In 1788, George Washington wrote to Arthur Young: ‘I am led to reflect how much more delightful to an undebauched mind is the task of making improvements on the earth; than all the vain glory which can be acquired from ravaging it, by the most uninterrupted career of conquests’ (51). The correspondence between Washington and Young, and the latter’s confusion over the workings of American estates, provides compelling evidence of the relationship between the ideology of improvement and transatlantic landscape design as examined in Finola O’Kane’s latest book.

Landscape design & revolution in Ireland and the United States, 1688–1815 focuses on how the revolutionary politics of the long eighteenth century translated into landscape design. Revolutionary thinkers, writers and leaders such as Washington and Young, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edward Fitzgerald, were also architects and designers. O’Kane examines how these revolutionary thinkers attempted to translate their ideas into ‘spatial form’. Any study of landscape design in Ireland and America in this period is also an examination of colonialism, and the book does acknowledge and explore the clash between the colonial and revolutionary belief systems. The focus is on the design currents which connected Ireland, Great Britain, France, the Caribbean and the United States. However, the bulk of the attention is given to Ireland and the United States. At times, this comparison can feel a bit odd given the relative scale of both countries. In addition, American estates were plantations that relied on enslaved labour, not tenanted farms — a distinction which seems at the core of Young’s confusion with Washington’s descriptions across their prolonged correspondence. The commonality, as O’Kane points out, is that Ireland and the United States both experienced these trends as political and geographic enterprises. O’Kane also stresses that just as ideas from Europe shaped landscape design in the United States, ideas about landscape and national identity were also projected back onto Europe.

The book encompasses seven thematic and chronological chapters. The first chapter covers the plantation period to the Glorious Revolution. O’Kane examines how the planation system reshaped the Irish landscape and remodelled Irish towns. Ireland emerges as a laboratory for colonial landscape design that is then exported across the Atlantic. Chapter 2 moves into the eighteenth century and focuses on the ideology of improvement. Arthur Young emerges as a key figure here, with much importance given to his A tour in Ireland, 1776–1779. This chapter also expands to include more focus on landscape design in the United States, with Washington’s correspondence with Young playing a central role. Chapter 3 shifts the focus to Washington’s correspondence with the Irish politician Sir Edward Newenham and the experience of European tourists who visited America and viewed Mount Vernon and Monticello. Chapter 4, ‘Subversive Suburbia’, examines the influence of Rousseau on suburban landscape design. This chapter also engages with the United Irishmen, Edward Fitzgerald and Arthur O’Connor, and the role that landscape played in their developing national and political identities. Chapter 5 looks at Pierce Butler, who was born in Ireland in 1744 and subsequently owned and carefully designed a plantation in Georgia. Here O’Kane makes the point that ‘the concept of “improvement”, whereby Ireland was not redistributed but “improved”, could serve to salve an Irish conscience abroad, where the many greater evils of matrilineal chattel slavery were all too evident’ (162). Chapter 6 shifts to concentrate on the design impact of absenteeism. Chapter 7 engages with the aftermath of revolutionary activity, primarily the 1798 Rebellion, to examine how the landscape of Ireland was remade once again by the forces of counter-revolution.

The book touches on several familiar concepts: that Ireland served as a laboratory for colonialism, the ideological connections between eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutionaries, and the way ‘improvement’ served as a defining idea of the period. O’Kane’s contribution is to bring these together through the lens of landscape design. The book was published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at Yale University, and it is appropriately lavishly illustrated. The accompanying paintings, maps and designs help to powerfully illustrate O’Kane’s arguments. Overall, this book is a significant accomplishment. O’Kane has produced a thorough and well-researched study on the connections between the ideology of revolution and landscape design. For those with an interest in eighteenth-century landscape design or architectural history, this book represents an important and useful contribution.