building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

meadow” 199 . Brown’s experiments had found the way to exploit and support some
of the scenic aspects already present in nature’s own skills. The basic concept was
to study and create within the garden project some views capable of conjuring up
the landscapes portrayed in contemporary painting of the period. Brown’s ideas as
regards the landscape could be summed up in the words: “like a picture”. The
improvements Brown made to nature soon began the controversy on the question
of picturesque 200 , which allowed his very own method to evolve. In fact, shortly
afterwards, Humphrey Repton (1752‐1818) perfected Brown’s ideas by using the
practices described in detail in his Red Books 201 , a series of texts which explained
the theory and practice of English landscape gardening. Repton’s ideas entered
America indirectly thanks to Bernard McMahon (1775‐1816), an American
horticulturist and botanist of Scottish origin. McMahon, as mentioned during our
explanation of the Monticello project, was not merely Jefferson’s passionate
gardening mentor, he was also the author of the book The American Gardner’s
Calendar (1806). McMahon’s Calendar was modelled on the English formula of the
typical gardening handbooks and gave instructions month by month on how to
plant, take care of the flora and prepare the garden soil. Furthermore, McMahon
used his books to introduce the theoretical and practical coverage of the subdivision
of the spaces in the garden, according to a consolidated English method: kitchen
garden on one side, fruit garden on the other, orchard, nursery, pleasure (flower)
garden, etc, these were all conceived as separate entities, to distinguish the
utilitarian from the aesthetic purposes. In the chapter entitled “The pleasure, or
flower garden. Ornamental designs and planting”, McMahon especially seized the
typical elements of gardening and added new theories introduced by Repton. In the
pages of the Calendar, McMahon affirms that
199 NEWTON, Norman T., Design on the Land. The Development of Landscape Architecture,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 212
200 Think of Uvedal Price (1747‐1829), author of the Essay on the Picturesque, as compared with the
Sublime and the Beautiful (1794)
201 Repton’s Red Books are three texts on garden design, so called because each volume was bound in
red: Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795), Observation on the Theory and Practice of
Landscape Gardening (1803), Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1816).
These books incorporate numerous sketches that show the difference between what existed and
what he proposed (before and after flaps). Repton’s work was also illustrated in the book Landscape
Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late Humphry Repton (1840) by John Claudius Loudon
(1783‐1843), eminent English botanist and garden designer.
125