America’s Landscape Legacy
Celebrating 250 Years of Stewardship, Design & Place in America!
For 250 years, America’s story has been written not only in documents and battles, but across fields, forests, gardens, farms, villages, and public spaces. As landscape architects, arborists, and horticulturists, we have the privilege of continuing that story, one landscape at a time.
A Celebratory Message from Colleen
Stewarding the American Landscape
As our nation celebrates 250 years, I’m overwhelmed with appreciation for our founding fathers and recalling the history of our dynamic landscapes across this great nation.
The fields where farmers experimented with new crops. The roads first laid out by surveyors. The orchards planted for future generations. The gardens that reflected both beauty and purpose. These places that provide the genius loci tell the American story just as powerfully as our history books.
Long before there was a profession called landscape architecture, there were individuals who carefully observed the land, understood its systems, and shaped it with intention. Few embodied that spirit more than George Washington.
Many know Washington as a general, president, and statesman. Fewer might know that his first profession was that of a surveyor. At just sixteen years old, he began mapping Virginia’s wilderness while developing an understanding of topography, drainage, soils, forests, and the relationship between people and the land (all the things we do today as landscape architects!). Those experiences informed everything that followed, including the thoughtful evolution of Mount Vernon into one of America’s most enduring cultural landscapes.
At Intreegue Design, we strive to approach every project with that same spirit. We believe great landscapes should be beautiful BUT also resilient, functional, and connected to their place.
This issue of the CoHORT celebrates landscapes, stories, and traditions that continue to inspire us, from Mount Vernon to colonial gardens, from homegrown apples to books that remind us where we came from.
Here’s to our country, celebrating it, and the next 250 years of caring for the land.
George Washington: America’s First Landscape Architect?
I know that is a bold statement and I’ll get many a comment from my fellow LA’s that it was Frederick Law Olmsted (of course I know that!) but this gives us something to ponder over the holiday weekend and celebrations. History remembers George Washington as a soldier and our nation’s first president, but his earliest profession may have had the greatest influence on how he viewed the world.
As a young surveyor, Washington spent years traversing forests, rivers, mountains, and farmland. He learned to read the land. He understood elevations, hydrology, vegetation, and how people moved through a landscape. Surveying demanded careful observation, precision, and an appreciation for natural systems.
Later, at Mount Vernon, Washington applied those same principles in ways that feel remarkably familiar to today’s landscape architects. He redesigned circulation, framed long views to the Potomac River, managed stormwater through grading, experimented with different agricultural systems, planted countless species of trees, and created gardens that balanced utility with beauty.
He believed that productive landscapes and beautiful landscapes could be one and the same.
Although the profession of landscape architecture would not formally emerge for another century, Washington demonstrated many of the same ideals we value today: thoughtful planning, environmental stewardship, horticultural curiosity, and designing places that endure.
Perhaps it’s not a stretch to think of George Washington as one of America’s first landscape architects—long before the profession had a name.
“Agriculture is the most healthful, most useful and most noble employment of man.” — George Washington
What We’re Reading
George Washington: Citizen Soldier
by Stephen Brumwell
An engaging look at Washington beyond the myths, exploring the experiences that shaped him into both a military leader and a thoughtful steward of the land. While I haven’t finished reading this one completely, I appreciate how the book traces his formative years as a surveyor and reveals the practical knowledge that influenced everything from military strategy to the development of Mount Vernon!
Why we recommend it: For me, it illuminated who Washington was as a person, his fears, his start in the professional world, his relationship with the landscape.
Angel in the Whirlwind
by Benson Bobrick
Rather than telling the Revolutionary War solely through military campaigns, this book brings together personal accounts, letters, and firsthand stories that reveal what life was actually like during America’s founding. It gives a sense of realness from these accounts.
Why we recommend it: History feels most alive when experienced through the voices of those who lived it.
From the Garden Gate
The Apple Tree
One of the greatest joys of gardening is planting something today that may not reach its full potential for years, we know that, for example that peony that may not bloom for a year, maybe two (or three), it’s landscape it’s alive, and sometimes it’s a game of patience.
This season, one of our apple trees will finally reward us with some beautiful fruit, although not ripe yet, it’s a small reminder that patience and stewardship often go hand in hand.
Washington was an avid orchardist who cultivated numerous varieties of apples, pears, cherries, and peaches at Mount Vernon. His orchards were both productive and beautiful, reflecting his belief that landscapes should nourish both people and place.
Watching our own mini orchard begin to mature has made that connection feel especially meaningful this year.
“The best tree is that which is most useful.” — George Washington
As we celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, we are reminded that landscapes connect generations. Every tree planted, garden restored, disc golf course designed, and community space created becomes part of a larger story, and it’s one that we are honored to continue writing through our work and landscape architects and environmental stewards!
Intreegue Design is a licensed landscape architecture firm operating in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Napa Valley, California. We offer the added value of having expert horticulturists, forest conservation planners, Chesapeake Bay Landscape Design professionals and ISA-certified arborists in house.
Learn more about working with Intreegue and our Design Process.
