Chapter Seven

 NEW WORLDS: AMERICA

Amidst all these headlong developments of new garden elements, other, and older ones were still on the move. For instance, the 'American Gardens' so popular toward the end of the eighteenth century, were still important. Many Victorian writers have plans for them, though their definition became increasingly blurred as plants from other continents were added, especially Indian and Chinese rhododendrons and camellias. Indeed, the term became used for almost any combination of conifers, 'rhodos' and other evergreens; it became almost a style in its own right, especially in the wilder parts of Scotland, where almost every industrial or aristocratic magnate had an estate.

These 'magnates gardens' did particularly well on acid soils and in areas of high rainfall. By the time that most of them were being established, (using rhododendron cultivars as well as the latest species from India and America), American gardeners had become as keen on their own native plants as on the hybrids developed from them. It hadn't always been so.

In the first half of the nineteenth century in America, only the most sophisticated gardeners were at all interested in the native flora. Though there were many wealthy garden enthusiasts, there were not many large estates yet held in long lines of descent,and so there was little incentive to indulge in long-term garden planning and planting. In view of the severity of the climate for much of the landlocked states, it is extraordinary that so much of the European garden flora was treasured for so long; essential things like box, rosemary, lavender, bay, even daisies and pinks had to be coddled over the winter, often being grown in pots as British gardeners were doing for oranges, lemons and oleanders. Even by the early nineteenth century there were few American garden books. The "American Gardener's Calendar" by Bernard McMahon appeared in 1806, and the delightful 'The American Gardener' by the English William Cobbett came out in 1821. Another rare American garden book based on actual American climatic conditions appeared in 1822. Perhaps not surprisingly it was concerned primarily with the garden as an economic unit. 'Gardening for Profit', a title used hundred of times since then, was by the Edinburgh born Peter Henderson.

Twenty years later, the next important garden work was closely based on the works of Repton and Loudon. 'A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, with a view to the improvement of Country Residences,etc etc, with remarks on Rural Residences', by Andrew Jackson Downing, was a vast success, and appeared in its fourth edition by 1849. Though published by Longmans in London, it had been revised and expanded for the increasingly enthusiastic American market. The fascinating preface draws a contrast between the new pioneers and their rough plots in the West, and the old families and long-cultivated country in the East.

This is the first book on American landscape gardening, and is an attempt to show newly prosperous gardeners how to ensure that they gardened in the most correct taste. Downing freely acknowledges Loudon's help, as well as that of various American garden owners. After having given a rather confused account of European garden history, he continues: "In the United States, it is highly improbable that we shall ever witness such splendid examples of landscape gardens as those abroad, to which we have alluded. Here the rights of man are held to be equal; and if there are no enormous parks, and no class of men whose wealth is hereditary, there is, at least, what is more gratifying to the feelings of the philanthropist, the almost entire absence of a very poor class... " He says that the middle class, who have villas and need landscaped grounds, is increasing every day, and "...we have no hesitation in predicting that in half a century or more, there will exist a greater number of beautiful villas and country seats of moderate extent, in the Atlantic States, than in any country in Europe, England alone excepted. With us a feeling, a taste, or an improvement, is contagious, and... is disseminated with a celerity that is indeed wonderful"

Downing clearly felt that he had a clear field, and that it should be he who became the first great American garden designer. The only 'current' designer when the book was written was the 'late' Mr Parmentier, of Brooklyn, who arrived from Holland in 1824, and established a nursery. Downing notes wanly that he did surveys and furnished plants, though he appears to have much admired some of Parmentier's work. He continues that the "the introduction of tasteful gardening in this country, is, of course, of very recent date. But so long ago as from twenty five to fifty years there were several residences highly remarkable for extent, elegance of arrangement, and the highest order and keeping".

He lists four of these: Woodlands, near Pennsylvania, seat of the Hamilton family from 1805 (they were rich enough to employ a plant collector and botanist called Pursh to look for interesting native plants); Judge Peter's House, thirty miles from Pennsylvania, in the ancient style of gardening with "long stately avenues terminated by obelisks, and gardens adorned with marble vases, busts and statues, and pleasure grounds filled with the rarest trees and shrubs... " It was, when Downing was writing, still exceptionally fine; Lemon Hill, also once perfectly geometrical, had by now been destroyed by the extension of the same city; also formal was Clermont, but on the Hudson River banks, and in the French style. Waltham House, nine miles from Boston, had a park planted with English trees (when its English equivalent would have had many American ones). Downing thought Waltham and Woodlands were the best demesnes in the landscape style. He also illustrated Hyde Park, and the Manor of Livingston. Hyde Park, like many others, on the banks of the Hudson, was blessed with a wonderful site, and one that had been decorated by Parmentier, and is, he thinks, one of the finest seats in the country.

