garden.
The British architect George Williams designed Shipley’s house. Williams had earlier worked with the horticulturalist and landscaper Joseph Paxton on Liverpool’s Prince’s Park, designed by Paxton in 1842. Additionally, he had worked with both Paxton and Kemp on Birkenhead Park. He too was familiar with the current fashion of landscape gardening.
Shipley purchased the Levi Weldin farm in Wilmington, a property with distinctive cliffs, trees, and a view of the Delaware River. He also bought adjoining parcels, creating an estate of 382 acres. He named his new estate Rockwood. The house, built between 1851 and 1857, was both a re-creation of his English home and an expression of the Rural Gothic style, popular in the United States after 1841 (fig. 3.1).96 That style, associated also with the picturesque view of nature, had been important in England earlier, when the Gothic Revival formed an expression of the Romantic age. The house featured a conservatory, a gate lodge, an extensive lawn, a kitchen garden, a carriage house, an orchard, a gardener’s cottage, and acres of farm and woodland.
Figure 3.1. Rockwood was built in the Gothic style, popular in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Shipley’s Garden Books
Shipley’s garden books included works by landscape designers Edward Kemp and Andrew Jackson Downing. While the wealthy in Europe were educated about landscape through reading and travel (including visiting gardens), wealthy Americans, too, traveled to Europe with the same intention. They also read English garden books.
Kemp’s landscape ideas inspired the design of Rockwood. Kemp became superintendent of Birkenhead Park, which impressed Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels to England well before his Central Park picturesque design took shape. Borrowing ideas from Kemp’s book How to Lay Out Home Gardens, Shipley transformed Rockwood into an English country estate in an English garden setting.
Kemp would continue to be an important voice influencing landscape in America for decades. In 1877, Meehan wrote in his magazine Gardener’s Monthly, “We would particularly recommend at this season of the year a consultation of works on taste in landscape gardening with a view to improvement in this respect. Of these there are Downing, Kemp, and Scott, within the reach of every one.”97
Born to a small community, early on Kemp showed interest in designing gardens. When he was old enough to work, he started training under Paxton. In 1858, Kemp judged the New York Central Park Competition, selecting the now-famous Olmsted and Calvert Vaux design. With his book, Kemp made Paxton’s ideas available to the masses. Paxton, first a rival and then a friend of Loudon’s, published the magazine Garden, which was read by American seed and nursery owners, who would sometimes refer to it in their catalog.
Downing also inspired Shipley, who owned two copies of Downing’s book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Downing devoted a section of the book to the Gothic style of home building, which he admired as beautiful and picturesque.
Downing distinguished between landscape design for a cottage and for a villa, representing different social classes: one for the middle class and the other for the wealthy. Though he sought to provide inspiration for the emerging middle class, his appeal throughout the century would be to the wealthier estate owner. The rural architect Lewis Allen wrote, “Mr. Downing’s Designs and Plans are too expensive for general use among this class [the mechanic and farming community] of persons; they will do for what are termed gentlemen farmers, and mechanics, who work, if at all, in gloves.”98 The wealthy could afford their own landscape designers, such as William Webster of Rochester, New York; Jacob Weidenmann from Hartford; Olmsted and Vaux; and, later in the century, Charles A. Platt.
Shipley was familiar with the landscape design principles of Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Gardening.99 Loudon made collecting plants for the landscape an important part of gardenesque design. Rockwood’s historian Lawrence Elliott Lee referred to the estate’s style of gardening as a gardenesque landscape.100
Sources for Rockwood’s Plants
Even while in England, Shipley had known the value of American trees for the landscape, and he had planted several of them in his Wyncote landscape. He later purchased trees and shrubs for his Rockwood landscape from several East Coast nurseries. The orders, placed in 1857, included plants from the Robert Buist Company of Philadelphia. More were ordered in 1852 from the Mount Hope Nurseries, owned by Henry Ellwanger and Patrick Barry of Rochester, New York. The majority of the plants for the Rockwood gardens were obtained from American sources.101
Nursery receipts show that Shipley ordered his plants in two stages. First, he chose the plants for the landscape away from the house. Later, after the house was built, he ordered plants for the area around the house. By 1861 the gardens were well established.
The nurseries Shipley used featured both native and exotic plants from around the world. Because the companies offered such plants and encouraged patrons to use them, they encouraged the English gardenesque design, which featured collections of plants.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
