When I begin teaching my graduate seminar on contemporary American landscape history, I tell my students that they will only be required to memorize one date for the entire course: 1841, the publication date of A. J. Downing's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America. Eighteen years ago while browsing in a second-hand bookstore on a Florida vacation, I happened upon a copy of the Treatise. I had just started teaching history courses, knew the book was important, and the $12.50 price was right. Then I found myself spending a summer in the garden library at Dumbarton Oaks where I read The Horticulturist for the first time. I felt that I had finally stepped into the world of 19th century horticulture, and had insight I so sorely needed to help me reconstruct the horticultural milieu of the Southern planters whose landscapes I was studying. That same summer, while researching a paper on the White House landscape as part of the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the laying of the cornerstone, I found myself in the White House archives studying Downing's plans for the landscape of the national capitol. Just a few months ago, I was called in to consult on an 1851 plantation house in a small rural community in North Carolina. I was struck by how closely the house and its setting resembled the plates in Downing's books. I went inside to inspect the planter's library, untouched since his death, and there on the shelf, with the owner's signature and the 1859 date (Sixth Edition) was a copy of the Treatise.

The story of Downing and his impact on the then nascent field of landscape gardening in America is a powerful one, and Judith Major's To Live in the New World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening adds an important perspective to the small but significant body of scholarly work that has been published in the past ten or so years, beginning with the proceedings of the Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium from 1989 with George Tatum and Elisabeth MacDougall as editors, and most recently David Schuyler's 1996 biography, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815 — 1852. Schuyler's and Major's books complement each other, but Major has been so cautious to not tread into the area of biography, the reader is left wondering what the personal context for Downing's short life actually was, and how the events of his family life played out in his professional life.

Major weaves throughout the text Downing's intent to learn the language of the distinctive American landscape and to articulate an esthetic that was as unique as the landscape that it embraced. The book itself is handsome, well-designed, and richly illustrated. Particularly informing are the engravings from the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. The book offers students of landscape history the opportunity to explore the origins and evolution of the theories of America's first esthetic spokesman. The American landscape esthetic has no stronger roots than Downing's works, and there was a crying need to improve upon Norman Newton's tacit overview of Downing in his standard history text, Design on the Land (1971). Although Newton, out of one side of his mouth, acknowledges the significance of Downing, his remarks leave the reader with the impression that Newton's true intent is to discount both the man and his work. In talking about the Treatise, Newton says, "One can hardly escape wondering not only what Downing meant, but also whether he clearly understood what he was writing about. Here and there are flashes of light, but on the whole, fog prevails."

It is this fog that Major attempts to lift in her careful review of Downing's published and unpublished writings. Part I surveys the Treatise in the three editions published before Downing's tragic death. Part II is a study of the more practical and down-to-earth ideas of the author as editor of the Horticulturist, the journal that Downing edited from 1846 until 1852. The subject and the language of the Treatise are much more complex than that of the editorials; and Major's Part I is correspondingly more difficult to digest. Her goal is noble — to translate Downing's theoretical evolution by placing his tenets within the context of the prevailing theories that were his sources and major influences. But as I worked through this section, I was reminded of the bogged-down feeling that I have gotten every time I have gone to the Treatise itself for clarification. I am simply not interested in splitting hairs when it comes to whether the picturesque and the beautiful are the most useful terminologies, or whether the graceful, the general, or the gardenesque should prevail. What I am intensely interested in as a design teacher is Downing's explanation and emphasis on the expressive content of designed landscapes, the power to shape human experience through the quality of a landscape's design. It is when Major discusses this aspect of Downing that the text comes alive.

One of the haunting themes of Major's analysis of Downing's professional rise to prominence was his struggle with the contradictory drives to teach his public how to design their own landscapes through his publications, and yet to promote the place of the professional designer in order to procure personal commissions. Most telling in the study of Downing as one of the founders of the practice of landscape architecture is the realization that as much as things have changed in the intervening century-and-a-half, some things have changed little, and the profession's struggle to make itself visible to the American public still goes on.

Suzanne Turner is associate dean of the college of design at Louisiana State University and coordinator of the graduate program in the school of landscape architecture. She works as a preservation consultant for historic and cultural landscapes and is co-author of the recently published The Gardens of Louisiana: Places of Work and Wonder (LSU Press, 1997).