The list goes on:Blithewood, with its manicured lawns, but also wild and picturesque ravines; Montgomery Place with a wilderness with rustic seats (very advanced), lake and perfect flower gardens; Kenwood, a mansion in either Gothic, or an odd sort of Flemish Renaissance, with touches of Tudeorbethan... And so on. He praises each estate with entirely Victorian enthusiasm, though few of the houses seem especially large or grand, many being little more commodious than a first or second rate suburban house in London. Some of his readers might have wondered quite how strong Downing's own sense of style and 'American-ness' was: he shows a conversion of a big American farmhouse with a straight drive up a field side, changed, at small expense, into an "old English cottage", all Gothic barge boards and rustic verandas, but with little to do with either 'old' or 'English' or America.

It's difficult to know, too, how the liberals of America would have felt about his belief that the landscaping of a farm or small estate should be designed so as to enhance the apparent size of the grounds. He suggests drives rather than the outdated avenue, because a drive can give the viewer a better (because grander) idea of the scale of the estate; to this end he suggests that an owner doesn't show the house from a great distance in case visitors get the disappointing idea that it's small.

He also is rather superior about the newest money of all, saying that "Nothing is more common, in the places of cockneys who become inhabitants of the country, than a display immediately around the dwelling of a spruce paling of carpentry, neatly made, and painted white or green; an abomination among the fresh fields, of which no person of taste could be guilty... " The 1849 edition also includes an outdated British plan for 'an irregular¸ flower garden', with a dozen amoeba-shaped beds with surrounding bushes. He writes: "In the English flower garden, the beds are either in symmetrical forms and figures, or they are characterised by irregular CURVED outlines. The peculiarity of the gardens, at present so fashionable in England, is, that each separate bed is planted with a single variety, or at most two varieties of flowers".

However enthusiastic Downing was for the landscape, and especially the Picturesque form of such things, and however enthusiastic some of his readers, old habits of gardening died hard. By 1866, admirers of the formal could buy the newly published 'The American Gardeners' Assistant', supposedly an edition of a mythical book written by Charles Bridgeman (an early eighteenth century British garden designer), now enlarged by Todd, and published in Pennsylvania. Of course, it is really only the title that Todd has taken; there's no real suggestion that gardens of the 1720's are to be resurrected. Though the author suggests that annual flowers are best suited for ladies, he was mainly fostering a still much used strategy for having a colourful summer garden in spite of the severities of climate for much of North America. He suggests planting greenhouse plants outdoors in the summer, a sort of sub-tropical bedding, except that the plants used are the old Mediterranean exotics such as acacias, oleanders, aloes, though with a few others, like Agapanthus, Alstroemeria, the strawberry tree, as well as Aucuba and azaleas, thrown in.

The list of greenhouse flowers also includes much more familiar things like daisies (especially the Hen and Chicken form), wallflowers, bay, lavender and rosemary, and still lists many plants cultivated for medicinal reasons (they were going out of use in Britain at this date), though interestingly he only included two or three native American species, taken from Indian pharmacopoeia (though this was infinitely more extensive).

He points out that new settlers in America copy the sort of gardens that they knew 'at home', and he asks the question (without giving an answer) of what sort of gardens should subsequent generations have? He points out, too, that not only does the old European garden flora still flourish, but that so does the old formal style. The natural flora has made little impact as yet, and there is no national style.

When, from the 1860's onwards, American gardeners began seriously to look at their own flora, not only did they, naturally, discover that the plants were perfectly suited to their conditions, but also that many were exceptionally beautiful. In terms of design, up to the middle of the nineteenth century, most American gardens had been of the cottage type, where useful plants and ones purely decorative were grown in a convenient and unstylish (but often very pretty) mix. Though,as we've seen, some East Coast and some southern gardens were in the latest European taste as early as 1840 or so, such stylishness remained fairly unique. As Americans of European descent moved West, the new settlers had either time or means to worry too much about gardening. The Civil War left all parts of the country impoverished, and new designers, like Frederick Law Olmstead, had to occupy themselves more with public than with private commissions. Olmstead, who took over the American design mantle once Downing had perished in 1852, aboard the paddle steamer 'Henry Clay' (an accident reported in London's 'Gardeners Chronicle'), followed a rather conservative 'Picturesque' line, and sensibly believed in the preservation and enhancement of natural scenery. He tried, as far as possible, to avoid all formal elements, except, as fashionable in London and Paris, a few near the house, as an overture to a large central lawn, beds of native plants that would have been the envy of any European gardener, and a serpentine walk around and just inside the ground's boundary (an idea developed by 'Capability Brown in the middle of the eighteenth century, and still popular).

Good examples of his work were at Mount Royal Park, Montreal, Franklin Park, Boston, and (most important of all, and where he was working from 1857), Central Park, New York. He also did other important parks at Brooklyn, New Britain, San Francisco, Chicago and so on.He worked closely in association with Clavert Vaux, a designer who first trained in England, and who had previously been a partner of Andrew Jackson Downing's. Olmstead's firm was very active and trained many other designers.

