Famous American Horticulturalists and Their Ties to English Gardens

American horticulture developed in close conversation with English gardens from its earliest days. Colonial-era plant collectors sent seeds back and forth across the Atlantic, and the American designers who followed studied — and frequently visited — the great gardens of England before shaping a style of their own. Here are five figures whose work still influences how gardens on both sides of the Atlantic are planted today.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

Best known as a statesman, Jefferson was also a serious and lifelong gardener. At Monticello, his Virginia estate, he kept meticulous records of the fruits, vegetables and flowers he grew, experimenting with hundreds of varieties in a 1,000-foot vegetable terrace that still exists today. Jefferson corresponded with English nurserymen and toured English landscape gardens during a 1786 trip with John Adams, taking detailed notes on the work of Capability Brown and his contemporaries that he later drew on at Monticello.

Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852)

Often called the father of American landscape architecture, Downing was the figure most responsible for importing the English landscape style to the United States. His 1841 book, "A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening," drew heavily on the work of Humphry Repton and introduced American readers to naturalistic, park-like grounds rather than the formal, geometric gardens common at the time. Downing's ideas shaped the design of many American public parks and influenced a young Frederick Law Olmsted, who went on to design New York's Central Park.

Luther Burbank (1849–1926)

A plant breeder rather than a designer, Burbank developed more than 800 new varieties of fruits, vegetables, flowers and grains over his career at his experimental farm in Santa Rosa, California, including the Russet Burbank potato — still one of the most widely grown potato varieties in the world. His methodical approach to selective breeding, refined over decades of trial, made him one of the most famous scientists of his era and a significant influence on modern plant breeding.

Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954)

As the founding dean of Cornell University's College of Agriculture, Bailey helped establish horticulture as a serious academic discipline in the United States. He wrote and edited an enormous body of reference work — including the multi-volume "Cyclopedia of American Horticulture" — that catalogued plants and cultivation methods for a generation of American gardeners and remains a foundational reference today.

Beatrix Farrand (1872–1959)

One of the few women among the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Farrand designed gardens for Rockefeller, Morgan and Wilson family estates, and created the celebrated gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. She travelled to England early in her career and was influenced by Gertrude Jekyll's planting style, later adapting Jekyll's ideas about colour and texture to American sites and climates.

The English connection

What ties these figures together is how directly they engaged with English gardens — visiting them, corresponding with English designers, or deliberately adapting English ideas for American soil and climate. Jefferson's notes on Brown's landscapes, Downing's debt to Repton, and Farrand's debt to Jekyll all show a tradition that has always crossed the Atlantic in both directions.

Visiting the English gardens that shaped this tradition — the Repton landscapes, the Jekyll borders — gives useful context for anyone interested in how American horticulture developed.