Wilderness

History

When used in the context of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century gardens, the term wilderness generally referred to a planned arrangement of trees that contained an understory of vegetation, often set within a regularly defined space [Fig. 1]. According to Batty Langley (1728), usually this feature was located in a remote region of the garden. Philip Miller, in his 1754 treatise, insisted that wildernesses be located some distance from the house, so that moisture from the trees would not harm the dwelling. He also believed that the feature should not “obstruct any distant Prospect of the Country” and recommended that it be developed on a scale proportionate with the rest of the garden.

Elaborately patterned walks helped establish the internal design of the wilderness and encouraged strolling. These walks, typically framed by vegetation, could range from rectilinear to serpentine, as Langley’s designs demonstrate. Miller maintained that wilderness walks should meander and contain quick turns to surprise the visitor with hidden features. In The Gardeners Dictionary (1754), American plants were listed under the category “wilderness,” a garden type that Miller recommended be laid out with serpentine walkways as if re-creating the untamed environment in which the plants were found originally.

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, wilderness walks were typically bordered by dense, high hedges, as suggested by Richard Bradley (1719). Increasingly, these hedges were either trimmed to a low height or removed altogether in favor of shrubs underplanted with flowers. This shift in taste is indicated by Miller’s treatise, in which he criticized high hedges and recommended lining the walks of the wilderness with irregularly disposed “Wood-flowers” (such as violets and daffodils), backed by low flowering shrubs (such as roses and honeysuckles). This method created a graduated slope of shrubs culminating in the grouping of trees. Eventually, this manner of arranging a wilderness became more commonly known as shrubbery in horticultural manuals (see Shrubbery).

The emergence of such shrubbery, however, did not mean the immediate demise of the wilderness, nor did it mean that the new use of the term “shrubbery” correlated precisely with the old. Shrubberies were typically characterized by decorative plantings arranged with respect to height in graduated slopes, and it is clear from Miller’s account that wildernesses could be similarly arranged. Nonetheless, some differences distinguish the two features. Most significantly, a wilderness (unlike a shrubbery) was often arranged in geometrical fashion, with regularized plantings punctuated by a centrally placed decorative object, such as a fountain or statue. The illusion of density in wilderness vegetation often was created by planting trees in a quincunx pattern (resembling the arrangement of a five-face on a die), a plan not generally used in shrubberies.

A few colonial wildernesses were constructed in a manner roughly comparable to that described by Miller and Langley. A 1734 real estate advertisement for a South Carolina island, for example, noted a shady wilderness filled with walks and arbors. John Penn and George Washington each built a wilderness on his estate, placing the feature at a distance from the main house, in keeping with Langley’s prescriptions. In John Nancarrow’s c. 1784 plan of John Penn’s estate in Philadelphia, the wilderness is labeled at “c” [Fig. 2]. In his plan for Mount Vernon [Fig. 3], Samuel Vaughan in 1787 depicted wildernesses flanking the serpentine walks and eventually merging at some distance from the main house. In practice, Washington did not follow Vaughan’s recommendation but kept the area clear to form a view framed by wildernesses, as his contemporaries Langley and Miller recommended. According to Washington’s diaries, the wildernesses at Mount Vernon were also intersected with walks, although such details are not noted on Vaughan’s plan of the estate. In keeping with the elision between the terms “wilderness” and “shrubbery” in this period, Washington sometimes referred to these planting features as shrubberies.

The term “wilderness” persisted in early nineteenth-century American horticultural manuals. Bernard M’Mahon (1806), for example, emphasized winding walks framed by closely planted vegetation and occasionally leading to open spaces also bounded by plantations. By this date, however, the term already was waning in importance. The Encyclopaedia (1798) denounced the “stars and other ridiculous figures” that sometimes appeared in wilderness plans. When Noah Webster defined wilderness in his 1828 dictionary, the landscape definition term was listed last and was explained only briefly as “a wood in a garden, resembling a forest.” When A. J. Downing in 1847 referred to “The Wilderness” at Montgomery Place, in Dutchess County, N.Y., he referred to the recreation of a native woodland [Fig. 4] and not to a feature consistent with discussions found in earlier gardening treatises. Downing’s evocative description of a “richly wooded valley,” where one could imagine oneself “in the depths of an old forest, far away from the haunts of civilization,” reflects a central trope in nineteenth-century American culture, representing the wilderness as a primeval forest. The later definition shaped not only aesthetics but also the nation’s sense of self-identity. Thus the wilderness in American gardens evolved from an artificially constructed space set apart from the natural landscape to an unimproved natural landscape included within the conception of the garden.

-- Anne L. Helmreich