The great formal gardens in the Italian and French taste were thus consigned to the past as outmoded. Many of these geometrical Baroque gardens were modernised and remodelled as a series of “natural pictures” composed on painterly principles. A classic example of this kind of transformation is the garden of the Liechtenstein summer palace in the Rossau quarter which was successively remodelled under the princes Franz Josef I (reg. 1772–1781), Alois I (reg. 1781–1805) and Johann I von Liechtenstein (reg. 1805–1836).

At the same time extensive tracts of land, which were intended both to edify as well as conform to strictly economic principles, were being landscaped and “tamed”. With his designs for his estates at Eisgrub (present-day Lednice) and Feldsberg (present-day Valtice) Prince Alois I von Liechtenstein laid the foundations of a successful project (also in economic terms) which over the course of the years evolved into the largest landscape gardens in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The transformation of the estate into an English landscape garden brought its own economic benefits in the shape of artificial lakes, which were not only a constituent element of the impressive vistas created in conjunction with the plantings of trees and the architectural features but were also used for breeding carp commercially.