Gardens are not merely ornamental settings. Historically, they have functioned as cultural instruments through which societies projected ideas of power, taste, order, nature, and the proper relationship between the human subject and the landscape.

In continental Europe, the French formal garden established one of the most influential models of designed nature. Its spatial language privileged axial composition, symmetry, controlled vegetation, and the legible organization of views. It made landscape appear disciplined, theatrical, and politically composed.

In Britain, the English landscape garden emerged partly in reaction to that rigidity. Rather than emphasizing strict geometry, it cultivated scenic sequence, winding movement, irregular planting, and a carefully designed appearance of natural freedom. It proposed not domination over nature, but an idealized countryside to be experienced emotionally through movement.

These two traditions are especially relevant to compare because they represent not only different aesthetic styles, but different environmental imaginaries. One privileges control and legibility; the other stages atmosphere, discovery, and picturesque unfolding.

Rather than relying only on plans, archival texts, or visual comparison, the study turns to Google Maps reviews as a contemporary archive of everyday interpretation. These short texts register delight, comfort, surprise, trust, disappointment, and atmosphere in ordinary language.

The core proposition of the project is that landscape traditions may survive not only as formal design genealogies, but as affective regimes of perception. In other words, gardens can be studied not only as compositions of paths, vegetation, and artworks, but also as environments that generate recognizable emotional signatures.

Art gardens are particularly suitable for this comparison because they combine landscape design, curatorial framing, movement, and sensory expectation. Visitors do not only encounter nature in them; they encounter atmosphere, sequence, symbolism, and surprise.

The goal, therefore, is not to prove fixed national essences, but to explore whether historically distinct design cultures continue to resonate in public discourse.

The project uses a lexicon-based NLP workflow. After collecting reviews for selected art gardens in France and the United Kingdom, the texts are cleaned, tokenized, and matched to eight emotional categories: anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust.

Each review contributes emotional signals that are then aggregated by site. This produces a comparable profile for each garden and makes it possible to compare emotional tendencies both at the level of individual locations and at the level of national groups.

This method does not claim to recover the full psychological depth of subjective experience. Rather, it offers a consistent comparative framework for tracing large-scale patterns in public emotional discourse.

The resulting dataset should therefore be read as evidence of how gardens are described and valued collectively, not as a direct measurement of internal emotional states.

Ratings show whether a place is broadly approved, but they flatten the texture of experience into a single score. Emotion analysis adds depth by revealing what kinds of feelings structure those positive or negative judgements.

A garden with a high rating may be associated with joy and surprise, suggesting delight and discovery. Another may be highly rated because it evokes trust, signaling comfort, care, legibility, and maintenance. Others may generate more ambivalent combinations.

The comparison between France and the United Kingdom is therefore meaningful not because it fixes two stable national identities, but because it reveals tendencies in how different landscape traditions may still be perceived and narrated.

Taken together, the maps and charts suggest that garden traditions may persist not only in morphology, but in atmosphere. Some spaces appear to be described through delight, scenic richness, and surprise; others through reassurance, care, and composure.

These patterns should be interpreted cautiously. Public reviews are shaped by tourism, platform culture, weather, service conditions, crowding, and accessibility as much as by landscape form itself. Yet even with these limitations, the dataset offers a valuable lens into how environments are collectively experienced.

What emerges is not a rigid opposition between French and British gardens, but a field of emotional tendencies. The project therefore invites a broader methodological claim: digital public language can serve as material for landscape interpretation.