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In the course of Eight miles riding we got one or two other tollerable prospects, when we got a sight of the Generals House, and soon after entered by a new Road he is making. He seems to be laying out his grownds with great tast[e] in the English fashion. [Lancelot “Capability ”] Brown was he alive and here would certainly say this spot had great Capabilities but he could never call it good soil. Lt. John Enys F rom the eighteenth century to today, visitors to Mount Vernon have pointed out the English influence on Washington’s gardens. As with other features of colonial and early national culture in America, from architectural style to political thought to tastes in music and literature, the English shaped American taste in gardening. Washington’s gardens were not slavishly beholden to English theory or practice, though, and he shaped his landscape into a consciously personal form that expressed his unique place in American society. From what little we know about Washington’s gardening schemes before the end of the Revolutionary period, we can conclude that they derived from the most conservative models of European gardening, following practices current in the American colonies but characteristic of British gardening of two generations before or earlier. There are no visitors’ descriptions of them, and much of the work was altered during his later efforts. Before the war, he had a straight entrance drive; square, walled gardens; view-blocking fences connecting the mansion house to dependencies; and conservative, geometric arrangements of trees, planting beds, and walks. Washington referred in March 1775 to the rows and gravel walk near the “head of the Octagon” in the gardens near the house.1 A “Cherry Walk” stood north and east c h a p t e r f i v e Mount Vernon and British Gardening 120 ' George Washington’s Eye of the house, and he planted some holly trees on the “Circular Banks.”2 Washington revised this older scheme in the 1780s and 1790s in well-documented efforts that came to embody his mature ideas. It is useful to consider Washington’s designs in an international context by looking at Mount Vernon within the history of the several forms of English gardening. Tastes and attitudes from England passed to America just as easily after the Revolution as before, and it is hardly surprising, as Julian Niemcewicz recognized that Washington had come close to the English style: “In a word the garden, the plantations , the house, the whole upkeep, proves that a man born with natural taste can divine the beautiful without having seen the model. The G[eneral] has never left America. After seeing his house and his gardens one would say that he had seen the most beautiful examples in England of this style.” Similarly, David Humphreys wrote that at Mount Vernon, “lands . . . are laid out somewhat in the form of English gardens , in meadows & grass-grounds, ornamented with little copses, circular clumps, & single trees.” In another passage, Humphreys noted that Washington learned much from conversations with others, especially foreigners: “Nor are his conversations with well-informed men, less conducive to bring him acquainted with the various events which happen, in different countries of the globe. Every foreigner, of distinction , who visits America, makes it a point to see him.”3 Washington was well aware of trends abroad. Still, it is equally striking how Washington departed from English practices. He responded to his American context, to his own place in history, and to the extraordinary natural site of his estate. Nevertheless, his language and resulting gardens were shaped by English thought, and one needs to look at their theory and practice. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, English gardeners began to turn away from the geometric, formal gardening style of the Continental European schools (Italian, French, and Dutch) and to produce something closer to Nature itself or to a landscape painting. Certain avant-garde authors, such as William Temple, Joseph Addison, and Stephen Switzer , expressed this idea in writing even before any broad application of the ideas in practice. Richard Steele, along with Addison, spoke out early against the clipped hedges and other constructions of the formal Continental styles.4 In a movement that became known in the eighteenth century with designations such as “modern gardening” and “landscape gardening,” the English began to embrace the ideal of the natural garden, which would oppose the artificial, geometric garden characterized by topiaries, square beds and parterres, and straight allées of...

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