Four phases of European influence on American gardens can be identified:

1. Early American landowners employed immigrants who had learned their skills in the gardens of the Old World. The houses and gardens they made form an integral part of the European tradition.

2. When America began to train its own gardeners and designers, they learned about European gardens and gardening from books, especially the publications of Humphry Repton and John Claudius Loudon. Given the strength of European influence, it is possible to use the same stylistic classifications as for American and European Gardens (as in the section on American examples of garden styles.

3. When American families became wealthy they booked passages on ocean liners and a European tour became as important to the American rich as a Grand Tour had been for the English during the eighteenth century. Americans were interested both in ancient gardens and in contemporary trends.

4. European designers influenced the development of the international modern style gardens in America

Virginian Garden Design in America

The first North Americans to accumulate serious wealth were the English tobacco planters of Virginia. They inherited ’estates’, built Georgian mansions and drew their ideas on garden design from the same source: early eighteenth century England. Westover Garden, forty miles from Richmond on the James River, is one of the best-known examples.


The house was designed in 1730 and Bannister Fletcher suggests that the style may have come from a pattern-book of the type published by Batty Langley. The ’box garden’, west of the house, is in the Enclosed Style and does not have an axial arrangement with the house. If it ever did, as Newton remarks, is ’very hard to tell’. This style had its origins in renaissance Italy and was popular in England during the seventeenth century and the first part of the eighteenth century.

America’s First and Third Presidents were keen gardeners and approached their gardens as they did the American Constitution: they tried to learn as much as possible from the Old World but to create something new and more practical. The First President, George Washington, owned a book by Batty Langley and it may be that Langley’s New Principles of Gardening (1728) also inspired Jefferson’s garden. Its plan is more Augustan than Serpentine. When tobacco proved to be an unsuccessful crop, George Washington turned to English books on agriculture. His layout of the estate, in the 1770s and 1780s, is only slightly influenced by the work of Brown. The Third President, Thomas Jefferson, had toured European gardens and was a skilled architect with a great interest in gardening. The layout shows the influence of Brown but Jefferson’s strongest interest was in growing fruit and flowers.

The wind blew strongest from England, but baroque garden design also had some influence in America and ’it seems to be universally acknowledged in books about eighteenth century American gardens, unless they are all relying on one source, that the Philadelphans alone espoused gardening in the formal, European style’ (Ann Leighton American gardens in the eighteenth century, 1976, p 376). Yet this influence appears to have traveled via England from France to America.

Garden Design in the North Eastern States of America
When New York State became rich, in the nineteenth century, its wealth came from trade and manufacture, rather than agriculture. A large house might often be set in in lush country, as in the Hudson valley. But it was not, as in the south, the hub of a major agricultural operation. These men were settlers, often newly rich and enthusiastically fashion conscious. They, and their designers, could obtain copies of the latest garden books from England, where such books were popular with the merchant classes. John Claudius Loudon was the most prolific author and Andrew Jackson Downing, the first American author to write about garden design, looked up to him as ’the most distinguished gardening authority of the age’. Jackson’s Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America was published in 1841, when Jackson was 26 years old. Jackson, in his turn, was hailed as an inspirational figure. As late as 1928 he was praised by Frank Waugh (a University of Massachusetts Professor of Landscape Architecture from 1902-1939) as a ’great luminary’. Waugh had published a revised edition of Downing’s book in 1921. But Downing’s reputation was not to last. Norman Newton, a Harvard professor of landscape architecture, in his 1971 Design on the land, makes the following assessment of Downing:

Unfortunately he was a child of his age, steeped in romanticism and resounding, sentimental, high-order abstraction. With seemingly uncritical enthusiasm he plunged into the metaphysical jargon of the English landscape gardening writers whom he admired and at times even outdid in elaborate vagueness. To make matters worse, he was heavily influenced by the gardenesque school of J. C. Loudon, to whom he refers in the Treatise as ’my valued correspondent... the most distinguished gardening authority of the Age’. It will be recalled that Loudon published his edition of Repton in 1840, the year before Downing’s book appeared; also that he was mainly responsible for the sorry closing chapter to the story of English landscape gardening.

