Andrew Parmentier was an American horticulturist and landscape gardener.
Background
Andrew Parmentier (original name: André Joseph Ghislain Parmentier) was born on July 3, 1780 in Enghien, Walloon, Belgium. He was the second of the three sons, all horticulturists, of André Joseph Parmentier, a well-to-do linen merchant. A cousin, Antoine Augustin Parmentier (1737 - 1813), French agricultural scientist and writer, had first introduced the potato as a food into France. His elder brother Joseph (1775 - 1852) was a long director of the beautiful "Parc Enghien, " a landscaped and richly stocked botanical garden owned by the Dukes of Arenberg, enjoyed a European repute as a horticulturist and landscape gardener.
Education
André Joseph Ghislain Parmentier received a liberal-arts and university education, the latter at Louvain.
Career
Under his brother's tuition, André Parmentier became highly skilled in horticulture. After losing much of his estate through speculative ventures, Parmentier came to New York with his growing family in 1824, intending to proceed to the West Indies. Acquaintances persuaded him, however, that his abilities would be valued in New York. Declining the superintendence of the Elgin Botanical Garden on Murray Hill, offered him by Dr. David Hosack, he carefully chose, and purchased on October 4, 1825, a triangular tract of twenty-four acres in Brooklyn, in the angle formed by the junction of the then Jamaica and Flatbush roads. There he established his own botanical garden and nurseries, a commercial venture, which soon became favorably known. Having cleared his tract of rocks and enclosed it in a high stone wall, Parmentier laid it out in nursery gardens, orchards, arbors, and tree-lined walks, with hothouses and a garden house, planning the whole with taste and trained skill. There he collected a rich and flourishing variety of trees and plants, foreign and domestic, useful and ornamental. All were classified, studied, and cultivated with the most meticulous scientific care.
He imported plants steadily from correspondents in Europe, introducing some to the United States for the first time, notably the black beech tree and several species of vegetables, shrubs, and vines. He advertised by catalogue and in agricultural journals, offering many dozen varieties each of apples, pears, grapes, and roses, and varieties also of many other fruit, vegetable, and flowering plants. He contributed frequently to the New England Farmer and the New-York Farmer. Eager to advance American horticulture, to which his work contributed a new degree of intensive thoroughness, he freely shared his experience with other gardeners. He is said to have been the earliest professional landscape gardener of note in the United States. He died on November 26, 1830.
From his own carefully drawn designs, he laid out pleasure grounds and gardens for clients ranging from Canada to the Carolinas. His influence on landscape gardening and on horticultural taste was definite and beneficial, and although his plans included some artificial, romantic designs, he was an advocate of the naturalistic rather than formal treatment thirty years before Olmsted and Vaux designed Central Park, New York, in 1858. Following his premature death in his fifty-first year, his widow and eldest daughter Adèle continued the business for two years, thereafter selling the garden, which was shortly converted into building lots.
Achievements
Andrew Parmentier was instrumental in bringing the European picturesque style to American landscape design. His known designs include "horticultural garden" or nursery in Brooklyn, New York; the estate of Elisha W. King in Pelham Manor, New York; the estate of Dr. David Hosack, Hyde Park, New York; the grounds of King's College (now the University of Toronto), Toronto; and Moss Park, the estate of William Allan, Toronto. Of these, only the Hosack property, now the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site, survives.
Personality
Andrew Parmentier was a genial, kindly man of domestic tastes and buoyant, active temperament.
Connections
On May 3, 1813 Andrew Parmentier married Sylvia Marie Parmentier, a distant cousin born in Louvain in 1793, who bore him five children. Of Parmentier's five children, three died young. Adèle, who married Edward Bayer, devoted her later life to the welfare of sailors at the Brooklyn navy yard.
