In English gardening history, the pleasure ground or pleasure garden was the parts of a large garden designed for the use of the owners, as opposed to the kitchen garden and the wider park. It normally included flower gardens, typically directly outside the house, and areas of lawn, used for playing games (bowling grounds were very common, later croquet lawns), and perhaps "groves" or a wilderness for walking around. Smaller gardens were often or usually entirely arranged as pleasure grounds, as they still are, and as are modern public parks.
The concept survived a number of major shifts in the style of English gardens, from the Renaissance, through Baroque formal gardens, to the English landscape garden style. The pleasure grounds of English country house gardens have typically been remade a number of times, and awareness has recently returned that even the designs of the famous 18th-century landscapists such as Capability Brown originally included large areas of pleasure gardens, which unlike the landscaped parks, have rarely survived without major changes.
