English garden style evolved over a period of centuries. The English in the 1600s copied the elaborate symmetrical landscape designs of the French, particularly as expressed in the formal style of Versailles. Elaborate topiary, a garden style of the Dutch, followed, with clipped shrubs and trees in the landscape. The English also combined the French landscape style, with its more formal appearance, with the fountains and statuary of the Italians.
The definition of the garden changed again in the 1700s, when landscape designers, or “landscape gardeners” as they were called, proposed a view of landscape that required a more natural use of trees, shrubs, and extensive lawns. This design approach, called “picturesque,” resulted in a landscape characterized by variation and irregularity.
By the mid-eighteenth century, England had begun to promote that more natural landscape, which included a lawn, winding paths, and the use of carefully placed trees and shrubs in groups similar to those one would, supposedly, find in nature. Flowers and flowerbeds were minimal or shunned entirely. This new approach was a reaction to the more formal landscape design that had dominated the English garden for over two hundred years. Advocates of the new garden design included landscape designers William Kent, Capability Brown, and Humphry Repton, each associated ever since with this naturalistic landscape. That view came to define the English garden by 1800. Today, the grand English landscapes like Rousham, Stowe, and Stourhead still embody that picturesque design.
By then the garden had ceased to be limited to an enclosure and instead approached the image of a park in the country.24 The estates of the aristocracy included an extensive lawn to create that parklike setting. For over two centuries the lawn, the central feature of the park view, has probably been the most constant factor in English gardening.25 Not that the lawn was limited to England. In 1864, Hovey, then serving as president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, praised the lawn in its picturesque style, as found on the Lyman property located in Waltham, outside of Boston, and he called it a fine example of the art of landscape gardening in America: “Who does not remember the once and yet elegant demesne at Waltham, where, years gone by, the beautiful deer might be seen bounding o’er the lawn, or gently reposing beneath some graceful elm?”26
By the end of the eighteenth century, landscape gardening in the natural design had become the recognized style of England and was reproduced on properties in Europe and America as well. Indeed, English gardens became the fashion. Old gardens were even destroyed to give place to the new style,27 and books were written abroad extolling English taste and inviting other nations to copy it. One continental example of the new English naturalistic style of the time was Germany’s Englischer Garten, in Munich.
Even today the grand estate gardens of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, such as Stowe, Stourhead, Rousham, and Chatsworth, serve as primary illustrations of the country’s history of gardening. Thus, it is no surprise that the English garden, until Loudon attempted to appeal to an emerging middle class in his writing during the early 1800s, was restricted to the landscape of the wealthy aristocrat. Usually a team of gardeners took care of the property and looked at gardening as a profession, one in which they could advance to become head gardener one day, like the famous Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth.
Gardeners often came from families of professional gardeners, which instilled the importance of this work in their sons; of the young men who were accepted as apprentices in the school of the garden of the Horticultural Society of London in the 1820s, about half were the sons of gardeners.28 By the mid-nineteenth century, England had long fostered a tradition of professional gardeners, who knew gardening both in theory and in practice. William Cresswell, one such English gardener, left a diary of his duties as a nineteenth-century gardener. His book provides insight into the levels of apprentice, journeyman, and finally professional gardener. Cresswell’s goal was to make horticulture his life’s career, as had his father before him.29
British Gardeners Journey to America
In the nineteenth century, some British gardeners, like many other Europeans, left to come to America to seek a new life. A few established their own seed or nursery businesses. They would, of course, also educate the American gardener about the English garden. The immigration of European-trained gardeners was an important factor in the early development of American horticulture.30
Some of this reliance on European-trained gardeners was born of necessity, because of the relative lack of professional gardeners in America. When John Bartram Jr., son of the founder of the Bartram garden and nursery in Philadelphia, died in 1812, his daughter, Ann, and her husband, Colonel Robert Carr, took over the business. In Loudon’s Gardener’s Magazine of 1831, Carr wrote an article in which he complained how difficult it was to find American gardeners: “We are very far behind you [England] in gardening, and willing to learn all we can from such as come here.”31
However, not everyone who came from England and called himself a gardener was qualified. Cobbett wrote, “Every man, who can dig and hoe and rake, calls himself a Gardener as soon as he lands here from England. This description of persons are generally handy men, and, having been used to spadework, they, from habit, do things well and neatly. But as to the art of gardening, they generally know nothing of it.”32
In addition, British and European gardeners did not necessarily have a lifelong passion for the craft. Englishman William Wynne visited Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia in the early 1830s. When he returned to England, he wrote, “Before I left London, several young gardeners begged of me to let them know what encouragement there is for such persons in this country. Colonel Carr told me (with regret) that most of the European gardeners turned farmers soon after they came here. This speaks volumes. There are no American gardeners except amateurs.”33 So the owners of large estates with extensive gardens in America were left to fend for themselves, since there were no professional gardeners as there were in Great Britain. Decades later, the situation in America would not be much better. Meehan suggested in an 1874 edition of his Gardener’s Monthly that the lack “of horticultural colleges is one of the principal reasons why there are few educated and really competent gardeners.”
Although the meaning of gardener has a long history in English gardening, American professional gardeners before 1870 were to be found only on the estates of the wealthy, tending to the fruit trees, lawns, and greenhouses. In contrast to the British with their system for training gardeners, the free-spirited Americans most often sought work in factories in the city or working the fields on a farm. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, indeed the profession of horticulture did not attract many native-born Americans.34 This disadvantage did not go unnoticed. As Andrew Jackson Downing wrote in his magazine The Horticulturist, in an article that compared American and British horticulture, “Rapid as the progress of horticulture is at the present time in the United States, there can be no doubt that it is immensely retarded by this disadvantage, that all our gardeners have been educated in the school of British horticulture.”35
The need to train professional gardeners shows how important gardening and gardeners were to the British; they took their gardens seriously. Eventually, so would American garden lovers, who did not necessarily enlist professional gardeners but nevertheless came to view the garden as something worthwhile, especially for an emerging middle class with suburban homes. Though seed and nursery businesses such as Hovey’s contributed to the growing importance of American gardening, the homeowner did not fear to take on the role of gardener.
Over a three-hundred-year period, England had evolved a definable garden style. It makes sense, therefore, that American seedsmen and nurserymen, eager to find an image to convey the message of the importance of the garden in their marketing, would rely on that