Jean-Marie Morel

Jean-Marie Morel (28 March 1728 – 10 August 1810), the author of La Théorie des Jardins (Paris 1776), was a trained architect and surveyor, who produced a substantial and popular work advocating the "natural" landscape style of gardening in France, a French landscape garden.

Morel never visited England to see the English garden style, but his book profited from the published theories of Thomas Whately and Claude-Henri Watelet and from the experience he had gained from his close association with the marquis de Girardin at Ermenonville.

[2] On her return from England in 1765, she immediately grassed over her gardens, both at the Hôtel Saint-Simon in the Temple, Paris and then at the house at Auteuil, which she acquired in 1773.

The results— "begotten by her on an English gardener" Horace Walpole remarked—[3] which were a revelation to all Paris, must have been deeply impressive to the Conti architect, Morel.

He worked on some four dozen parks and gardens, including Guiscard, Arcelot, Couternon, Ermenonville, Casson, Launay and La Malmaison.