Downing, Andrew Jackson

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many American thinkers linked better cultivated land with a better cultivated national character. The state or regional agricultural societies that began in the 1780s, and the horticultural societies that followed, often extolled gardens, orchards, and beautiful rural scenes as uplifting esthetic and even spiritual influences. The Hudson Valley nurseryman, landscape gardener, and domestic architect A. J. Downing (1815–1852) was among the best-known exponents of this theme.