Defending the American Genius Loci: The Reception of Foreign Trends in "Garden and Forest"

Eric MacDonald, Assistant Professor
School of Environmental Design, University of Georgia

This paper examines conversations about "foreign" gardening styles and the concomitant struggle to define a uniquely "American" approach to garden and landscape design in the late nineteenth-century horticultural journal Garden and Forest. The paper traces how contributors to Garden and Forest borrowed from contemporary discourses in both science and art to coalesce an ethos of garden design that resisted the appropriation of foreign garden styles in American environments.

Garden and Forest represents a unique and valuable resource for exploring the development of ideas about landscape and garden design in late-nineteenth-century America. Published during 1888-1897, Garden and Forest was conceived as a "weekly illustrated journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry" by Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum, along with a small group of collaborators that included Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. The analysis of Garden and Forest presented in this study derives, in part, from the Bakhtinian tradition in discourse analysis, and treats those involved in producing and reading the journal as a discourse community. This analytical approach permits a fuller accounting of the participation of a broad array of actors, including botanists, horticulturists, foresters, journalists, schoolteachers, businessmen, professional landscape designers, and amateur gardeners, in public conversations about American gardens and gardening practices. These diverse individuals worked out their own vocabulary, genres, and norms for discussing landscapes and the art of gardening. In establishing discursive conventions that incorporated design principles such as genius loci while emphasizing the language and epistemic authority of science, contributors to Garden and Forest coalesced a rhetoric that sought to neutralize heated debates about the appropriateness of foreign garden styles to American conditions.

Most Garden and Forest writers opposed the adoption of foreign garden styles, and they rooted their resistance in the notion of genius loci, which Garden and Forest writers elevated as the fundamental premise of garden and landscape design. Yet these writers also developed a more "literal" interpretation of genius loci, articulating the concept in terms borrowed from the contemporary lexicon of evolutionary biology and the emerging science of ecology. Accordingly, the central object of gardening became the creation of symbolic landscapes of local nature, rendered by means of native plants and the replication of natural processes. Landscape design became a practice for cultivating a sense of community and place, and instrumental in defining national and regional identity. Garden and Forest contributors thus articulated a philosophy of garden-making that retained a sense of historical continuity while it also responded to the contemporary social and cultural conditions of the late nineteenth century. In its reassertion of genius loci, this philosophy was ostensibly timeless, yet in its appeal to contemporary science it also was undeniably "modern." Both of these features would prove useful in attempts to address the growing popularity of "foreign" garden forms based on European and Asian precedents. Moreover, the rhetoric that emerged in Garden and Forest was extended during the early twentieth century by a number of American garden writers (many of whom had connections to Garden and Forest), as well as through the writings and work of professional designers such as Jens Jensen, O.C. Simonds, Frank Waugh, Wilhelm Miller, and Elsa Rehmann. Their design work and writings emphasized distinctiveness of place, and drew stronger links with nationalism and American regionalism-themes that clearly were incipient in the nineteenth-century environmental discourse of Garden and Forest. The logic of garden-making, as articulated in Garden and Forest, fused principles of science and art in a way that allowed these twentieth-century practitioners to respectfully dismiss "foreign" garden styles, while advancing their quest for a wholly American and "modern" approach to landscape development.