A.J. Downing

Rural Essays

Ed. George William Curtis. Leavitt & Allen, 1856.

Let me give you an outline of another garden in the midst of the Regent's Park...The scene, as you enter the grounds, is extremely beautiful and striking, especially when you recall (what, without an effort, you would certainly forget) that you are in the midst of a vast city...Here is a large velvet lawn, admirably kept, the surface gently undulating, and stretching away indefinitely (to all appearance) on either side, losing itself amid belts and groups and masses of shrubs and trees, with winding walks stealing off, here and there, in the most inviting manner, to the right and left.

The author had written the first American treatise on landscape gardening in 1841, and was an advocate of large city parks that could be enjoyed by all classes of society. In this essay on English gardens, dated August 1850, he seems to have been most impressed by the park's Botanical Garden, which was not open to the public.

All the elite of the West End of London are here; for in London, horticultural shows are even more fashionable than the opera; and a gayer or more beautiful sight is not easily found. At the last festival of this sort, the great novelty was a magnificent plat, or garden of rhododendrons, of all colors; the plants, in full bloom, were large and finely-grown specimens, sent beforehand from various nursery gardens fifty or one hundred miles off, planted here in a scene by themselves, where they bloomed in the same perfection as if they had grown here for a dozen years