From Wild Gardens to City Planning: Warren Manning’s Living Legacy

November 7, 1860

Today, we celebrate Warren H. Manning, a visionary landscape architect whose birth was commemorated by his father with the planting of an elm tree - a fitting tribute for a man who would dedicate his life to transforming America's landscapes.

As his father noted in his diary:

At five minutes past 12 this morning, we had a son born to us...
I planted the Elm tree to commemorate the day that our first child was born.
I think that there should be a tree planted at the birth of every child so that in the after times it may be seen which is most useful.

Manning's revolutionary "wild garden" approach challenged the formal, symmetrical gardens popular in his era. His philosophy was simple yet profound: work with nature, not against it. He advocated for selective pruning and thoughtful plant placement that enhanced existing landscapes rather than imposing artificial order upon them. In his unpublished essay The Nature Garden, Manning wrote eloquently about his approach:

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.

Manning's influence extended far beyond private gardens. His career encompassed more than 1,600 projects across North America, from intimate home grounds to sprawling estates, from college campuses to entire city plans.

Perhaps most remarkably, he developed overlay mapping techniques that would later inspire modern computer-based geographic information systems (GIS) - a testament to his forward-thinking approach to landscape architecture.

As one of the eleven founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1899, Manning helped establish the professional standards that would shape American landscape architecture for generations to come. His legacy lives on in countless public spaces, including his work on the Biltmore Estate and the World's Columbian Exposition.

The Birmingham artist Frank Hartley Anderson captured Manning's lasting impact in this tribute: "Fifty other towns and cities today are better places to live because of the vision of Warren H. Manning. Eleven hundred communities, in part, were made pleasanter places through his 50 years of wholehearted service."