In a way, therefore, the Olmstead office inherited the American design tradition in a remarkably direct way. In America, where the idea that informality of design was associated with the ideals of republicanism was more easily propagated than it was in Europe, the new formalism only began to be re-introduced to gardens around 1890 - 1910, though as in so many other things, California was a special case. There, with Hispanic influence being basic, most gardens before 1800 had a strong Mexican/Spanish feel, and so an equally strong formal basis. However, most of the developed gardens belonged to the 'missions', with a Mediterranean flora of vines, olives, oleanders and myrtles, but not much else. There were few other gardens; the hacienda/ranch garden seems to be a compete myth. Most were usually bare, and infinitely less romantic than their modern recreations.

From about 1850, what Californian gardens there were in formation follow the Eastern state's tradition absolutely; they also had an identical flora, even if it wasn't in the least suited to California's climate. Again, there was the curious irony of the period, that Europe was busily growing many of the annuals from the Californian dry-lands, while the seedsmen of Eastern America were importing seed from Thomson and Morgan, Vilmorin-Andrieux et Cie, Ernst Benary of Erfurt and so on, then selling them on to gardeners in California.

Eastern nurserymen were also buying trees and shrubs from British nurseries like Hilliers, and even from Australian ones. Gardeners found employment most readily if they had first been trained in Europe; two notable early examples were trained at Chatsworth (where Paxton had been head-gardener), and at Gosford (in East Lothian, Scotland) respectively. The first Western nursery catalogues date from around 1848, listing an eclectic flora, running from Australian acacias to lemons from Lisbon. As the life became more settled, many new nurseries soon set up, especially at San Jose, which soon became called the 'garden city'. The Australian flora increased in strength by 1878, when interest switched to Japan (the interest was international, and of course embraced all aspects of Japanese culture, not just its gardens and plants).

By the 1890's, not only were American gardeners fascinated by their own native flora (and how sensible), but they were also becoming nostalgic for the old European garden flora. The reasons for this are obscure, but perhaps the fashion for gardening had taken hold so quickly that the old flora had become supplanted by new garden plants, and so lost to view. 'The Garden's Story' of 1896, by George H. Ellwanger, is an example of this new attitude.

With a foreword by the Englishman C. Wolley Dod, the book, all very discursive, does much to describe Ellwanger's gardens at Rochester NY. There, the winter is so hard that he covers all his herbaceous flower beds with thick carpet of leaves. This is now necessary because, he says, over last fifteen year American nursery catalogues have become very much better, especially in the number of roses, vegetables, and herbaceous flowers, and therefore the range of the plants he wanted to grow has suddenly enlarged. Like many writers of the period, he wanted to extend gardening into the city and the countryside, suggesting that highways and drives should be lined with flowering shrubs like deutzias, hydrangeas, philadelphuses, prunus, spiraeas, magnolias, exochordas, daphnes, dogwoods and so on. All this was to be mixed with herbaceous flowers like paeonies, japanese anemones, the taller lilies, grasses, eulalias, and more. Lovely though that sounds, he confesses that that would not only be impossible to maintain, but also that it would suffer (as many American gardens do), an extraordinary degree of insect damage.

Like many garden writers, before and since, he likes making rules. His, though, throw interesting light on American gardens and social mores of the time. They include: 1. Whatever is worth growing is worth growing well 2. Study soil and exposure, and cultivate no more than can be maintained 3.Plant thickly; it is easier and more profitable to raise flowers than weeds 4. Avoid stiffness and exact balancing; garden vases and flowers need not be used in pairs 5. A flower is essentially feminine, and demands attention as the price of its smiles 6. Let there be harmony and beauty of colouring; magenta in any form is a discord that should never jar 7. In studying colour effects, do not overlook white as a foil; white is the lens of the garden's eye 8. Think twice and then still think before placing a tree, shrub or plant in position. Think twice before removing a specimen tree 9. Grow an abundance of flowers for cutting; the bees and butterflies are not entitled to all the spoils 10. Keep on good terms with your neighbour; you may wish a large garden-favour of him some time 11. Love a flower in advance; and plant something new every year 12. Show me a well-ordered garden, and I will show you a genial home.

Nevertheless, despite the insects and rules, he makes gardening in America sound quite as wonderful and just as romantic as doing the same thing in the most pastoral counties of Britain. "You would know by the scent of the lilies that summer was here. How fragrant the censer of June!ow profuse the scent of blossoming vegetation! - odors not alone from myriads of plants, but breathing from orchards, hedges, and thickets, rising from woods and hillsides, blown from meadows and pastures... " and from the gardens of "tumble down farmsteads" where the loveliest American flowers and the loveliest of Europe too filled the air with perfume...

End