Pleasure ground

In English gardening history, the pleasure ground or pleasure garden was the parts of a large garden designed for the use of the owners, as opposed to the kitchen garden and the wider park. It normally included flower gardens, typically directly outside the house, and areas of lawn, used for playing games (bowling grounds were very common, later croquet lawns), and perhaps "groves" or a wilderness for walking around. Smaller gardens were often or usually entirely arranged as pleasure grounds, as they still are, and as are modern public parks.

The concept survived a number of major shifts in the style of English gardens, from the Renaissance, through Baroque formal gardens, to the English landscape garden style. The pleasure grounds of English country house gardens have typically been remade a number of times, and awareness has recently returned that even the designs of the famous 18th-century landscapists such as Capability Brown originally included large areas of pleasure gardens, which unlike the landscaped parks, have rarely survived without major changes.

Pleasure garden more often had a different meaning, a public space of entertainment, though often charging for entry, for example Vauxhall Gardens in London. By 1847, "pleasure ground" had become the preferred American term for the private garden space after George William Johnson added it to his gardening dictionary. In German, the adopted and adapted term "Pleasureground" means an area in a park or large garden landscaped in the German idea of the English landscape garden style.

The English term "pleasure garden" was probably taken from the French jardin de plaisance, with the same meaning. This seems to go back at least to the end of the 15th century, as an important anthology of poetry (the first French one to be printed) published in Pais in the 1490s is called Le Jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique (lierally "The Garden of Pleasure and Flower of Rhetoric").