The Beautiful Backyard
by Aaron Ahlstrom

When I was a young child, most of my backyard consisted of dirt. For the five-year-old me, this couldn’t have been better: playing in mud was one of life’s unvarnished pleasures. My parents, though, had a different set of values for our small patch of land. The crumbling driveway, meager shrubs, and pervasive weeds left over from the previous owners did not befit their vision of what our backyard should look like. And so, they remodeled the outside. A flat gleaming blacktop, fresh green lawn, walled flower garden, border plantings, and a geometric brick patio emerged from the old backyard. The five-year-old-me lamented the loss of my precious mud, but now, many years later, I see how my backyard’s transformation speaks to the very essence of what a backyard means in contemporary America. Furthermore, after coming to Hudson Valley, I was able to learn how the estates lining the river’s shore can show us how the backyard came to be.

Before understanding the backyard’s origins, it’s important and helpful to consider what exactly a “backyard” really is. On a basic level, it seems overly simple: “a yard behind a house or other building, typically surrounded by a fence,” as the New Oxford American Dictionary phrases it. On another level, the backyard is much more than simply a patch of ground away from the road. It is our own piece of land where we interact with the planet, exercise our affinity (or neglect) for the Earth, express our aesthetic sensibility, grow supplemental food, play games and sports, relax, and entertain. In many ways it serves as an extension of our house—and outdoor room, so to speak. Overall, backyards are multifaceted. They have multiple uses and meanings, and so take on different forms. Despite backyards’ flexibility, they have inherent similarities, and by looking at the development of Hudson Valley landscape theory and design, we can better understand our own backyards.

In the first century of European colonization of North America, landscape aesthetics were not a primary—or existing—concern of settlers. In the case of New York, colonists from the Netherlands cared mainly about beavers and shipping their fur to Europe. Gardens during this time were completely practical. People would grow vegetables and medicinal herbs around their house, not because they looked nice, but so that they could survive in a new and challenging environment. As the Patroon system began to promote agriculture in the Hudson Valley, backyards remained functional, as farming operations occupied virtually all cleared land. Recurring conflicts with Native Americans and the difficulty of creating settlements and sustaining their livelihoods reduced colonists’ desire and ability to spend time and energy making their backyards beautiful.

Toward the end of the 18th century, though, some wealthy landowners, freed from the trials of working life, began to beautify portions of their vast landholdings. At Clermont, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston adopted English and Classical landscape conventions in his riverfront property. Rolling lawns, artfully placed trees, and carved out views took the place of forests and farms. The area surrounding one’s house became not so much a burden or hindrance, but more like clay, to be molded according to one’s artistic inclinations.

As a new nation emerged from the 13 colonies, so too did an entirely new relationship with land. In the early to mid-19th century, the artistic movement generally known as Romanticism swept through the nation. With its origins in Europe, Romanticism, which encompassed poetry, painting, music, as well as landscape architecture, emphasized transcendental possibilities of humankind’s closer relationship with nature. Rather than an adversary, nature became a source of spiritual enlightenment.

Furthermore, this growing recognition of the natural world’s benefits came at a time when America was rapidly industrializing. As urban centers grew in size, population, and dirtiness, an aesthetic developed that espoused nostalgia for the nation’s vast yet diminishing wilderness. Painters from the Hudson River School such as Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Frederick Church afforded people with images of a powerful and pristine natural world that, in turn, began to influence the way Americans thought about and shaped their own parcels of land—their backyards.

By far the most influential, prolific, and well-known landscape architect of this period was Andrew Jackson Downing, whose writings and designs altered the American landscape forever. Downing ran a nursery in Newburgh. In the 1830s he began writing for a popular publication called the Horticulturalist, which was akin to today’s Better Homes and Gardens. He also published two hugely popular books on landscape and home design. In his work, Downing took the tenets of English Romantic landscape gardening and adapted them for the growing numbers of American middle-class homeowners who wanted to know what to do with their backyards.

At Clermont, and other Hudson River estates, the Romantic ideals of landscape gardening coalesced to form a prototype of what would evolve into the contemporary American backyard. The land surrounding the house, now freed from the necessities of an agricultural economy, could be sculpted into a multi-faceted aesthetic experiences. The work that the Chancellor had undertaken years before reached an apex. Trees were removed to form wide vistas of the river and mountains, architectural follies were placed artistically throughout the grounds, and carefully situated patios and gazebos were constructed to provide relaxing and pretty vantage points. The overall character of Clermont was geared towards leisure and the appreciation of natural beauty.

As the 19th century came to an end, Romantic landscape gardening slowly waned in popularity and new forms of landscape architecture proliferated. In the early decades of the 20th century, backyards were no longer cohesive landscapes with an underlying ideal, but became segmented into distinct “garden rooms,” each with its own style and character. During this time backyards became eclectic. At Clermont in the 1920s and ’30s, Alice Livingston placed her Colonial Revival walled garden adjacent to a “wilderness” garden, inspired by the work of the English garden expert, Gertrude Jekyll. The walled garden, with its symmetric, straight paths, contrasts with the wilderness garden’s winding brook and irregularly space bushes and shrubs.

Surrounding these gardens, typical for the time, is a wide and expansive lawn—the hallmark of the 20th-century backyard, and the most widespread and recognizable facet of contemporary American backyards. Virtually every backyard in America has at least a small patch of lawn, yet it was not until the early 20th century that this became desirable or even possible. One of the main reasons lawns did not multiply rapidly until then was that it was simply too hard to keep them maintained before mowing technology developed—scythes were a tedious way to trim acres of grass. Companies such as the Coldwell Lawn Mower Co., based in Newburgh, began to manufacture horse-drawn, and later on mechanized, lawnmowing equipment that made a manicured lawn a reality for the masses.

After the influx of World War II veterans looking for their own American Dream, the backyard as we know it became an institution. Suburbs emerged and grew, and along with them the accompanying pristine lawn and tasteful flower gardens bordering the house. Lawn ornaments, including the iconic pink flamingos and garden gnomes, served as 20th-century versions of the Romantic landscape’s sculptures and architectural follies. The 19th- and early 20th-century ideas that led to Clermont’s sweeping expanses of lawns, artfully-planted gardens, and stone patios with epic views have now reached the homes of millions across America.