James Kornwolf divides the picturesque landscape into three phases, which appeared one after another in eighteenth-century England. The first phase emphasized formal features and a variety of garden buildings in numerous styles, such as temples and grottos (for example, Alexander Pope at Twickenham, William Kent at Rousham Park); the second phase featured clumps of trees, artificial knolls, and serpentine ponds or lakes, often with islands (Capability Brown at Blenheim); the third phase generally stressed very natural settings and sweeps of turf with a minimum of “artificial” features.93
The picturesque style did not remain in England, however; wealthy Americans such as Joseph Shipley used its design principles to inspire their own gardens, designed and built in the manner of an English country home, with a lawn, trees, and shrubs. Such an estate sometimes served as a second home for a wealthy merchant who lived most of the year in the city.
The French immigrant Andre Parmentier, both a nurseryman and a landscape designer, was particularly notable in introducing the English style of landscape on the East Coast during the first part of the nineteenth century. Parmentier chose that design for his clients with properties along the lower Hudson River, outside New York City. He said that in America the landscape for the home needed to be more natural, not focused on an undue regard for symmetry: “Our ancestors gave to every part of a garden all the exactness of geometric forms. They seem to have known of no other way to plant trees, except in straight lines, a system totally ruinous to the beauty of the prospect. We now see how ridiculous it was.”94 His was an early voice for the naturalistic English picturesque style of landscape and garden on American soil.
The Gardenesque Style
English plantsman, designer, and writer John Claudius Loudon first used the term gardenesque in 1832, in his garden journal Gardener’s Magazine. After traveling to France and Italy, he realized the importance of plant collections and wanted to accommodate such plants in the landscape. He proposed a style of gardening that would show off a collection of plants and also allow for a bit of formality.
Though Loudon originated the term gardenesque to describe his modern view of landscape, English landscape designer Edward Kemp also used it in his own book, written in 1850. Loudon wrote that there were three kinds of landscaping: formal, gardenesque, and picturesque.95 For the rest of the nineteenth century, several American seed companies and nurseries used the same threefold division in their annual catalogs to instruct readers in how to landscape around the home.
In the gardenesque style, trees, shrubs, and flowers—often nonnative —would be planted carefully, so that one plant did not touch another. The idea was to create informal gardens that were, however, as obviously manmade as were formal gardens, so that the landscape would appear as a work of art. The landscape became an artistic display for a collection of plants that were often assembled from around the world.
Joseph Shipley of Delaware
Shipley, a member of one of the leading Quaker families of Wilmington, sailed to England in 1823 to run the Liverpool office of a banking firm called James Welch (the name would later change to Shipley, Welch, and Co.) that financed the shipment of cotton to England. Shipley remained in England for over twenty-five years, at a job that created enough wealth to purchase the land in Delaware and to design and build the house and landscape of his dreams. His home and landscape at Wyncote, whose design featured the parklike, more naturalistic use of trees and shrubs, clearly show that Shipley had firsthand experience of the modern English garden.
The British architect George Williams designed Shipley’s house. Williams had earlier worked with the horticulturalist and landscaper Joseph Paxton on Liverpool’s Prince’s Park, designed by Paxton in 1842. Additionally, he had worked with both Paxton and Kemp on Birkenhead Park. He too was familiar with the current fashion of landscape gardening.
Shipley purchased the Levi Weldin farm in Wilmington, a property with distinctive cliffs, trees, and a view of the Delaware River. He also bought adjoining parcels, creating an estate of 382 acres. He named his new estate Rockwood. The house, built between 1851 and 1857, was both a re-creation of his English home and an expression of the Rural Gothic style, popular in the United States after 1841 (fig. 3.1).96 That style, associated also with the picturesque view of nature, had been important in England earlier, when the Gothic Revival formed an expression of the Romantic age. The house featured a conservatory, a gate lodge, an extensive lawn, a kitchen garden, a carriage house, an orchard, a gardener’s cottage, and acres of farm and woodland.
Figure 3.1. Rockwood was built in the Gothic style, popular in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Shipley’s Garden Books
Shipley’s garden books included works by landscape designers Edward Kemp and Andrew Jackson Downing. While the wealthy in Europe were educated about landscape through reading and travel (including visiting gardens), wealthy Americans, too, traveled to Europe with the same intention. They also read English garden books.
Kemp’s landscape ideas inspired the design of Rockwood. Kemp became superintendent of Birkenhead Park, which impressed Frederick Law Olmsted on his travels to England well before his Central Park picturesque design took shape. Borrowing ideas from Kemp’s book How to Lay Out Home Gardens, Shipley transformed Rockwood into an English country estate in an English garden setting.
Kemp would continue to be an important voice influencing landscape in America for decades. In 1877, Meehan wrote in his magazine Gardener’s Monthly, “We would particularly recommend at this season of the year a consultation of works on taste in landscape gardening with a view to improvement in this respect. Of these there are Downing, Kemp, and Scott, within the reach of every one.”97
Born to a small community, early on Kemp showed interest in designing gardens. When he was old enough to work, he started training under Paxton. In 1858, Kemp judged the New York Central Park Competition, selecting the now-famous Olmsted and Calvert Vaux design. With his book, Kemp made Paxton’s ideas available to the masses. Paxton, first a rival and then a friend of Loudon’s, published the magazine Garden, which was read by American seed and nursery owners, who would sometimes refer to it in their catalog.
Downing also inspired Shipley, who owned two copies of Downing’s book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Downing devoted a section of the book to the Gothic style of home building, which he admired as beautiful and picturesque.
Downing distinguished between landscape design for a cottage and for a villa, representing different social classes: one for the middle class and the other for the wealthy. Though he sought to provide inspiration for the emerging middle class, his appeal throughout the century would be to the wealthier estate owner. The rural architect Lewis Allen wrote, “Mr. Downing’s Designs and Plans are too expensive for general use among this class [the mechanic and farming community] of persons; they will do for what are termed gentlemen farmers, and mechanics, who work, if at all, in gloves.”98 The wealthy could afford their own landscape designers, such as William Webster of Rochester, New York; Jacob Weidenmann from Hartford; Olmsted and Vaux; and, later in the century, Charles A. Platt.
Shipley was familiar with the landscape design principles of Loudon’s Encyclopedia of Gardening.99 Loudon made collecting plants for the landscape an important part of gardenesque design. Rockwood’s historian Lawrence Elliott Lee referred to the estate’s style of gardening as a gardenesque landscape.100
Sources for Rockwood’s Plants
Even while in England, Shipley had known the value of American trees for the landscape, and he had planted several of them in his Wyncote landscape. He later purchased