If we look back at the origin and development of gardens and landscapes through the years, we can see a number of significant changes. It all started with the classic Roman garden, which was laid out in relation to the house. In this garden, the view axis had to finish in the middle of the house. In the gardens of the middle ages, we can see that there are a lot more right angles and squares, filled with flowers or herbs. The Renaissance garden is characterised by the lack of a relationship with the house, with various smaller gardens together forming a whole. The Dutch classical garden is well-organised, symmetrical and geometrical. Flowers hardly occur in it. The French classical style continues on this theme: the house and the garden together form a unit. In response to this, there followed the much looser, early landscape style with flowing, undulating forms, followed by the late landscape style, in which gardens increasingly start to look like parks. The mixed, gardenesque style is a mixture of the geometric and the landscape styles. From the beginning of the twentieth century the trend was increasingly for more natural gardens, in which flowers and plants played a more important role, while the planting style became more relaxed and less formalised.
