John Claudius Loudon - father of the English garden - Early life

Early life

An example of picturesque, Plumpton Rocks rock formation with lake. Copyright Louise Wickham The son of a Scottish farmer, as a child Loudon was given a small plot of land by his father in which he cultivated flowers. After a formal education, his desire to be a landscape gardener was fulfilled at the age of 15, when he was employed as a draughtsman and assistant to John Mawer, a landscape gardener. Here Loudon learnt about the rudiments of gardening and the management of hothouses. In 1799, he became the pupil of another gardener, Dickson, and he studied agriculture for four years at the University of Edinburgh under Dr. Coventry.[4]

In 1803, Loudon left Edinburgh for London and established a thriving landscape gardening practice, due in part to the letters of introduction that Dr. Coventry had given him. At this stage he was also starting to write: his first published article was about the management of London’s squares and their importance, a subject he would return to later.

Loudon’s first book in 1804 was the snappily titled Observations on the Formation and Management of Useful and Ornamental Plantations, on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening and on Gaining and Embanking Land from Rivers or the Sea.

At this early stage in his career, Loudon was influenced by the ‘Picturesque’ style, advocated by Sir Uvedale Price. Although little remains of his work from this period, his designs ‘delight[ed] in the wild and irregular’.[5]

He was also persuaded by the philosophical arguments of Archibald Alison, that unsophisticated people prefer simple uniformity, as demonstrated by their art and architecture. Loudon believed ‘that this theory accounted for the taste for regular gardens which reigned from earliest times until the end of the 17th century. But in 1806 he thought that the regular style had been rendered obsolete by the advance of civilisation’.[6]