Henry Winthrop Sargent

Known as an American horticulturist and landscape gardner, Henry Winthrop Sargent was born in Boston on November 26, 1810, the first child of Hannah (Welles) Sargent and artist Henry Sargent. He graduate from Harvard College, class of 1830. After studying law in the Boston office of Samuel Hubbard, he became a partner in the banking hosue of Gracie and Sargent, New York agents of his uncle, Samuel Welles, a Paris banker. On January 10, 1839, he married Caroline Olmsted, daughter of Maria (Wyckoff) and Francis Olmsted of New York. In 1841 he retired from banking and moved to his estate, called Wodenethe, on the Hudson River at Fishkill Landing (now Beacon), New York. Andrew Jackson Downing, his friend and neighbor, is credited with helping him plan the mountain vistas cut through native forests and extensive plantings of coniferous trees. He published articles in horticultural magazines and wrote supplements to Downing's Cottage Residences (1842) and several additions of Downing's A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841), which influenced popular taste during this period of the beginning of the professional practice of landscape architecture in te United States.