Writing the Landscape

Texts as Representations of and Sources for American Landscape Design History

A 1739 advertisement lists a lot for sale with an “extensive, pleasant, and proﬁtable” garden. Among its holdings in 1770, a colonial lending library lists twenty-seven titles related to husbandry, botany, and gardening. A late eighteenth-century French traveler gathering information on potential invest.ments for a French-Swiss banking syndicate describes notable gardens along his journey. A Washington, D.C., gardener with a burgeoning nursery business writes in 1804 about the advantages of planting hedges. A collection of house portraits published by subscription in 1808 begins with brief captions praising the setting and beauty of each estate.1 Each of these texts provides a glimpse into the world of men and women who shaped the American landscape and offers clues as to how they articulated its meanings. Because gardens were multivalent, touching upon notions of scientiﬁc agriculture, picturesque scenery, and national identity, the sources that recorded them are equally diverse, encompassing a wide range of voices and contexts. Some texts give details of a site’s appearance; others convey advice that a landowner or practicing gardener might read. Together they provide evi.dence of the theory and practice of landscape design in Amer.ica and demonstrate not just the history of the built environment, but also the ways in which gardening knowl.edge was structured and aesthetic debates were organized.

The information that may be gleaned from written descriptions is as varied as the sources in which the accounts are found. Documents convey concrete information on the garden’s construction, monetary value, dimensions, historical associations, ownership, speciﬁc plant material, and other details. They may also explore less tangible topics such as the philosophical and intellectual aspects of the garden. The par.ticularity of viewpoints expressed in them makes such docu.ments fascinating sources for cultural analysis. For example, Andrew Jackson Downing’s treatise arguing for the appropri.ateness of certain architectural and landscape styles for the owners’ social standing offers a view of the construction of class in mid-nineteenth-century America. Critical reading of these sources includes determining, as far as possible, why a text was written and for whom. Moreover, it requires an understanding of the speaker’s voice, ideally including knowledge of gender, nationality, social sta.tus, education, religious and political inclinations, race, eth.nicity, and speciﬁc situation. In addition, for published works such as garden treatises and periodical literature, it entails building a picture of the works’ audiences and their reading practices. Each Keywords term record distinguishes between “usage” sources and “citations from treatises and dictionar.ies.” The former include descriptions of sites by contempo.rary observers: advertisements, ﬁction, travel diaries, etc. The latter include textual sources that were written to instruct and were consulted, presumably, as didactic sources. While these categories are useful for distinguishing between different kinds of information, it must be noted that some sources, particularly periodicals, contain both sorts of writing. For example, A. J. Downing’s The Horticulturist contained general

instructions, such as for establishing an orchard, as well as descriptions of prominent gardens of the day. This study of the textual representations of the American landscape begins with a descriptive survey of usage sources, considering the ideological and interpretive implications of these texts. It then turns to the published garden treatise literature examining the types of publications and tracing their history from the seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century. Descriptive Survey of Usage Sources A systematic survey of primary accounts of American land.scape design reveals the complexity of the documentary sources. