basin was 'converted into an irregular piece of water' to hide its artificiality.

Sharp Quotations and Critical Voices

Sedding enlists allies to bolster his case. He reproduces Dr. Johnson's withering assessment of Shenstone's gardening: 'Whether to plant a walk in undulating curves, and to place a bench at every turn… demand any great powers of the mind, I will not enquire.' Johnson's 'surly and sullen spectator' becomes a weapon against the landscape school's pretensions. Sedding also cites Walpole's and Addison's essays, and Pope's 'admirable chaff.' Yet he is not merely a collector of quotations; he uses them to sharpen his own argument. When Whately recommends 'a plain field or a sheep-walk' as part of a garden's embellishments, Sedding calls it evidence of a failure to understand the garden's 'function… as a refining influence in life.'

Structure and Pace: From Lecture to Open Letter

The book's nine chapters move from theory ('The Theory of a Garden') to history ('Historical and Comparative Sketch') to practical design ('The Technics of Gardening'). But the preface warns readers that the essay 'lost gravity and compactness' after its delivery, becoming a 'gardener's open letter.' This explains the shifts in pace: early chapters are dense with architectural principles, while later ones, especially 'A Plea for Savagery' and 'In Praise of Both,' adopt a more playful, dialogic tone. The inclusion of nine illustrations—plans of rosaries, tennis lawns, and sunk flower gardens—anchors the text in concrete designs, though Sedding admits he offers 'descriptions' rather than 'useful figured plans.' The result is a hybrid work: part manifesto, part historical survey, part practical guide.

Readers should approach Garden-Craft Old and New as a period piece in the debate over garden design, not a how-to manual. Sedding's voice is that of a passionate advocate, not a neutral historian; his quotations and anecdotes are weapons in a polemic. The book rewards attention to its rhetorical strategies—the way it frames the landscape school as a 'grand moment' of folly, and the formal garden as a lost art. For those interested in Victorian aesthetics or the history of landscape architecture, it offers a vivid, opinionated entry into the conversation.

I have watched John Sedding’s Garden-Craft Old and New sit unread for decades, its arguments for order and form gathering dust. Yet some evenings I find myself turning from his tidy plans to the loose, wandering hours promised in Cupid's Fair-Weather Booke Including an Almanack for Any Two Years (True Love Ought to Last That Long) — Reading Companion. Both know that a structure, however stern, only matters when something tender grows inside it.