STTLES OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN S7 



level or court or tea-room * — circumstances or taste may have dic- 

 tated, its own symbols and conventions are followed by the designer. 



Prior to 1850,! there was comparatively little landscape design of The Modem 

 any kind in the United States. In the settled communities of our ^^^^i<^^n 

 Eastern coast, there were small gardens, mostly in the style of the style 

 part of Europe from which their owners had come, J and there 

 were also some large private estates almost always in the English land- 

 scape manner or some adaptation of it to our conditions ; in California 

 there were the gardens of the Spanish missions. With these exceptions, 

 there was no definite mode of landscape treatment to be found in the 

 country, worthy to be called a style. 



With the tremendous growth of our cities and the industrial develop- 

 ment of the whole country, there came an increase of wealth and the 

 rise of a whole class of people who could afford to own a country estate, 

 while doing business regularly or occasionally in the city. Also there 

 was an enormous increase in the number of people who, while daily 

 workers in the city, were still able to own and enjoy a small piece of 

 land in the suburbs. And further, the civic problem arose of the well- 

 being of the hundreds of thousands of people, who, having flocked to 

 the cities for employment, were unable of themselves to obtain the rest 

 and refreshment in open surroundings which the oppression of their 

 work and life in the city was making increasingly necessary. There 

 was thus a very real and pressing demand for the utilization of the land- 

 scape by man, not for an economic use, not primarily to delight him 

 with beautiful compositions of form and color, but to serve as a relief, 

 an antidote to the too great insistence of his own affairs and his own 

 constructions. § In response to this demand came the work of Olm- 

 sted and Vaux, and H. W. S. Cleveland, Charles Eliot and many others ; 



* This subdivision is taken from an unpublished manuscript by Takekatzu Uenoni 

 Takata of Kioto (secured for the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture by B. Y. 

 Morrison, Sheldon TravelHng Fellow), written in English in 1893, apparently without 

 the author's knowing of Conder's work published the same year. 



t Note the work of Andrew Jackson Downing. His editorials in the Horticul- 

 turalist on the need for public parks appeared in 1 848-1 849. 



X Cf. the reference to Grace Tabor's Old-fashioned Gardening, given in footnote 

 on p. 51. 



§ Cf. Chapter I, p. i and Chapter V, p. 75. 



