The Railroad Beautiful: Landscape Architecture and the Railroad Gardening Movement, 1867-1930

Abstract

American landscape architects enthusiastically confronted the design challenges posed by the railroad and by the peculiar “view from the train.” The profession evolved an aesthetic theory, and tested its concepts on sites ranging from rights-of-way hillsides to suburban station grounds. Landscape architects united municipal, corporate, and private interests into a broadly successful movement that emphasized quality site-planning and careful planting. Although the movement withered in the late 1920s, its lessons are still valuable to a profession grappling with the design of roads and perhaps, in the future, with a rebirth of rail travel.