To Live in the New World ─ A.J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening

A. J. Downing (1815-1852) wrote the first American treatise on landscape gardening.As editor of the Horticulturist and the country's leading practitioner and author, he promoted anational style of landscape gardening that broke away from European precedents and standards. Likeother writers and artists, Downing responded to the intensifying demand in the nineteenth centuryfor a recognizably American cultural expression.To Live in the New World examines in detailDowning's growing conviction that landscape gardening must be adapted to the American people and thenation's indigenous landscapes. Despite significant changes in its three editions, Downing's ATreatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, remained true to the original intent: toguide country gentlemen--with enough money, time, and taste--in the creation of ideal homes andpleasure grounds. While most historians and critics have focused on Downing's more formally writtentreatise, Judith Major gives equal emphasis to Downing's spirited monthly editorials in theHorticulturist. In the journal, Downing "spoke American" and encouraged his countrymen and women topractice economy, to use America's rich natural resources wisely yet artfully, to be content with alittle cottage and a few fine native trees.Although the book is not a biography, the people, events,and experiences that shaped Downing's thinking on landscape gardening are central to the story.Significantly, Downing spent his life in the spectacular natural setting of the Hudson River valley.Through his professional practice, travels, reading, and extensive correspondence, he graduallybecame aware of the individual and collective needs that he served. Landscape gardening, Downingcame to feel, had to respect not only a client's desires and means, but also the nation's republicanvalues of moderation, simplicity, and civic responsibility. Major takes a fresh look at theinfluence on Downing's theory and practice of British writers such as Archibald Alison, UvedalePrice, Humphry Repton, John Claudius Loudon, and John Ruskin, and analyzes for the first time hisdebt to the French academician A. C. Quatremere de Quincy's Essay on Imitation.

George Symeonidis is a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Essex and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London.