The English Garden in Enlightened Scotland

Item No. 16.

N. T. Phillipson

Nicholas T. Phillipson was a preeminent historian of the Scottish Enlightenment and biographer of David Hume and Adam Smith. His work focusses on the ways in which Scotland responded intellectually and culturally to the Union of 1707 and how provincial elites in Edinburgh and Glasgow began to substitute English ideas of politeness and commerce for the strict morality of presbyterian religion and the civic virtue of the ancients. In this article, published originally in 1978 but since gone out of print, Phillipson similarly explores how the English garden of William Kent and Capability Brown was received in Scotland and adapted to Scottish conditions, first by Sir John Clerk and then by Sir Walter Scott, who gave the Scottish conception of landscape its familiar association with the romantic and the picturesque. N. T. Phillipsen’s papers were donated to the University of St Andrews in 2019.