GARDENS IN UNITED STATES

GARDEN IS THE ARENA IN WHICH MAN

AND HIS NATURAL SORROUNDINGS COME
IN TO THE MOST INTIMATE CONTACT,A
PLACE WHICH MIGHT POTENTIALLY BE
UNDERSTOOD AS A BAROMETER OF
SOCIAL ATTITUDES TOWARDS
NATURE.THIS RELATIONSHIP HAS AFTER
ALL BEEN A KEY FACTOR IN THE
DEVELOPMENT OF WHAT MIGHT BE
CALLED THE AMERICAN PSYCHE,AND THE
GARDEN MIGHT COME TO BE UNDERSTOOD
AS A FORMAL MILIEU IN WHICH THE
DRAMA OF THIS RELATIONSHIP IS ACTED
OUT.
History:

The Americas were settled, from Asia, c30,000 BC and

re-colonised at various later dates. North America is
thought to have had less than a million inhabitants, but
no gardens, at the time of Columbus' 1492 landfall.

When America came to view itself as a nation instead of

only a union, after the Civil War, there was an
increased desire to compete with the glories of the Old
World. This was one reason for the establishment of
American National Parks which were viewed, rightly, as
better examples of Wild Nature than anything which
could be found in Europe. Since garden designers had
spent centuries 'imitating nature', information on the
National Parks began to appear in histories of garden
design and the professional skill of managing National
Parks was claimed as part of 'landscape architecture'.
Four phases of European influence on
American gardens :
1. Early American landowners employed immigrants who had
learned their skills in the gardens of the Old World. The
houses and gardens they made form an integral part of the
European tradition.

2. When America began to train its own gardeners and

designers, they learned about European gardens and
gardening from books, especially the publications of Humphry
Repton and John Claudius Loudon. Given the strength of
European influence, it is possible to use the same stylistic
classifications as for American and European Gardens.

3. When American families became wealthy they booked

passages on ocean liners and a European tour became as
important to the American rich. they were interested both
in ancient gardens and in contemporary trends.

4. European designers influenced the development of the

international modern style gardens in AmericaVirginian
Garden Design in America.
The first North Americans inherited 'estates', built
Georgian mansions and drew their ideas on garden design
from the same source: early eighteenth century England.
Westover Garden, forty miles from Richmond on the
James River, is one of the best-known examples.

THE ORIGINAL BOX GARDEN AT

WESTOVER:

The house was designed in 1730 and

Bannister Fletcher suggests that
the style may have come from a
pattern-book of the type published
by Batty Langley. The 'box garden',
west of the house, is in the Enclosed
Style and does not have an axial
arrangement with the house. If it
ever did, as Newton remarks, is 'very
hard to tell'. This style had its
origins in renaissance Italy and was
popular in England during the
seventeenth century and the first
part of the eighteenth century.
Garden Design in the North Eastern States of America
When New York State became rich, people were settlers,
often newly rich and enthusiastically fashion conscious.
They, and their designers, could obtain copies of the latest
garden books from England, where such books were
popular with the merchant classes.
John Claudius Loudon was the most prolific author and
Andrew Jackson Downing, the first American author to
write about garden design, looked up to him as 'the most
distinguished gardening authority of the age'.
Jackson's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of
Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America was
published in 1841, when Jackson was 26 years old.
Jackson, in his turn, was hailed as an inspirational figure.
As late as 1928 he was praised by Frank Waugh (a University
of Massachusetts Professor of Landscape Architecture
from 1902-1939) as a 'great luminary'. Waugh had published
a revised edition of Downing's book in 1921.
But Downing's reputation was not to last. Norman Newton,
a Harvard professor of landscape architecture, in his 1971
Design on the land, makes the following assessment of
Downing:
But Downing's reputation was not to last. Norman Newton, a
Harvard professor of landscape architecture, in his 1971
Design on the land, makes many assessments about Downing. He
mocks Downing's four 'grand principles' of design:

1. Unity
2. Variety
3. Recognition
4. Imitation
he was theoretically confused, the above principles are
admirable list of the key issues facing American garden
design in the 19 th century.
The origin of Downing's grand principles
is as follows:
The achievement of a just balance of these competing ends is
Unity and Variety
one of the most ancient objectives of art.

The 'imitation of nature' has, since Plato launched the idea,

Imitation
been a central principle of European art.

This principle comes from Loudon and was a key issue for
those who were making estates amidst scenes of great
Recognition natural beauty. Loudon had a keep appreciation of natural
scenery but argued that to class as Art the designer's
contribution should be 'recognisable' as the work of man
International Modern Garden Design Style in America

The international modern garden arose from a theory

about the unity of the arts - allied to a belief in the
creative potential of analytical thought to solve
aesthetic and functional 'problems'.

This theory can be traced to the tenets of the arts and

crafts movement but the garden designers who worked
in this mode, like most of their architectural
contemporaries, were more interested in a new Italian
revival than in the developing a new art for their own
times. The heroic pioneers of modernism were the
exceptions.
Frank Lloyd Wright might have invented the
Modern Garden, easily, for his fecund pen was more
than capable. That he had an instinct for the
relationship between landscape and architecture
can be seen in his designs and read from his
comment that ‘no house should ever be ON a hill or
ON anything, it should be OF the hill, belonging to
it, hill and house should live together, each the
happier for the other’.
At the Robie house (1908-9) one sees the abstract
geometry of the building projected into the lines of
the garden.
One sees this principle in the County Court and
Falling Water (1936-7).
Wright had even less influence on modern gardens
than he had on American architecture in the first
half of the twentieth century. Though he was an
American colossus, few of his countrymen looked
upward when there was most to learn. The de Stijl
movement, in Holland, was excited by Wright's work
and the cover of the first issue of de Stijl magazine
could have been used a garden plan.