Gardens, legitimation, and resistance

Eighteenth-century garden design has been interpreted in terms of legitimation, a tool with which elites attempted to maintain power and authority over marginalized groups. But most acts of aesthetic landscaping, it can be argued, were primarily directed not towards "the poor" but to rival groups within the propertied. Similarly, any opposition to the dominant ideology expressed in the design of landscape was mainly mounted by disaffected groups within the ranks of the franchised. In so far as the poor in this period inscribed their mark upon the land, it was in acts of vandalism or reappropriation which have left little direct trace in the archaeological record.