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them into being, will deny that the strongest impulse 

 which the movement received at the outset came 

 from Andrew Jackson Downing. Mr. Downing was 

 bom with a strong love of nature, and as his father 

 was a nurseryman he was brought up in a calling 

 that increased his interest in trees and planting. 

 Reared almost in sight of many of the old places on 

 the Hudson which, had been planned and planted by 

 Parmentier and others of that older school, he learned 

 while still young that a landscape could be made 

 impressive by the simplest and most natural treat- 

 ment. As he was to become our first authoritative 

 writer on the art of landscape gardening, the whole 

 country has occasion to be thankful that he was in this 

 way led to adopt what was then called the English 

 style of gardening, in which, to quote his own words, 

 ' the spirit of nature, though softened and refined by 

 art, always furnished the essential charm, thus dis- 

 tinguishing it from the French or Italian style, where 

 one sees the effects of art slightly assisted by nature. ' 

 Downing was a man of catholic views, but while he 

 realized the fact that vases and balustrades and 

 studied symmetry might be mingled with foliage 

 enough to make a garden, yet his ideal garden-scene 

 was the primeval paradise, whose pervading beauty 

 was fotmd in the unstudied simplicity of nature. 

 With his natural taste refined by travel and by study, 

 Downing's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of 

 Landscape Gardening, which was published in 1841, 

 became at once the accepted text-book of rural art in 



