Warren H. Manning

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Warren Henry Manning (November 7, 1860-1938) was a noted American landscape designer and a proponent of the "American style" of irregular groupings of mostly indigenous plants.

Manning was born in Reading, Massachusetts. He first worked in his father's horticultural nursery, then from 1888-1896 he worked first for Frederick Law Olmsted and then for Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot, at the firm's office in Brookline, Massachusetts (now the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site). While working for the Olmsteds, he supervised the firm's planting plans (including major commissions for the World's Columbian Exposition and the Biltmore Estate). Manning founded his own office in 1886 and worked on range of large estates in a naturalistic style similar to that of Andrew Jackson Downing. In 1899 he helped establish the American Society of Landscape Architects. Noted landscape designers Fletcher Steele and Dan Kiley were apprentices in his office.

Manning's preference for "wild gardens" was sharply different from that of many other landscapers of his time. As he wrote in a very early unpublished essay:

I would have you give your thoughts to a new type of gardening wherein the Landscaper recognizes, first, the beauty of existing conditions and develops this beauty to the minutest detail by the elimination of material that is out of place in a development scheme by selective thinning, grubbing, and trimming, instead of by destroying all natural ground cover vegetation or modifying the contour, character, and water context of existing soil.

Manning planned numerous parks and park systems, including those in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St Paul, Louisville, and Cincinnati. He also designed landscapes for a number of large country estates, including Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens, and the entire "model town" of Gwinn, Michigan. At the time of his death in 1938, Manning’s office listed more than 1,700 projects. His remaining papers are collected at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

References

Robin Karson, "Warren H. Manning: Pragmatist in the Wild Garden", in Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Volume 18 of Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.
W. Manning, "The Nature Garden", unpublished essay, Warren Manning Collection, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Massachusetts.

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