Many of these critical terms are normally used as terms of praise: most great artists are children of the ages in which they live, influenced by romanticism and abstraction. But Newton was also a child of his age, desperate to break away from Victorian eclecticism and unsure where the future lay. Nor was Newton sufficiently well-read in Loudon and Downing. He mocks Downing’s four ’grand principles’ of design:

1. Unity 2. Variety 3. Recognition 4. Imitation

While we may not admire Downing’s work as a designer, and may agree that, like Loudon, he was theoretically confused, the above is an admirable list of the key issues facing American garden design in the nineteenth century. As the First and Presidents would have wished, it draws from the Old World and sets an agenda for the New World. The origin of Downing’s grand principles is as follows:

Unity and Variety The achievement of a just balance of these competing ends is one of the most ancient objectives of art.
Imitation The ’imitation of nature’ has, since Plato launched the idea, been a central principle of European art.
Recognition This principle comes from Loudon and was a key issue for those who were making estates amidst scenes of great natural beauty. Loudon had a keep appreciation of natural scenery but argued that to class as Art the designer’s contribution should be ’recognisable’ as the work of man

Imagine if the Muir family, discussed above, had struck rich and settled in the upper reaches of the Hudson. What sort of garden should they have made? A baroque display of axial power would have been as inappropriate as the imitation of rolling English parkland. Instead, one can imagine the family choosing a place with a good view of the river and setting their house modestly among the trees. When choosing an architectural style it would be natural to look at picture books of rich men’s houses in America and Europe. Elaborate decoration would appeal. When planting near the house, it would be natural to include some exotic plants with beautiful flowers and foliage. If one disregards the crudity of Downing’s illustrations, one can see that this is exactly what he recommended. It is also worth remembering that, compared to Old England, the climate of New England is colder in winter and hot-humid in summer. It can form a rich scenic backdrop but is less suited to the enjoyment of sitting in the sun and playing on the lawn. Downing died at the age of 37 but his writings were popular and a great many American houses and gardens were designed in the manner he advocated.



The international modern garden arose from a theory about the unity of the arts - allied to a belief in the creative potential of analytical thought to solve aesthetic and functional ’problems’. This theory can be traced to the tenets of the arts and crafts movement but the garden designers who worked in this mode, like most of their architectural contemporaries, were more interested in a new Italian revival than in the developing a new art for their own times. The heroic pioneers of modernism were the exceptions.

The front cover of the first issue of de Stijl magazine could easily
be used as a garden plan.
Frank Lloyd Wright might have invented the Modern Garden, easily, for his fecund pen was more than capable. That he had an instinct for the relationship between landscape and architecture can be seen in his designs and read from his comment that ‘no house should ever be ON a hill or ON anything, it should be OF the hill, belonging to it, hill and house should live together, each the happier for the other’. At the Robie house (1908-9) one sees the abstract geometry of the building projected into the lines of the garden. One sees this principle in the County Court and Falling Water (1936-7). Wright had even less influence on modern gardens than he had on American architecture in the first half of the twentieth century. Though he was an American colossus, few of his countrymen looked upward when there was most to learn. The de Stijl movement, in Holland, was excited by Wright’s work and the cover of the first issue of de Stijl magazine could have been used a garden plan. [see Note 1 below]

France took the lead in developing modern gardens with the 1925 Paris Exposition of Modern Decorative Art (the ’Art Deco Exposition’). It showed work by André Vera, Tony Garnier and Gabriel Guevrekian. Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier was the outdoor exhibition co-ordinator. Guevrekian’s Garden of Water and Light inspired Charles de Noailles to commission a second triangular garden for his villa at Hyères in the south of France. Le Corbusier was a significant influence on modern gardens. A sculptor at heart, he had a deep concern for the settings of his buildings and that love of natural landscape one would expect from a child of Switzerland. The Villa Savoye (1928-31) was raised on pilotis and has a garden terrace on the roof. A similar principle was used for the Unite d’Habitation (1946) where the roof terrace is as much an abstract modern sculpture as it is a garden. Yet the modern garden did not prosper in France any more than it did in England. Garden designers were influenced by de Stijl.

