emerged, with a lawn and an extensive collection of ornamental trees and shrubs. The garden was laid out in 1755; today it remains as an example of a combination of both the formal and the picturesque. The English garden style was at one time formal and geometric, and later naturalistic and picturesque.
Farther north, the William Paca house, built in Annapolis in the mid-1770s, likewise showcases a formal garden design, with parterres, walks, and a fountain. John Penn’s estate in Philadelphia, another design of the same period (laid out during the 1780s), demonstrated a taste for the contemporary English fashion of naturalistic landscape gardening, which included the ha-ha to keep animals from the house, irregular flower gardens, and a vista south of the house. The design reflects the work of Capability Brown and his vision of the ideal English landscape garden of the period.13 Other important estate gardens appeared in and around Philadelphia during the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Designed landscapes in America were not a priority in the colonial period, and certainly for decades after the revolution most people had to attend to the demands of farming just to survive. Few Americans were then familiar with the English picturesque style that had emerged in seventeenth-century England as the “modern” style. An English traveler who wrote about his visit in the first quarter of the nineteenth century said, “Ornamental gardening is an art at present totally unknown or at least unpracticed, in the United States.”14 Evidently, he had not visited Woodlands: William Hamilton (1749–1813) designed Woodlands, his property in Philadelphia, in the modern English style of the picturesque. Indeed, Woodlands was so well done that Thomas Jefferson visited the estate to gain ideas for his own landscape in Virginia. Woodlands, reflecting the English obsession with plant collecting, included ten thousand exotic plants, many of which had to be grown in the greenhouse.
Henry Pratt’s Lemon Hill, likewise in Philadelphia, was another important estate garden. Three thousand plants, including the first gardenia in America, were in Pratt’s collection. Pratt had an even more concrete connection with the English garden: not only did he send his gardener to En-gland to bring back exceptional plant varieties, but also nurseryman Robert Buist, who later became an influential figure in English-style landscape gardening in America, worked at Lemon Hill when he first emigrated from Scotland. Though Buist worked for only a year or two at Lemon Hill, considered one of the finest gardens in America at that time, he probably felt at home since the garden reflected a style that Buist knew from Great Britain.
However, not all gardeners had the funds or the space for estate gardens, and the Colonial gardening style remained strong until 1840. Gardens until that time were often developed by Europeans who had immigrated to the United States, and these gardens reflected the style of gardening back in the immigrants’ home countries, with their focus primarily on vegetables and herbs. By the second half of the nineteenth century, though, colonial gardens had started to diverge from that model, edging toward a New World sensibility.
The gardens of German settlers in mid- to late nineteenth-century Wisconsin are a good example of this trend, showing the distinct influence of mainstream America in relegating the kitchen garden to the side yard and having plantings in neat rows (rather than the traditional rectangular beds). Row planting allowing for mechanical cultivation, with the tools suggested by the garden catalogs.15 Indeed, the gardens took on the look presented in the catalog.
Middle-class gardens, too, reflected a more standardized form of gardening, which had swept the country largely in response to the advertising in seed and nursery catalogs. Along with popular garden magazines, books such as seedsman Peter Henderson’s Gardening for Pleasure encouraged the same kind of garden, featuring flowerbeds and an extensive lawn.
Members of the growing middle class did not limit themselves to standardization and practicality, however. After 1870, the period of the Gilded Age encouraged large estates in which the landscape and gardening became a way to show off one’s wealth. The middle-class Victorian garden included a lawn with flowerbeds and exotic plants, evoking the gardenesque view first introduced by Loudon. Boston nurseryman Marshall Wilder, president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, said in 1879 that the introduction of subtropical plants such as palms, agaves, musas, dracaenas, caladiums, and the many other ornamental foliage plants was the most characteristic feature of that era in horticulture.16
By the final third of the nineteenth century, the Victorian garden of exotic tropical annuals, popular in England and America, had come to require a greenhouse in which to start the plants and also to overwinter them. Rejecting beds of annuals for the landscape because they demanded too much time in maintenance, the English horticulturalist and writer William Robinson’s new book The Wild Garden promoted the use of perennials in borders. Perennial borders were likewise a feature in the “cottage garden” look favored by English garden designer and artist Gertrude Jekyll, who in-fluenced American gardening through her insistence on perennial borders in carefully orchestrated chords of a certain color that would bloom with season-long interest.
Still other influences came to bear in America. One of these, the Arts and Crafts movement, which developed at the turn of the century, focused on native plants such as grasses for the landscape. In midwestern states such as Illinois and Wisconsin, a new interest emerged in using prairie plants in the garden rather than exotics. Around the same time, an interest in Italian garden styles (inspired even by novelist Edith Wharton) became part of the American garden scene in the 1890s. More preference for the formal garden soon followed, promoted through the work of American landscape architects such as Charles Platt.
Because of all these influences, and more, the preferred garden style of the decades before 1900 fluctuated between formal design and a more natural and less geometric composition. The extent of variety in gardens of the period was readily apparent to the likes of Daniel Denison Slade (1823–96), a Boston physician and member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, who described the garden styles in his book on the evolution of New England horticulture: “Between the lawns, walks, and shrubbery of the Gardenesque, so often deemed ‘artistic’ and the only possibility for beautiful grounds—the wildness of the Picturesque, requiring little or no interference with nature,—the Geometrical style, so intimately connected with Architecture,—between these types, there are numerous modifications that are appropriate and will be adopted by those of refined taste.”17
Despite all this variety, most of the American gardens of the time shared a common element: the influence of the English-style garden. As nineteenth-century Americans read English garden books and designed their landscapes in that style, the English garden became the fashion. England’s reputation for having a developed sense of horticulture certainly played a role in making English design more prominent. Travel, too, to view English gardens firsthand helped make the English garden the preferred style among some Americans, including Thomas Jefferson. While Americans recognized the importance of English gardening practices and sought them out, the English were eager to spread their knowledge of horticulture on our shore as well.
Hovey wrote in Gardener’s Monthly of 1876 of the influence of one En-glish garden writer: “Loudon’s books have molded and formed the present English taste for landscape art, as they have also influenced to a great degree the taste in our own country.”18 But Loudon was not the only writer to find an audience across the Atlantic. In the early nineteenth century, William Cobbett, a seedsman from Kensington, England,19 visited America in search of new plants. In 1821, Cobbett published a book in America titled The American Gardener, an account of his trip along with some recommendations for the American gardener. He began by highlighting the English garden tradition: “The labourers of England are distinguished from those of other countries by several striking peculiarities; but, by none are they so strongly distinguished as by their fondness of their gardens, and by the diligence, care, and taste, which they show in the management of them.”20 That care of the garden was something he sought to instill in an American readership.
In the book Cobbett thanked his American hostess, Mrs. John Tredwell, of Salisbury Place, Long Island, for her hospitality and dedicated the volume to her. The purpose
