This seminar examines the history of landscape architecture and of the idea of nature in Britain from 1600 to 1900. Topics of discussion include Italian and French influences on the seventeenth-century British garden; the Palladian country house and British agricultural landscape; Capability Brown’s landscape parks as national landscape style; garden theories of the picturesque and of the sublime; Romanticism and the psychology of nature; the creation of the public park system; arts and crafts landscape design; and the beginnings of landscape modernism. Comparisons of historical material with contemporary landscape design are emphasized throughout the term. The collection of the Yale Center for British Art is used for primary visual material, and a trip to England over spring break, partially funded by the School, allows students to visit firsthand the landscape parks studied in this seminar.