Fletcher Steele was the most important American designer to take at interest in the Modern Garden in the 1920s and 1930s. His practice was sufficiently profitable to fund regular European tours. This included a visit to the Art Deco Exposition in 1925. He met Guevrekian and visited Hyères. Steele complimented Le Corbusier on his ’strikingly original ideas’ and ’odd patterns of concrete walks’ but criticised him for becoming ’banal’. Writing in Landscape Architecture (October 1930) Steele considered that ’What a modernistic garden may be is everybody’s guess. The reason is that it does not yet exist as a type’.

A New York exhibition in 1932 (’The International Style: Architecture since 1922’) showed the work of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. It was curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design invited Walter Gropius to America. He arrived at Harvard in 1937, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. Though not personally interested in the design of outdoor space his advocacy of Bauhaus principles had a profound influence. Garrett Eckbo, John Rose and Dan Kiley were in the same class at Harvard. They read Christopher Tunnard’s Gardens in the Modern Landscape and two of the young men went on to work for Thomas Church on the West Coast. Kiley remained on the East Coast and developed a practice with famous modern movement architects, including Eero Sarrinen, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. He became ’the supreme master of the modern garden’ (Brown, p98).

The modern garden also took root in South America. Roberto Burle Marx was trained as a botanist and a painter. He worked the architects Oscar Niemeyer, Affonso Reidy and Locio Costa, who were influenced by Le Corbusier. Marx’s paintings were overtly cubist and his geometrical vocabulary translated easily into garden designs for flat surfaces, especially near buildings. His work with natural landform was less happy. As Marc Treib points out ’More often that not, he appears to blanket the contours in forms derived from his own flat artworks rather than from the lay of the land. Rarely is there any perceivable attempt to, say, derive a shape from the profile of the topography.’ (Modern landscape architecture: a critical review, p.53).

Note 1

See FL Wright The Future of architecture Mentor New York 1963. He had a great sensitivity to design and to places.

’I chose Taliesin for a name – it means "shining brow," and this place now called Taliesin is built like a brow on the edge of the hill –not on top of the hill – because I believe you should never build on top of anything directly. If you build on top of the hill, you lose the hill.’ P. 21

’We see an airplane clean and light-winged – the lines expressing power and purpose; we see the ocean liner, streamlined, clean and swift – expressing power and purpose. The locomotive too – power and purpose. Some automobiles begin to look the part. Why are not buildings, too, indicative of their special purpose? The forms of things that that are perfectly adapted to their function, we now observe, seem to have a superior beauty of their own. We like to look at them. Then, as it begins to dawn on us that form follows function – why not so in architecture especially? We see that all features in a good building, too, should correspond to some necessity for being – the reason for them, as well as for other shapes, being found in their very purpose. Buildings are made of materials too. Materials have a life of their own that may enter into the building to give it more life. Here certain principles show countenance. It is the countenance of organic simplicity.’(pp 142-3)

The California Style of Garden Design
Thomas Church was the first professional landscape architect in North America to embrace the principles of abstract modernism. He had met Fletcher Steele in the 1920s but worked as a garden designer for a decade before becoming interested in the Bauhaus and Cubism. Church then embarked on a European tour and returned with a confirmed belief in the use of modern materials to achieve functionalist objectives. His work, with Lawrence Halprin, on the Dewey Donnell Garden (El Novillero) in Sonoma County is a masterpiece. Michael Lancaster describes it as ’one of the most significant gardens of the twentieth century’ (in the Oxford Companion to Gardens) and describes it as:

Informed by the Cubist idea that a scene may be seen simultaneously from a number of viewpoints, and by his feeling that a garden should have no beginning and no end, Church, typically, has placed the rounded V-shaped pool so that it cuts across the pattern of concrete and redwood squares, each stressing the rhythm of the other. Line plays against line, form against form, the whole uniting, with admirable restraint, into a composition which has its own unique identity and at the same time belongs essentially to the site.

Lawrence Halprin was born in New York, in 1916, and took a first degree in plant sciences from Cornell. A visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home, Taliesin East, led him to read Tunnard’s Gardens in the Modern Landscape. It struck him ’like a bolt of lightning’ and led him to study, under Tunnard, at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He qualified in 1943 and then joined the navy. In 1945 Halprin moved to San Francisco and took a job with Thomas Church. After working on El Novillero he branched out on his own. Often, he employed the same craftsmen as Church ’but the detailing was more refined, and often more elegant, than that of Church. Planting was typically more artful and adventurous too’ (Walker and Simo p151.) He became a vital influence on ’the California garden’ and went on to design a famous set of civic projects, including Lovejoy Plaza in Portland, Freeway Park in Seattle, the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC and Jacob Riis Plaza in New York City.

