Published records of Italianate gardens in America

Abstract

While Italy's Renaissance and Baroque gardens influenced landscape design in France and England during the seventeenth century, in Britain's American colonies neither the financial resources nor the social imperatives existed to foster the adoption of an Italianate style. By the eighteenth century, the now prospering colonies followed the less architectural garden fashions in vogue among England's aristocracy. Despite the new Republic's preference for neoclassical architecture, its gardens made only the most oblique references to Italy. Thomas Jefferson gave his Palladian home an Italian name, yet his landscape style at Monticello came from England, even if later at Poplar Forest it was more attentive to Italianate modes. By the middle of the nineteenth century, with the previous generations' naturalism in retreat, the revived European interest in formal gardens found Americans able and willing to adopt such styles in general and the Italianate in particular.