building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

First experiences of landscape gardening
Landscape culture entered the United States via the experiences of the plantation
homes of the Antebellum South and the development of horticulture in the states
of New England in the East. Anglosaxon, Dutch, French and Spanish influences
characterised the colonial period and defined the years immediately afterwards.
These historic influences represented the founding nucleus of American landscape
gardening, however, English romanticism did not fail to make some important
contributions. The relationships between American and Anglosaxon culture had
been open to dialectic debate on the topic of the landscape since the second half of
the eighteenth century. On the one hand, there was the tradition of gardening and
the proposals of European Romanticism, which found fertile ground in the United
States. On the other, there was a society which was rapidly consuming its imported,
cultural baggage from overseas to satisfy its need to find a national culture. The
reasons for this rapid absorption (and the consequences of the review of the English
tradition) were at the basis of the originality of American landscape gardening. The
rapid pace of the frontier and the scientific and naturalistic explorations of wild
territories were peculiar to America. Frederick Law Olmsted was the figure who
best summarised these aspects by including in his work the anti‐geometric theories
of the English garden, as well as the American need for the rift between wilderness
and contemporary metropoli. Not by chance did the so‐called Conservation
Movement begin in the 1850s, to guarantee protection for the spectacular natural
scenaries highlighted by the geographical and geological discoveries in the lands of
the wilderness. This movement became so specific as a result of the opposite
European preoccupation. During the same period in the old continent, the main
problem in the topic of landscape was the question of how “to improve” nature.
In England, for example, Capability Brown (1716‐1783) had been one of the first to
introduce the lesson of picturesque into the concept of the garden. His project
design method envisaged the rejection and neglect of geometrical and straight
solutions and preferred a different approach, as Norman T. Newton claimed
“somewhat unsteadily in a visual sense, in an oversoft surrounding of undulant
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