François de Paule Latapie played a massive part in the promulgation of Whately through Europe. He was a botanist who learned from the philosopher Montesquieu at Labrède, where there may have been something of an English park. Montesquieu had been in England in 1729–30, immediately following Voltaire, and both men absorbed ideas of the English constitution to the extent of wishing to copy it in France. Latapie accompanied Montesquieu's son to Italy and came to England in 1770, visiting Stowe and Blenheim, among other places. He eventually held the Chair at the botanical Jardin des Plantes at Bordeaux.

LATAPIE'S PREFACE

Latapie published his French edition of Whately, L'Art de former les jardins modernes…ou L'Art des jardins anglois, in 1771. There was an extended preface, which included a little garden history going back to the Assyrians and Greeks, leading to Le Nôtre as the apogee of the French garden. Latapie sought to demolish the originality of the English garden by claiming that the Frenchman Charles Dufresny had beaten William Kent to the first steps of the ‘natural’ look in gardens as early as the 1720s. He was clearly anxious to deny England the credit for introducing the landscape garden, and his manifestly French slant colours the book and therefore would tend to influence the reader. Whately himself had neither looked at garden history nor claimed originality for the landscape garden.

The preface continues with two lengthy quotations pressing the case for Chinese influence on the ‘natural’ garden. One is a chapter from William Chambers’ book on Chinese design (1757) and the other an extract from Father Attiret's description of the royal palace gardens at Peking (Beijing) (1749). Their inclusion was clearly to demonstrate that China had already embraced the natural approach to garden design, which would contribute to the French concept of le jardin anglo-chinois (G.-L. Le Rouge copied Latapie a few years later in reproducing the same section from Chambers as the fifth cahier of his albums of prints of English and French gardens). There then follows the translation of a letter from Whately to Latapie dated December 1770, which is preceded by a foreword about Whately.