ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING (1815-1852)

Landscape gardener, architect and horticulturist Andrew Jackson Downing helped to run his father's nursery in Newburgh, New York, and traveled to estates on the Hudson River to observe their gardens. His Fruits and Fruit Trees of America, prepared with his brother's assistance, was the most complete treatise of its kind up to that time. It established Downing's reputation as a pomologist and was widely read, going through thirteen printings in the author's lifetime. In the preface, Downing referred to America as a "young orchard" with soil so rich that "In one part or another of the Union every man may, literally, sit under his own vine and fig tree."

Acquired with the support of the Unidel Foundation