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, for example, wrote as a “farmer in Pennsylvania” about his Pine Hill property, allegedly inherited from his father. In Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecoeur presented himself as “a simple surveyor of lands, a cultivator of my own grounds.” This appellation dis.guised Crèvecoeur’s origins as a classically educated French.man who had been a soldier for seven years before purchasing his Pine Hill farm in New York for $350.2 A naturalized subject of King George, he was suspected of pro-Tory sympathies by his patriot neighbors and yet imprisoned by the British garri.son in New York. The text is no less complicated than the author. Writing letters addressed to the Abbé Rayal, F.R.S., the book opens by noting that the correspondence was “made public because they [the letters] contain much authentic information little known on this side of the Atlantic.”3 Rather than private correspondence, however, Crèvecoeur’s episto.lary strategy was a literary device. His report of “authentic information” has been characterized variously as “fable,” “emotional history,” and “protomythic imagination at work.”4 Despite the fact Crèvecoeur has been hailed as an American “literary pathﬁnder” and “the voice of our national conscious-ness,”5 and his book was widely read in England and Europe at the time, it was not popular in America. Despite such complexities, a survey of the sources con.sulted in Keywords reveals the types of documents containing evidence for garden history and offers some observations on the contexts in which they were produced. Sources for “usage” texts describing the practice and perception of land.scape design include diaries and journals, letters, travel litera.ture, ﬁction, history, biography, advertisements, legal documents, and institutional records. Among the richest sources for garden descriptions are diaries and journals written for private consumption, as opposed to those intended for publication. These sources record a variety of voices: men and women, tutors and planters, urban and rural residents, young and old. Some diaries are records of daily life that mention the garden only incidentally (ex. Philip Fithian, Martha Forman6) while others, such as the diary of William Faris, are devoted mainly to gar.den activities.7 The commentary in diaries also varies from Thomas Jefferson’s self-conscious musings on his garden’s aes.thetic program to George Washington’s concern with the everyday details of transplanting trees and training ivy. Diaries reveal the garden as a place for exercise, conversation, botanical experiments, observations of nature, contemplation of beauty, meditation of classical literature, as well as growing, harvesting, and viewing plants. In their intimate accounts of outdoor living space, diarists also record the intricate cultural codes of social interaction. In a short diary passage, Princeton student Philip Vickers Fithian, who was serving as tutor to the Carter children at Nomini Hall in Virginia, described an encounter in the gar.den between himself and the mistress of the house, giving little description of the form of the garden but instead indicating its function as a social space: As soon as the Bell rung I had dismissed the Children I took a walk in the Garden; When I had gone round two or three Platts Mrs. Carter entered and walked towards me. I then immediately turn’d and met Her; I bowed—Remarked on the pleasantness of the Day—And began to ask her some questions upon a Row of small slips—To all which she made polite and full answers; as we walked along she would move the ground at the Root of some plant; or prop up with small sticks the bending scions—We took two whole turns through all the several Walks, & had such conversation as the Place and Objects naturally excited—And after Mrs. Carter had given some orders to the Gardiners (for there are two Negroes, Gardiners by Trade, who are constantly working when the Weather will any how permit, working in it) we walked out into the Area viewed some Plumb-Trees. . . . I shall in a proper time describe . . . the Area, Poplar-Walk, Garden, & Pasture: in the mean time I shall only say, they discover a delicate and Just Tast [sic] and are the effect of great Invention & Industry, & Expence.8 In Fithian’s account, a New Year’s Eve stroll reveals how the garden operated as a social stage upon which differences in class, status, and race—landowner, educated servant, and slave—were enacted and reinforced. The garden is not merely a setting for a dialogue between an educated man and his master’s wife, but serves as a vehicle by which Fithian can comment without impropriety on his employer. Fithian reg.isters Mrs. Carter’s good breeding by the politeness he is accorded and by her knowledge of the plant material. Her rank is insinuated by her orders to the “Negro” gardeners (presumably slaves) and by the contrast of her own delicate work. Finally, the tutor judges the gardens to be in “Just Tast” and links that taste with the moral virtues of invention and industry, as well as the economic means to afford the expense of maintaining the extensive grounds.

