The theme of gardens was closely related to landscapes and in the sixteenth century overlapped also with other themes, such as ruins and idealised buildings.
Androuet Du Cerceau, for instance, sometimes included reconstructions of ancient gardens in his views of Roman ruins) and, in like manner, included contemporary gardens in his views of modern chateaux and palaces.
Vredeman de Vries was the first to publish collections of perspectival views of gardens, some of which involved adaptations of the five orders of columns. These prepared the way for an approach to nature as pure artifice, which authors such as Salomon de Caus completed, with the aid of automata, and other feats of engineering. Books on gardening from the seventeenth century onward frequently contained brief instructions concerning perspectival effects.
It was not until the eighteenth century that books concerned with perspectival views of specific gardens emerged in England, as for example, Serle’s (1745) Plan of Mr. Pope’s garden, Chatelain’s (1753) views of the buildings and gardens at Stowe or Chambers’ (1763) views of Kew Gardens. The nineteenth century added books specifically devoted to creating perspectival gardens such as Vergnaud (1835) or Glindemann (1900).
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