When examining the Arts & Crafts garden it is important to examine both the social conditions that gave it its form and ideology and the art movements that gave it its character and aesthetic quality. Speaking of the former, the industrialization of England played a large role. It led to the rise of the middle-class, leading to many people having suburban estates with gardens. These gardens largely lifted designs from various types of historical gardens in an unoriginal and monotonous way. The result was uninspired and seemed to reflect the lack of creativity and individualism that was often considered a negative outcome of industrialization. The Arts & Crafts gardens attempted to do away with the industrialization England was forced to deal with. Instead the focus became traditional craftsmanship and a simpler, more folky approach to garden architecture and design. The result aimed to feel old-fashioned and reconnect man with nature. In this sense the Arts & Crafts garden was not merely a reaction to industrialization but was a way of advocating social reform against it. 

Just as important to the way Arts & Crafts gardens took their form was the paintings of those like Turner and Monet. It was especially the impressionism and natural subjects of the paintings of Monet that gave inspiration to the "painterly" qualities of the gardens. The partnership of Jekyll and Lutyens allowed for a synthesis of the house and gardens. One flowed into another. Already, this gave the house a more natural feeling than those of industrialization. Jekyll trained as an artist herself, and applied painterly colour theory to the design of the garden. She scrupulously arranged the flowers and plants of the garden in a way that really did give it the painterly quality of a Monet painting, creating such dazzling perennial borders that the majesty of the gardens is hard to beat. They were not just geometrically designed in a way that was pleasing, but were filled with fountains and arches and courtyards all perfectly lined with the correct arrangement of plants. It made the garden a more than appealing retreat from industrialization and a compelling argument for the importance of nature, perhaps now more than ever. 

Jekyll's Munstead home shows the return to simpler and more traditional values

 The display of eloquent perennial borders that characterized the painterly gardens

 Here is the design for the borders, showing that this was no easy task. Painstaking effort leading to seamless execution and aesthetic pleasure