Diary authors, while generally more diverse than those represented in published sources, are still limited to the liter.ate who had both access to materials and the leisure time to compose.9 As a result, there is little record from the perspec.tive of those who hauled the earth to make terraces or who weeded the beds and rolled the walks. Relatively few texts produced before 1852 by slaves, day laborers, or indentured servants have survived, and the presence of these people in landscape descriptions is almost nonexistent.10 Most often their appearance is limited to a name on a sales record, plan.tation role, or brief mention in letters such as in Charles Car.roll of Carrollton’s complaint to his father, “I am very glad you have ordered Harry a good whipping; he richly deserves it, he has been exceedingly idle; never was a garden in worse shape than mine.”11 Other voices also have relatively little representation in the text sources. The more modest gardens, which are often represented in visual media such as samplers, wall murals, and overmantles, are rarely recorded in the documentary record in any more detail than in a deed or court document. Likewise, while colonial newspapers contained advertise.ments by and for professional gardeners and although such individuals are occasionally mentioned in correspondence, the gardeners’ own voices were rarely recorded, at least in surviving texts, until the early national period with the devel.opment of commercial nurseries and American horticultural publications. Collections of letters, both sent and received, and letter-books (commonly kept as a place to draft letters, record memoranda, or copy ﬁnished letters) contain a wealth of observations and reﬂections on gardens. When read with an understanding of the relationship of the correspondents and the purpose of the exchange, letters offer a context in which to interpret the gardening activities of the correspondents. For instance, the letters between Charles Carroll of Carrollton and his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, offer, on the one hand, an intimate portrait of the process of constructing a terraced garden in Annapolis, Md., over the course of ten years (from 1770 to 1780).12 Their exchange suggests tensions and contradictions such as the constant competition for labor, the elder Carroll’s plans to move because of dissatisfac.tion with the Maryland legislature’s treatment of Catholics at the same time his son is investing heavily in his Annapolis seat and in the government of the new nation, and the reﬂec.tions of the younger man on the joys of a quiet retreat at the same time he is spending much of his time traveling to Canada and Philadelphia on behalf of colonial independence.13 The letters also record a father’s advice that “money for show is money wasted” at the same time the son is spending freely for silver, china, carpets, and the creation of a landscape gar.den. In short, the correspondence reveals that the garden was more than an exercise in botanical knowledge or garden design theory; it provides insight into the garden as the politi.cal and social arena of the day.14 Letters also provide one of the best views into the lives and gardening activities of women.15 Because of women’s lim.ited access to publishing opportunities and less visibility in legal records and court documents, women’s interest and involvement in landscape design were recorded less often in published venues than that of men.16 Women’s correspon.dence and diaries, however, reveal an active interest in gar.dens, both in their admiration for visited sites and their own gardening pursuits. Along with details of planting and design, the letters record the pleasure and ideas that the gardens inspired. For example, Fanny Longfellow, writing around 1844, noted with gentle humor the recreational potential of the garden walks at their Cambridge, Mass., home: They contrived to plant a linden avenue in which my poet [Henry Wadsworth Longfellow], intends to pace in his old age, and compose under its shade, resigning me to all the serpentine walks, where, in the abstraction of inspiration, he might endanger his precious head against a tree.17 The letters of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who had received a classi.cal education and ran her father’s and husband’s plantations in Charleston, reveal the management responsibilities women could assume, as well as the intellectual sophistication they brought to gardening. In a letter describing her plans to plant a cedar grove with under-plantings of ﬂowers and inter.spersed fruit trees, Pinckney reﬂected, I have got no further than the ﬁrst volume of Virgil but was most agreeably disappointed to ﬁnd myself instructed in agriculture as well as entertained by his charming pen; for I am persuaded tho’ he wrote in and for Italy, it will in many instances suit Carolina. . . . the calm and diction of pastoral and gardening agreeably presented themselves, not unsuitably to this charming season of the year, with which I am so much delighted.18 Letters written by both genders depict gardens as a realm of social interaction, with visits, plants, seeds, and advice being the primary medium of exchange. They also offer a glimpse into the exchange of knowledge that bound together groups of men and women exploring the diversity of the New World’s plant kingdom. This network of gardeners and botanists shared their enthusiasm, along with seeds, cut.tings and bulbs, throughout