Garrett Eckbo was born in 1910, in New York, and raised in California from the age of 4. He graduated in landscape architecture from Berkeley in 1935 and went on to study at Harvard, where he absorbed the precepts of cubism, constructivism and Christopher Tunnard. His first book Landscape for living, published in 1950, was also the first American book on modern gardens. The designs, and the drawing style, was ’uninhibited, constructivist, jazzy’ (Walker and Simo, p 129). It became a key text for the development of Californian gardens.

Garden Design in America; since 1970
By 1970, modern garden design was well-established in America. The revolutionaries from Harvard GSD’s class of 1936, Kiley, Eckbo and Rose, had become established practitioners of an admired style, with many followers and numerous awards. But something went wrong. The building industry experienced a recession in the during the early 1970s, coupled to a book in ecological awareness. Individual practitioners shifted their focus to the provision of environmental and planning advice to corporate clients. Peter Walker associates this trend with the adoption of aconyms pp250-259 in M. Treib Modern landscape architecture). Skidmore Owings and Merrill became SOM. Garret Eckbo became a partner in EDAW inc. JJR, SWA, HOK and POD followed. The firms often described themselves as ’site planners’ and their work became separated from the fine arts. Treib believes that designers were jogged out of this position by the the land artists. The examples he gives are Robert Irwin, Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. Irwin himself draws a clear distinction between art and design. But some of his works have functions and could be read by the un-informed as examples of landscape architecture.

Peter Walker can be associated with the land artists. He has made a significant contribution to the modern American garden with his designs and with has book on Minimalist Gardens (Spacemaker Press 1997). Minimalism was an influential mid-twentieth century ’-ism’ which grew from the principles of early cubism. When artists broke away from confines of gallery space, it led to the development of Earth Art, Land Art and Environmental Art. In applying these ideas to gardens, Walker has produced some of the best twentieth century examples of garden and landscape design in the Abstract Style. In the preface to Minimalist gardens , Walker describes himself as ’a late-second-generation modernist trained in the 1950’s’. He graduated from Berkeley with a landscape architecture degree in 1955. His early work used the renaissance idea of extending a building to create a setting combined with the landscape idea of creating a transition from the setting into the surrounding landscape. In the 1960s he began collecting minimalist artwork and saw minimalism as ’a revival of the analytic interests of the early modernists that parallel in many respects the spirit of classicism’. Gradually he found his taste in art influencing his professional work. Carl Andre’s metal floor pieces became ’metaphors for gardens’. A tour of French gardens in the late 1970s persuaded him that a minimalist approach to landscape architecture was both possible and desirable. He argues that ’to be visible, I believe an object must be seen, at least partly, in and for itself’.

Interestingly, John Dixon Hunt has argued that a study of what happened to landscape and garden design after 1800 is crucial to an understanding of modernism. One of the ideas resulting from the crisis of 1800 was Loudon’s Principle of Recognition. Loudon believed that, to join the circle of the fine arts, a garden must be ’recognisable’ as the work of man. No one took an interest in his idea but it may be that, transformed into Walker’s call for the ’visibility’, American garden and landscape design may be able to shake off a discredited nineteenth century ’naturalism’ and re-join the circle of the fine arts.

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE IN NORTH AMERICA

[Editor’s Note. Chapter 18 was commissioned from Frank Waugh, in 1928, as the final chapter of Gothein’s History of Garden Art. It is of interest as a continuation of Gothein’s story and as a picture of how American garden designers saw themselves in 1928. Readers seeking a concise overview of American garden design in the twentieth century can go to the section on American gardens, seen from 2001 .]

European influence on American Landscape Architecture and Colonial Gardens
In studying the progress of garden art and landscape archiecture in America, especially whenever any comparison with Europe is implied, one fundamental difference should always be taken into account. By comparison with Europe, America has never had a large number of great private garden estates. A certain number were indeed created, but many of them have already been abandoned, and none has ever had a permanent leadership or influence. At most they represent a transitory phase of American culture. On the other hand the American taste in small home grounds represents something permanent, general and significant; and this may be said to be a natural corollary of the earliest traditions.

