Judith K. Major - A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening

MHG Meetings

Sponsored By: Metro Hort Group

Judith K. Major

A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening

Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852) wrote the first American treatise on landscape gardening and was editor of The Horticulturist. Responding to the intensifying demand for a recognizably American cultural expression, he promoted a national style of landscape gardening that broke away from European precedents. Judith will talk about the people, events, and experiences that shaped his thinking on landscape gardening and horticulture.

Judith Major is a landscape historian and professor of landscape architecture at Kansas State University and the University of Kansas. She is the author of To Live in the New World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening. Her book on the landscape critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer will be published soon. She has lectured in Turkey, China, England and throughout the United States.