The English Garden – How It Came to Be and Where It is Going

By Anne W. Semmes

Just how the English garden design has changed across the centuries to what it is destined to be in this 21st century was well laid out by noted English landscape architect, garden designer and author Richard Sneesby, at the Bruce Museum’s last Saturday “Meet for Coffee” talk, attended by 65 garden enthusiasts. “My passport says…my nationality is British,” Sneesby began, but he identifies “most of all as being English…for I’m talking about English gardens as opposed to Scottish or Welsh or those from Northern Ireland.” And beginning with William the Conqueror’s arrival in 1066, England “had no gardens at all…we were growing food as was happening in northern Europe.”

Start with those English gardens beginning in the Tudor period in the 15th century with Haddon Hall in D