Andrew Jackson Downing

It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–52) on American life during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. By 1836, four years after he published (at age seventeen) the first of nearly seventy magazine articles on horticulture and rural life, his and his brother Charles’ Botanical Gardens and Nursery in Newburgh, New York (where Downing was born and lived all his life), was so well-known for the trees, plant material, and information it dispatched far and wide that it had become a mecca for traveling garden enthusiasts and was known even to English and French correspondents. Its fame and the knowledge on which it was based prompted him in 1841 to publish A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (revised 1844revised 1849; regularly reissued during and after his lifetime), the first book on what is now called landscape architecture specifically to address American conditions.

The book’s acclaim encouraged Downing to take up landscape architecture professionally. During the next decades his ideas—the result of actual designs, on-site consultation, off-site response to client drawings, advice to friends and visitors, and taken from his writings—were implemented on rural estates and suburban plots from Maine to South Carolina and in the Middle West. Had he been able to implement his 1841 suggestions for what eighteen years later became the Boston Public Garden or his 1850 plan for “The Public Grounds” that fifty years later was landscaped as the Washington Mall, he would be recognized today as America’s first urban park planner. And he was in a way, less because “The Public Grounds” was in small part executed (though later completely obliterated), more because his ideas directly influenced Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer in 1857 of New York’s Central Park, of which, he said, Downing was the “originator.”

The pride of Downing’s Newburgh nursery was the 200 varieties of pears and 150 kinds of apples cultivated there, a specialization that no doubt prepared him to publish Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845; reprinted every year until his death and several times thereafter) which introduced standardized nomenclature for 190 kinds of native apples, seventy-six types of cherries, seventy-five varieties of pears, and much more, as well as comprehensive classification systems and the most accurate descriptions available. The authority of Fruit Trees buttressed his campaign to establish in 1850 the American Pomological Congress, the first national organization of its kind, which soon was setting universal quality standards, dispensing information about apples to producers and consumers alike, and devising marketing strategies. Downing was also founding editor from 1846 to 1852 of The Horticulturist, the most widely read “Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste” in the nation wherein “do-it-yourself” builders, gardeners, and village beautifiers found pertinent advice. He had accomplished all this by the time he was thirty-five.

But that was only half of it. Believing that no rural building should be conceptually or visually separable from its garden, site, or physical surroundings, he devoted considerable attention to architecture. This was the other half. Beginning with an 1836 essay, “Remarks on the Fitness of different Styles of Architecture for the Construction of Country Residences,” and continuing through “Landscape or Rural Architecture,” a hefty chapter in A Treatise, Downing went on to publish two other exceedingly influential books; Cottage Residences (1842, new editions 1844, new editions 1847, new editions 1852; reprinted after his death) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850, reissued that year, in 1852, and again later on) were not only pioneering departures in format and content from contemporary builder’s guides and pattern books but they also “presented designs for moderate-sized, picturesque houses in avant...