Looking back at the history of landscape design, there are various styles and schools as well as numerous design concepts. From the perspective of philosophical epistemology, landscape design has experienced three periods, namely, apriorism, empiricism and transcendentalism. Combining the design phenomena in the history of garden design, this paper sorted out the evolution of landscape design in terms of methodology, epistemology and instrumentalism, in order to speculate on the macroscopic trajectory of the evolution of landscape cognitive model.