Landscape Gardens on the Hudson is a new look at the 19th-century American golden age of grand designs and great estates, and features the designed historic landscapes of New York's Hudson River Valley including Hyde Park (Vanderbilt), Sunnyside, Olana, Clermont, Lyndhurst, Montgomery Place, Locust Grove, Wilderstein, Springside, Idlewild, Blithewood, Millbrook, Kenwood, The Point, Philipse Manor, Van Cortlandt Manor, and The Pastures (Schuyler Mansion). The Hudson Valley's role in the mid-1800s as the birthplace of American landscape architecture is explored through the romantically designed grounds of the valley's historic estates and the works of the father of American landscape design, Hudson Valley native Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing was a Hudson Valley native and America's leading landscape gardener in the antebellum years. His protégé, Calvert Vaux, coined the term landscape architect and later teamed with Frederick Olmsted on the design of Central Park (1858), a triumph of romantic landscape design and the inspiration for nearly every American public park created in the subsequent 150 years. Landscape gardening is a hidden but unequaled historic resource along the Hudson River, exhibiting some of the most significant designed 19th-century landscapes in America. Landscape Gardens on the Hudson is the first comprehensive study of the development of these landscapes and the important role they played in the cultural underpinnings of the young United States a legacy that continues today with the design of America's urban parks and nearly every rural or suburban home. The text is illustrated with over 140 period and contemporary images, including plans, photographs, bird's-eye views, paintings and engravings, many in color. Robert Toole's important contribution in this book is to perform what amounts to a feat of garden archaeology, bringing to light the many-layered landscapes of these historic Hudson River places. This kind of knowledge is indispensable if their grounds are to be restored to a semblance of their former Romantic glory. --Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, President, and founding President of the Central Park Conservancy --The Foundation for Landscape Studies Robert M. Toole's 'Landscape Gardens on the Hudson' is a nearly encyclopedic volume of great estates on the Hudson River. ... Toole's history is an effective primer on English landscape gardening and its influence on 19th-century America. Toole's scholarly and richly illustrated volume will please historians and landscape architects alike. ... Toole's thorough written explanation of the picturesque ideal ... will be of broad interest to designers who seek the aesthetic roots of America's urban parks.--Katie Kingery-Page, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Kansas State University --Landscape Architecture Magazine In an artful and effective organization of material, the writer has told the story of landscape design along the Hudson, from agrarian land use in the colonial era until the last decades of the nineteenth century, accompanied by the commentary of Hudson Valley native Andrew Jackson Downing, one of America's early landscape design professionals, who knew many of these properties intimately. For the first time in print, the landscapes we most care about and most want to know about are brought vividly to life in straightforward, lucid prose. Upon putting down this volume no reader will be in doubt as to why these gardens are a supreme legacy to our civilization and one of the foundations stones of the environmental movement. This book is a marvel. --J. Winthrop Aldrich, Deputy Commissioner for Historic Preservation --New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation The Hudson Valley s role in the mid-1800s as the birthplace of American landscape architecture is explored through the romantically designed grounds of the valley s historic estates and the works of the father of American landscape design, Hudson Valley native Andrew Jackson Downing. Landscape gardening is a hidden but unequaled historic resource along the Hudson River, exhibiting some of the most significant designed 19th-century landscapes in America. Landscape Gardens on the Hudson is the first comprehensive study of the development of these landscapes and the important role they played in the cultural underpinnings of the young United States a legacy that continues today with the design of America s urban parks and nearly every rural or suburban home. This garden design work in the 19th century stands at the center of historic events that decisively shaped the concept of scenic beauty in America and became a core value of the American dream. It was undeniably indigenous, because it reflected America s genius of the place the genius loci of the Hudson River Valley. Fueled by sympathetic political, religious and nationalistic principles, America s cultural aspirations joined with the nation s physical assets, the landscape, to achieve a