"A prospect two fields' distance": rural landscapes and urban mentalities in the eighteenth century

This article explores the nature of designed landscapes in the mid to late eighteenth century and focuses on the often neglected area of small parks and gardens which, in fact, outnumbered the large sites that are often the focus of garden historians. A careful consideration of these diminutive landscapes sets them in their wider social and landscape context, but also highlights the need for both landscape and garden historians to place individual sites within the context of other designed landscapes in a particular region, county or parish. Examining these more modest residences and their grounds also sheds valuable light on the influence of the urban landscape on parks and gardens and the nature of social emulation in polite society during the eighteenth century.