Civilisation in America began, as it were, full-fledged. The early colonists came direct from the settled civilisations of Europe, particularly from England. Many of them were persons of education and refinement; some were men of substance. Under such circumstances one might expect that evidences of culture, including the making of gardens in America, would be shown very early, and that some of the slow and painful stages of progress as witnessed in the Old World might be altogether elided. This is in fact what happened. Other circumstances contributed to the popularity of gardening in America. Every colony was compelled under threat of imminent starvation to gain an immediate living from the soil. Practical gardening and simple agriculture began at once and in great earnestness. The American colonists were forced to strain every nerve, not alone to make a living, but to make homes and gardens. These they conceived inevitably in English terms—a house surrounded by a garden, and in the garden always plants both for food and for delight. There were flowers for colour and for perfume.

Even the first-comers brought seeds and cuttings and with these began at once the experiment of growing the English favourites: apples, plums, cherries; beetroots, turnips and carrots; catnip, marjoram and thyme; gillyflowers, poppies and roses. While some of these failed, others happily succeeded. Then there were the native plants of the New World, which were not to be neglected. Here were fruits and shrubs and gay flowers ready to be pressed into cultivation. Their enlistment moved more slowly than one might have expected, but it went on. There is to be considered the further fact that the first colonies were planted in regions of propitious soil and climate. Gardening came easily.

The first American colonists were practically all English. They came from a country of gardens. They had been bred in the tradition of gardens and some of them were skilled in garden practice. And the great preponderance of English blood and of English culture, so marked in the beginning, has continued to rule American life even to the present day, in no realm —not excepting even literature and common law—more strongly than in gardening. In later years America received large levies of immigrants from other nations, notably from Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and quite recently from Italy, Greece and their neighbours. These immigrants, especially the Germans and the Scandinavians, contributed substantially to some departments of American thought and culture—to education, science and technology, for example—but not appreciably to gardening. To conclude in a sentence this very brief account of foreign influence in American landscape architecture, it may be noted that French contributions have been nil: only two French settlements survived on the continent, a small one at New Orleans and a larger, more prolific and more permanent one in Quebec in Canada. Neither has affected American culture, least of all American gardening.

In quite recent times (the 1920s), however, a certain amount of Latin influence, mainly Italian, has been manifest. This has flowed in through two openings. First has been the stream of wealthy (and largely parvenu) Americans who have traveled and lived abroad. They have found Paris a place convenient for the spending of money by persons of limited imagination. If they have returned to America at all, they have returned measurably Europeanised and in a temper to imitate the customs of France and Italy, even in the making of gardens. Since the Latin garden forms offered special opportunities for extravagance, it was natural that some of them should adopt this way of showing their wealth.

But the old garden forms, especially the Renaissance gardens of Italy, have strong attractions for more cultured minds also. Thus it happened, in the second place, that Americans of refinement began to be moved by Italian garden traditions. Here entered the new profession of landscape architecture, with a group of ambitious young men eager to learn all that Europe had to teach. The architecture and gardening of the Italian villas were studied intensively, sympathetically, and with some regard to their acclimatisation in America. These two groups—persons of wealth and persons of education—both helped to introduce French and Italian ideas, especially the latter, into American landscape architecture. Later an attempt will be made to estimate more exactly the results of this impact.


Before this topic is dismissed mention should be made of the truly remarkable cultural unity of the North American people. Though they are derived from many races and nationalities, there is an astonishing uniformity of speech, thought and feeling. There are of course appreciable differences of dialect, but not more over the whole continent than may be found in two adjoining counties in England or than can be discovered between the German spoken in Hanover and that of Bavaria. The newspapers, inordinately read, are highly standardised, printing the same news and the same “ features “ from Maine to California and from Texas to Canada. Everybody on the continent sees precisely the same “ movies.” Everybody listens at the same instant by means of the universal radio to the same lectures, the same songs, the same ball games. Schools are graded exactly alike from the kindergarten through to the college. Every article of daily use is “nationally advertised” and continentally sold. One buys precisely the same toothpaste, collars, canned foods or cigarettes in Montreal, New Orleans, San Francisco and Boston.