A great deal about the English Landscape Garden can be revealed and read in contemporary prints. As visual records, prints chart the progress and development of garden design, but, perhaps more importantly, they also indicate how gardens were perceived at the time and how owners or artists wanted them to look. There is a wealth of material deserving of consideration by anyone interested in garden history.

While the designed landscape grew in richness and complexity, the techniques of printmaking developed to rise to a higher standard of reproducing garden scenes. This resulted, particularly in the mid-18th century, in many images that are exceedingly attractive in their own right as pictures. Garden prints can, at their best, be highly atmospheric and give great aesthetic pleasure. And even where the visual quality is not so pronounced a print can still have much to tell.

It may well be asked, why focus entirely on prints – should not paintings and sketches be considered? There are two main answers. One is that paintings have been covered comprehensively in John Harris's The Artist and the Country House (1979) and Roy Strong's The Artist and the Garden (2000). The other, more telling, reason is that prints ensured wide circulation of an image and were publicly available. Just like books (of which they were often a part), prints would be an important element in mass communication, thereby contributing to discussion and spreading taste. The question of whether a print merely reflects fashion or helps to create it has mixed answers. While on one hand prints illustrate a narrative of the evolution of the landscape garden, they can also act as drivers of that narrative. Prints of the same scene at different periods often indicate changes in both style and taste.

The aims of this book are to show the range of depiction of gardens in the mid- to late 18th century, to ‘read’ the garden from prints, and to try to determine what they reveal or tell us about attitudes to the landscape garden. It does not attempt to be exhaustive in the reproduction of images: there are countless thousands of prints, especially small ones, including those where (as often happened) the house was the focal point and the surroundings were only of secondary interest.