Landscape gardening is an art form that is often used to compliment the architecture of buildings and to provide outdoor spaces for individual and public benefit and pleasure. Andrew Jackson Downing helped pave the way for landscape gardening in American society, when he established a number of nurseries and began designing landscape gardens along the Hudson River above New York City in the 1850s. As one historian notes, ôno American has built for himself a more permanent monument than Downing the landscape gardener,ö (Elliott, 1995, p. 14). This essay will discuss different forms of landscape gardening and those responsible for them.
The concept of landscape gardening was a concept available only to the wealthy when A. J. Downing began designing gardens for the wealthy in upstate New York in the 1850s. While gardens were popular up to this time, Downing helped pave the way for a wide scale movement that was the result of an increasing prosperity among Americans. His embellishments in Westchester County, New York, were part of a growing desire on behalf of the wealthy to exhibit their status through their gardens, ôThe serious planning and execution of private gardens on a wider scale was beginning, driven, like so much else, by the spread of bourgeois prosperity,ö (Elliott, 1995, p. 18).
In the United States, the Cornish Colony was started in 1885, in New Hampshire, along the Connecticut River. In the late nineteenth century, individuals like Rose Nichols, Stephen Parrish, and Charles Platt transformed the landscape by ôturning farmhouses into summer houses and pastureland into gardens,ö (Van Buren, 1988, p. 369). The inhabitants of Cornish Colony were heavily influenced by the changes taking place in landscaping by landscape architects like Charles Platt and artists like Stephen Parrish. Rose NicholsÆ garden design is emblematic of the use of walkways and colors associated with s
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