I spent a portion of this past Saturday happily hiking through the Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery under bright skies. The trees were at the height of their foliage and our guide proved as adept at winding her way through the cemetery’s 165-acre labyrinth of paths, knolls, and grottoes, as she was at tracing the region’s history in the names on the monuments there.

The hike was part of a guided tour of the South Road Heritage Trail, just one of many events this month celebrating our region’s legacy of landscape architecture. Imported from Europe, the art evolved—alongside the work of the Hudson River School painters and Transcendentalist writers—into something distinctly American.

The Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area chose landscape architecture as the first in a series of month-long thematic exhibitions and events exploring Natural Beauty, Freedom and Dignity, and the Corridor of Commerce.

In addition to tours and lectures, there have been book-signings and the release of our own thematic issue of The Hudson River Valley Review.  It begins with an excerpt from Robert Toole’s new book, Landscape Gardens on the Hudson: A History, a succinct overview of the evolution and far-reaching impacts of landscape architecture.

Peter Manning illustrates how these concepts were translated by the Smiley family to create the carriage roads and other plein air amenities so popular today at the Shawangunks' Mohonk Preserve and Mountain House.

Following the further development of the country’s outdoor ethic, we republish Benton MacKaye’s 1921 call for an Appalachian Trail. Returning to the domestic landscape, a second article by Robert Toole discusses the relationship between painting and landscape architecture at Cedar Grove, the Catskill home of Hudson River school artist Thomas Cole.