National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Resource History and Description of Existing Conditions
earlier at the direction of Dr. Samuel Bard who had read deeply of the works influencing the
English picturesque movement, including Shenstone's Works and Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty
which he paraphrased for his father in letters home from Scotland. In one letter, the younger
Bard encouraged his father to consider the advice of Henry Home, Lord Kames as written in
1762 in the book Elements of Criticism. This volume, Samuel Bard told his father "condemns the
cutting of gardens into formal parterres, or forcing nature in any respect . . ." 1040
One can have little faith that the elder Bard took his son's advice to heart, as he was
frequently beset by financial problems and had more basic priorities than landscape gardening
to command his attention. The inappropriate qualities of formal parterres were, quite possibly,
the least of his problems. However, at the time of his father's death in 1799 when the property
came into his hands, Samuel Bard made the key decision about the layout of this breathtaking
property that would remain its fundamental characteristic when the Vanderbilts finally acquired
it. The younger Bard chose to perch his new house on the swelling edge of a geologic terrace
two hundred feet above the Hudson River. According to Walter L. Creese in The Crowning of
the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and their Buildings, it is from this elemental
landform that the Hyde Park property as well as the entire stylistic range of the Hudson River
estates gain their ascendancy. 1041 The younger Dr. Bard's consuming interest in landscape
gardening and horticulture placed him with the enlightened company of early nineteenthcentury
peers searching for European plants that would thrive in the New World. In addition to
the development of his private greensward at Hyde Park, Bard's obsession with plants led to
involvement with his business partner Dr. David Hosack in the 1801 creation of the first
scientific botanic garden in this country. 1042
It was fortuitous marriage rather than business acumen that permitted Dr. Hosack to buy
the Hyde Park property from Bard's heirs in 1828. As a very wealthy man, he intended to dabble
in both medicine and in what Virgil knew as the "Georgics," a gentlemanly pursuit of agriculture
and husbandry. During his later years Hosack saw Hyde Park as a retreat from public and
political obligations. While there, he professed a desire for nothing more ambitious than to
"devote myself to the cultivation of the vine and fig-tree, as more conducive to my own
happiness and that of my family." 1043 It was at the time of his purchase, while serving as
President of the New York Horticultural Society, that Hosack made the acquaintance of the
landscape gardener Andre Parmentier, a Belgian by way of Brooklyn.
Parmentier emigrated from Europe in 1824 and was a frequent contributor of
horticultural notices to journals that would have drawn Hosack's attention. 1044 During the brief
six years he lived in this country, Parmentier established a very successful landscape gardening
business. According to A.J. Downing, "In many cases, he not only surveyed the demesne to be
1039
Nathaniel Parker Willis, Outdoors at Idlewild: Or the Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson, 47.
1040
Samuel Bard to John Bard, June 9, 1764, in McVickar, "Domestic Narrative," 61.
1041
Walter L. Creese, The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and their Buildings,
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 43.
1042
O'Donnell, et. al., 29.
1043
As quoted in Freeman Hunt, Letters about the Hudson River and Its Vicinity, Written in 1835-37 (New
York: Freeman Hunt & Co., 1837), 160. The reference to the cultivation of figs would presuppose the
presence of greenhouses on the property during Hosack's tenure.
1044
O'Donnell, et. al., 33.
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