This 1841 work by the American landscape designer and writer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52), reissued here in its 1849 fourth edition, was the first such book published in the United States. Downing, the son of a nurseryman, saw that a 'taste for rural improvements of every description is advancing silently, but with great rapidity in this country', and he aims to provide the prosperous east-coast dweller with a guide to beautifying his surroundings. The emphasis is on landscape and overall effects rather than the minutiae of gardening, with chapters on plantations, specimen trees, and the...