Through his widely read books and essays, Downing changed the way Americans looked at the natural world around them and laid the foundation for a new appreciation of designed landscapes, especially public parks. “Plant spacious parks in your cities,” he once urged, “and unclose their gates as wide as the gates of morning to the whole people.”

Downing’s home and business in Newburgh, known as Highland Gardens, were the center of his universe.  His greenhouse occupied the site of the cottage in which he was born on October 15, 1815, and a rear wing of the dwelling accommodated a cozy office where he prepared house designs for a nationwide clientele.

Before 1847, he and his brother Charles earned much of their livelihood running the commercial nursery that occupied most of the four-and-a-half-acre grounds. His ideal of home was epitomized by Highland Gardens, a Gothic Revival villa he designed himself, and the grounds, which he planted with vegetation framing views of the Hudson and the Fishkill Mountains in the distance. “Mr. Downing has shown in his garden and in his house how much beauty and comfort lie at the doors of those whose means are not very extensive, but are willing to bestow care, and able to bestow taste upon their places, however small,” remembered his friend, the popular writer George William Curtis, who termed it “a haunt of beauty.” Designed according to his principles of architecture and landscape architecture, Highland Gardens was where Downing composed his thoughts and sent them forth to a broad audience eager to improve their own homes.

Downing left his home for the last time on the afternoon of July 28, 1852. He was on his way to Washington, D.C., to supervise the creation of America’s first publically funded large park on land between the Capitol and the White House. His journey ended tragically, however, near Yonkers, New York, when the steamboat on which he was traveling exploded. Downing, who was thirty-six years old, died in the mayhem that ensued.

“I reside at Newburgh; I am his partner in business; I have just seen his body; it was taken out from near the wreck.” With these words, Calvert Vaux, who had come from London to work with Downing two years earlier, identified the drowned body of his friend and mentor. Vaux accompanied the body back to Highland Gardens, where Downing lay in state, high above the picturesque scenery he had loved so much. “A terrific storm burst over the river and crashed among the hills, and the wild sympathy of nature surrounded the hills,” testified Curtis.

Downing’s early death did not curtail the influence of his thought. His books remained in print throughout the nineteenth century. They especially appealed to middle-class homeowners, whose ranks continued to swell after the Civil War. The year after Downing’s death, his widow, Caroline, sold the property to an appreciative owner who engaged Andrew Jackson Davis, her husband’s former associate, to remodel it. By 1870, however, the grounds had been so altered that visitors who knew them in Downing’s time found them unrecognizable.

In the 1880s, a subsequent owner began selling off the property in parcels for house lots. By 1903, almost all of the land had been divided and the house remained unoccupied. Abandoned and in disrepair, Downing’s villa fell to the wrecking ball in the early 1920s. Last year, on that afternoon walk, our little group of Downing devotees could find no trace of Highland Gardens. The memory of a place that might now exist as a hallowed example of American culture survives only in rare photographs, a few engravings, and several written descriptions.

Ironically, during the time that the world stopped thinking about Downing’s Highland Gardens, his books continued to enjoy widespread readership. Downing was one of the first to recognize the possibilities of mass communication made possible by new and cheaper methods of printing and illustrating books. His Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America: with a View to the Improvements of Country Residences (1841), Cottage Residences (1842), The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1848), and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) went through dozens of reprint editions in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Downing’s books carried his reputation abroad to England and Europe. In 1845, the Queen of the Netherlands acknowledged the pleasure she found in his writings by sending to Highland Gardens “a magnificent ruby ring encircled by three rows of diamonds.” Downing had harnessed the power of the book for popular education, taking it out of the hands of the few and placing it into the hands of the many.