Such lovely images inspire me to do a post related to my topic of Romanticism, rusticity & Barton Cottage.

The Picturesque was a term fashionable at the end of the C18th, used principally in describing landscape. It couplemented ideas of 'the sublime' and 'th beautiful', and it's attributes were wilderness-like qualities of roughness and irregularity.

Maggie Lane in 'Jane Austen's England (Robert Hale. 1986) comments;
The function of the Barton landscape was to explore ideas rather than to embody or illuminate the condition of the charecters. Thus it is plainly set before us, admirably Devonshire in it's charecter, certainly, but offered as a pretext for the discussions of the picturesque which are to follow;

'The situation of the house was good. High hills rose immediately behind, and at no great distance of either side; some of which were open downs, the others cultivated and woody.
... The prospect in front was more extensive; it commanded the whole of the valley, and reached into the country beyond...'

When JA wrote S&S, the subject of the picturesque was very topical. Not only Gilpin but Uveldale Price's "Essay on the Picturesque" were popular with the reading public.
Writers on the picturesque often used elevated expresssions such as 'Picturesquenesss...it is the coquetry of nature; it makes beauty more amusing, more varied, more playful'.

Price's friend Richard Payne-Knight published published a poem "The Landscape, a Didactic Poem advocating roughness and intricacy instead of tidy homesteads.
JA's description of the Dashwoods' Devonshire home,
'As a cottage it was defective, for the building was regular;...' (Ch. 6) may have been influenced by Richard Knight's lines,

'Not yet unenvy'd, to whose humbler lot,
Falls the retired and antiquated cot;
It's roof with weeds and mosses cover'd o'er,
And honeysuckles climbling round the door;
While mantling vines along it's wallls are spread,
And clust'ring ivy decks the chimney's head.'

Marieanne may've approved the ivy clust'ring and the honey suckles round the doorway.
Such lovely vines spreading on the walls of the 1796 cottage at Exmouth !

Excesses of the Picturesque attracted the satirical attention of Jane Austen in S&S.