It was not long now before the "style pompadour" began to make itself
shown with regard to garden design--the exaggeration of an undeniable
grace by an affected mannerism. All the rococco details which had been
applied to architecture now began to find their duplication in the
garden rockeries--weird fantasies built of plaster and even shells of
the sea.

By later years of the eighteenth century there came on the scene as a
designer of gardens one, De Neufforge. His work was a prelude to the
classicism of the style of Louis XVI which was to come. There was, too,
at this time a disposition towards the English garden, but only a slight
tendency, though towards 1780 the conventional French garden had been
practically abandoned. The revolution in the art of garden-making
therefore preceded that of the world of politics by some years.

There are three or four works which give specific details on these
questions. They are "_De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance_," by
Blondel (1773), his "_Cours d'Architecture_" of the same date, and
Panseron's volume entitled "_Recueil de Jardinage_," published in 1783.

The following brief resume shows the various steps through which the
French formal garden passed. In the moyen-age the garden was a thing
quite apart from the dwelling, and was but a diminutive dooryard sort of
a garden. The garden of the Renaissance amplified the regular lines
which existed in the moyen-age, but was often quite as little in accord
with the dwelling that it surrounded as its predecessor.

The union of the garden and the dwelling and its dependencies was
clearly marked under Louis XIV, while the gardens of Louis XV tended
somewhat to modify the grand lines and the majestic presence of those of
his elder. These gardens of Louis XV were more fantastic, and followed
less the lines of traditional good taste. Shapes and forms were
complicated and indeed inexplicably mixed into a melange that one could
hardly recognize for one thing or another, certainly not as examples of
any well-meaning styles which have lasted until to-day. The straight
line now disappeared in favour of the most dissolute and irrational
curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens of Louis XIV
became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not
uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but as a whole an
aggravation.

Finally the reaction came for something more simple and more in harmony
with rational taste.