american landscape architecture. ill 



The Ante-Bellum Period. 



Between the Revolution and the Civil War a few families found 

 themselves in comfortable circumstances and able to develop 

 pleasant country estates. For them new ideas were waiting on 

 every hand. The Revolution had broken all the old traditions. 

 But even in the Mother Country a new gospel of landscape garden- 

 ing was being preached by Repton, Price, Milner, and Kemp, 

 and these new notions found congenial soil in America. And all 

 these ideas were caught up, crystallized and adapted to the times in 

 America by one man, Andrew Jackson Downing. 



Downing is by all odds the first of American landscape gardeners. 

 His ability as a student of this art is nearly always judged by one 

 piece of work, namely his book on Landscape Gardening, with 

 occasionally some slight addition for the pleasing essays in the 

 Horticu Iturist. These writings indeed show a man of great refine- 

 ment of character, a man of rather severely voluptuous tastes, of 

 somewhat aristocratic temper, retiring and sensitive, fond of every- 

 thing beautiful, but with a taste influenced by the spirit of his time 

 toward the curiosities of beauty, a man highly aj^preciative of the 

 natural landscape but still more passionately fond of trees, shrubs, 

 and fruits. We must not forget that Downing — like hundreds of 

 his followers — was a nurseryman before he was a landscape gar- 

 dener, and this fact had a marked influence on all his work. 



If we are to form any fair judgment of Downing, however, we 

 must not stop here. We must rather draw our conclusions largely 

 from the disciples who followed him. Every great artist or teacher 

 leaves a group of disciples behind. These men work over and put 

 into effect the ideas of the master. Judged by the number and 

 character of his disciples Andrew Jackson Downing's name is the 

 most illustrious in the entire history of American agriculture, 

 horticulture, or landscape gardening. He has been the model and 

 the beau ideal of every pomologist, fruit-grower, and nurseryman, 

 as well as the direct inspiration of almost every native landscape 

 gardener which our country has produced. Every nurseryman who 

 has grown trees and shrubs in America during the last fifty years 

 has had some fairly definite notions of improving his own grounds. 