the colonies and across the Atlantic. The correspondence among John Bartram, Peter Collinson, Mark Catesby, Cadwallader Colden, Jane Colden, Carolus Linnaeus, Martha Logan, and Philip Miller is ﬁlled with descriptions of plants, garden experiments, reports of plant hunting excursions, and the trials of pursuing “botani.cal pleasures.”19 While these letters are generally concerned with the plant materials themselves, rather than containing descriptions of the spaces in which they were planted, occa.sional letters are more revealing of the landscape settings. For example, Dr. Alexander Garden’s letter to Cadwallader Colden in 1754 reported a visit to the Bartram Botanic Garden and Nursery in Philadelphia: “He disdains to have a garden less than Pennsylvania, & every den is an Arbour, Every Run of water, a Canal, & every small level Spot a Parterre.”20 Other letters reveal the social currency of plant exchange among colonial gardeners. For instance, correspondence between Margaret Carroll and George Washington reveals the sub.tleties of etiquette, status, and social obligation played out as Washington “can no longer refuse the kind and pressing offer” of a mature orange tree to be sent (at the General’s expense) from her greenhouse at Mount Clare in Baltimore to the President’s greenhouse at Mount Vernon.21

The published literature of explorers and travelers stands in contrast to unpublished journals, diaries, and letters in that the published authors generally had an explicit mes.sage intended for a broad audience. While such publications and their messages changed dramatically from the ﬁfteenth through the nineteenth centuries, they bear in common a construction of the “other.” In the early years of settlement and exploration, this construction was a powerful tool of European expansion. As anthropologist Janice Bailey-Goldschmidt has observed: travel literature . . . was also a kind of “esoteric knowledge” that was both passed around and managed as a source of information and propaganda between competing countries. . . . While the literary intent . . . was to make sense of the unfamiliar in terms of the under.stood, the fact that myths and inaccuracies about the exotic peoples remained alive for centuries after the original publication of such guides suggests that such literature served primarily to justify European domination over the “strange” or “uncivilized” peoples of the world.22 Travel literature is bound less as a genre than as a per.spective, and, for early American landscape accounts, was written by those acquiring territories, resources, and subjects under the auspices of colonialism with its supporting ideolog.ical formations.23 Perhaps no forms of knowledge are more redolent with concepts of conquest and control than images of the landscape. Land, in this sense, is territory—the claim of ownership, the stage of colonization and control, and a proﬁt-making resource. Representations of the American landscape, whether written or visual, conveyed ideas that were fundamental to the establishment of European hege.mony and the selling of the “New World.” Throughout the history of European exploration, settlement, and establish.ment of the new American nation, texts describing both the natural and designed landscape were potent purveyors of claims to authority by each new set of leaders. The earliest accounts of the “New World,” which some scholars have analyzed as promotional literature, were written by members of explorers’ parties.24 Many of these early descriptions were written explicitly to attract new investors and settlers, and their optimism and exaggeration are evident in descriptions of the landscape. The few examples of land.scape design terms, such as “grove” and “prospect,” pro.moted an impression of the productivity, abundance, and proﬁtability of the new territory.25 While the texts offer the ﬁrst written evidence of Native American agriculture, their colonizing agenda also tended to suppress evidence of native control of land thereby leaving it open for European claim. For instance, John Winthrop recorded that “the Natives of New England . . . inclose noe Land, neither have any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land by, and soe have noe other but a Naturall Right to those Countries . . . the rest of the country lay open to any that could and would improve it.”26 Travel literature continued after the ﬁrst settlements were established, although it recorded tours of the growing towns and expanding frontiers rather than exploration. These accounts—by tourists, immigrants, and American-born authors written throughout the eighteenth and ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century—provide some of the most detailed descriptions of American gardens. Authors such as Rev. Man.asseh Cutler, Timothy Dwight, Benjamin Silliman, and Frances Trollope were writing for audiences who expected not only to gain information about distant places, but also to be transported to them by detailed description. Dwight, in his preface, wrote “The reader . . . partakes partially of the emo.tion, experienced by a traveller, when standing on the spot, which was the scene of an interesting transaction.”27 While the evocative language makes for some of the most colorful garden descriptions, travel accounts must also be used cau.tiously with an awareness of the informing discourses of national identity and cultural imperialism, as well as the liter.ary conventions of the genre.