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History of Early American Landscape Design

Canal

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[See also: Basin]

History

The canal was an artificial waterway built for navigation, irrigation, and ornamentation. In general, it was a channel, usually set into the ground, with parallel walls made of earth, stone, or brick. Canals varied widely in size: from broad navigable examples, such as the Erie and the Chesapeake & Ohio, to smaller garden ones such as that depicted in a sketch of the seat of Edmund Quincy [Fig. 1] in Massachusetts. Within the garden, canals could be straight, an idea promoted by treatise author Humphry Repton (1803), or they could meander, as at the Vale, in Waltham, Mass. [Fig. 2]. In addition to the main channel, garden canals sometimes widened to form a fishpond emptied into a nearby river or pond, or filled a basin as in Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s plan of an aqueduct [Fig. 3] (see Basin).

Canals were an element of American landscape design as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, as attested to by Hugh Jones’s 1722 description of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, Va. [Fig. 4]. The chronology of American garden canal construction, at least as recorded in garden descriptions, suggests that the popularity of building canals in residential gardens dwindled in the nineteenth century. They continued to be utilized in public landscape designs, however, as at the Columbian Institute in Washington, D.C. Although images of navigable canals, such as the Erie Canal, were popular symbols during this time of America’s burgeoning prosperity and technological achievement [Fig. 5], views of private garden canals were rare.

In gardens, canals were less common than still-water features (such as fishponds and pools), most likely because canals required both a continuous water source and a relatively large amount of space. The feasibility of such a canal was obviously dependent upon the availability of water, and, not unexpectedly, garden canals were more common in coastal or riverine areas such as Charleston, Williamsburg, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia.

Like other water features, canals provided a source of fresh food. The canal of Edmund Quincy supplied eel, Alexander Gordon’s canal was stocked with fish, and the canal of Thomas Brattle was noted forits waterfowl. Canals also provided irrigation, ice, and, if large enough, offered opportunities for boating [Fig. 6]. In low-lying areas and in examples such as Garden’s waterway (which was fed by fresh springs), the canal also offered drainage for excess water. Like other water features, they provided a garden with the animation of moving or rippling water, the cooling effect of evaporation, the visual interest of reflective surfaces, and habitats for swans and other ornamental birds. The slow flow and placid surface of a canal might stand in contrast to the burbling course of a stream or the dynamic rush of a cascade. With a border of flowers, a canal might, as Repton (1803)suggested, lend “to the whole an air of neatness and careful attention.”

Urban canals, indicated on city plans, were built as commercial transportation routes, but these canals were also embraced in efforts to create healthful, recreational areas for city dwellers. Banks along some navigable canals were ornamented with walks, benches, and fences. In other cases, canals constructed for commercial or navigational purposes were incorporated in public landscape design schemes, as at Fairmount Park in Philadelphia [Fig. 7] and the national Mall in Washington, D.C. [Fig. 8]. At Fairmount Park, which is depicted on a painted vase [Fig. 9], the canal for the pumping station became a popular promenade. In Washington, designers such as Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, and Robert Mills used the canal as an integral element of their plans for the national Mall, routing it to accentuate the view of the capitol and ornamenting it with bridges and walks [Fig. 10]. Latrobe’s Plan of the Capitol (1815) incorporated a waterway he referred to as a Canal [Fig. 11]. L’Enfant even proposed an ambitious scheme to have water run under the U.S. Capitol and then cascade into the canal below, at the level of the Mall.

Samuel Johnson’s 1755 definition of a canal as a “course of water made by art” and Thomas Sheridan’s 1789 definition are particularly telling for the canal’s significance in a landscape-design context. The use of art and water points to the canal’s combination of the artificial and the natural, a juxtaposition that is at the essence of any garden. A canal, in particular, resonates with the theme; it carries water, a basic element in the garden, yet the hand of its human creator is obvious in the contrived regularity of its construction. Dr. Alexander Garden (1754), in reference to Bartram’s garden, noted that the botanist’s enthusiastic attempt to put the stamp of art on every natural feature, culminated in a design in which “[e]very run of water, [was] a Canal.”

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