In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, England seemed to be transformed by various kinds of "improvements" in gardening and the ornamentation of the landscape. Many people saw these changes as reflections of highly controversial moral, social, and economic issues. To clear a wood or plant one, to build a folly or a cottage, to design in the formal style or the picturesque, to choose to employ one improver or another--these were all interpreted as decisions that expressed a political orientation. Poets, essayists, political theorists, theologians, and economists debated the merits...