In her book, The English Garden and National Identity, Anne Helmreich argues that English gardening in the late Victorian era was fraught with competition between different styles of gardening.  The sources included here suggest a similar story - there were several dominant styles (the wild garden, the landscape garden, and the formal garden) that were supported by various groups and individuals in England.   These styles can be separated into two main schools of thought: one that attempted to emulate nature by focusing on irregularity and variety, and one that tried to control and suppress it by imposing order, uniformity, and regularity on the landscape.  In other words, there was not one kind of "English garden" in the Victorian era.  

However, as designer J. C. Loudon argued in 1850, gardeners were still guided by particular principles in their work.  In general, Miles Hadfield has argued that Victorian-era gardening was grounded in the notion of "bigger and better" - more ornamentation, more exotic plants, and extravagance in all ways possible.  As Dutton writes, "houses were built to the size of palaces for no good reason beyond a desire for display, garden temples which might be used not more than two or three times a year for an al fresco meal were constructed as large as villas, while a mere garden seat often developed into an ambitious affair of columns and pediments." (Dutton 115)