The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Art Of Landscape Architecture

"As he was to become our first authoritative writer on the art of landscape gardening, the wholecountry has occasion to be thankful that he was in this way led to adopt what was then called the English style of gardening, in which, to quote his own words, 'the spirit of nature, though softened and refined by art, always furnished the essential charm, thus distinguishing it from the French or Italian style, where one sees the effects of art slightly assisted by nature.' Downing was a man of catholic views, but while he realized the fact that vases and balustrades and studied symmetry might be mingled with foliage enough to make a garden, yet his ideal garden-scene was the primeval paradise, whose pervading beauty was found in the unstudied simplicity of nature. With his natural taste refined by travel and by study, Downing's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, which was published in 1841, became at once the accepted text-book of rural art in this country, and this book, passing through many editions, and his Rural Essays and other works, are still classics in this branch of literature. It was his example and precept which inspired such men as Henry Winthrop Sargent, and they in turn kindled the enthusiasm of younger men, so that the best private gardens in America today owe what is best in them to his sound teachings."

"Downing was a graceful and forcible writer as well as an artist of the highest intelligence, and as he had been already recognized as an authority a timely series of letters which he wrote for the Horticulturist on the subject of public parks in 1849 had a marked influence in creating and moulding popular sentiment in this direction. These essays, which appeared month after month, and were widely copied by the press, marshalled in a convincing way the arguments which were then fresh and original, although many of them have since become a part of our common knowledge and belief. He began by showing that public parks were needed not only to educate the public taste, but because everybody at some time felt the necessity for this contact with nature. He showed that this communion was not only a delight to people who were as unsophisticated as children, but that the more thoughtful and educated a community became the stronger grew the passion for rural pleasures. When it was argued that the people would not visit parks, even if artistic ones were constructed, he pointed to the large cemeteries to prove how eager all classes were to avail themselves of an opportunity for a visit to anything resembling a park. Mount Auburn, Greenwood, and Laurel Hill had been already established for a quarter of a century, and that they had come to be places of resort was certainly not because they afforded opportunity for solemn meditation or for the artistic value of the monuments reared within them."