Woodland garden
In Europe the large gardens of country houses often included in the enclosed area a park, whether used for deer or grazing by horses and farm animals, and often woodland.
These were probably mostly given little alteration from their natural state other than some attention to bridging streams and keeping paths open and easily navigable, but there was some deliberate planting of flowers and shrubs, especially native climbers.
This was a natural wood, to the side of the main axis of the garden of the newly-built house, which was instead "turned into a labyrinth of tangled paths, enlivened by various fountains", but at least initially, little special planting.
[8] In the early 18th century the English horticultural trade began to enthusiastically import new plants from British America, generally the eastern seaboard of the modern US; Philadelphia was the main port for shipments.
Leading figures in the trade included John Bartram, collecting, propagating and packing in America, and Thomas Fairchild and Philip Miller, distributing and promoting the new plants from London.
This irregularity, often expressed in the fashionable serpentine shape for walks, laid out like snakes, was almost invariably adopted for the new shrubberies, and later became normal for the woodland garden.
A description of a "grove" planted by 1746 in the garden of William Shenstone, describes what would today be called a woodland garden:... opaque and gloomy, consisting of a small deep valley or dingle, the sides of which are enclosed with regular tufts of hazel and other underwood, and the whole shadowed with lofty trees rising out of the bottom of the dingle, through which a copious stream makes its way through mossy banks, enamelled with primroses, and variety of wild wood flowers.
It really required steep slopes, even if not very high, along which paths could be made revealing dramatic views, by which contemporary viewers who had read Gothic novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) were very ready to be impressed.
Trim up their bodies as high as the constitution & form of the tree will bear, but so as that their tops shall still unite & yeild [sic] dense shade.
The thickets may be varied too by making some of them of evergreens altogether, our red cedar made to grow in a bush, evergreen privet, pyrocanthus, Kalmia, Scotch broom....[23]The rhododendrons from Europe and America known in England by 1800 were "pale-pink and mauve" in flower, and the arrival from India in the 1820s of a large species with "brilliant scarlet" flowers began a phase of plant collecting in the Himalayas and adjacent regions, also covering many other types of plants, that would last over a century.
[25] The new Asian plants were generally easier to grow successfully in northern Europe than the American arrivals of the previous century, and tended to replace them.
Various schemes for arranging these rose and fell in fashion, and were also used for woodland gardens: by botanical groups, by geographical origin, by size and shape, and finally and most popularly, by colour.
[28] Many woodland gardens set out to replicate as far as possible the scenery of exotically remote and distant landscapes, mostly Asian, which their owners and designers often knew only from books.
[32] A second crucial influence from the years around 1900 was the opening up of south-west China, especially Yunnan, and parts of the Himalayan foothills to European plant collectors, including George Forrest and Ernest Henry Wilson.
Woodland gardens work well, arguably best of all, on sites with sharp but small contouring; the original habitat of most of the waves of new Asian plants was steep valleys or hillsides.
