Lesson plans: Pierre Panseron and the pedagogy of garden design in the late eighteenth-century France

During the second half of the eighteenth century, a new paradigm of garden design emerged in France. Form-giving in French gardens had long been guided by rules of measure, proportion and symmetry in keeping with principles of architecture. However, a reaction against those practices began to take shape around the mid-r zoos. Many designers abandoned the conventions of regular (i.e., rule-based) design in favour of asymmetrical forms and arrangements with features such as meandering paths and streams, serpentine water basins, uneven ground surfaces and seemingly haphazard plantings.