In transit to these shores, convoyed by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington among others, the Pastoral and Picturesque of the English Garden underwent something of a sea change. The Pastoral was drained of its literary allusions to Virgil and Horace in favor of real (if prosaic) countryside. The Picturesque lacked the reinforcement of the portfolios of prints and the picture galleries which were standard features in English great houses. The English Garden left a landscape in which the thumbprint of the hand of man was everywhere in evidence; it left the relatively tame wildernesses of the Wye Valley and the Lake District to confront the hundreds of thousands of square miles worth of wilderness, that always seemed to be lying in wait just beyond the horizon.

And wilderness came into the eighteenth century in America with something of a spin on it. In New England the Puritans had confronted the wilderness by demonizing it and its aboriginal inhabitants and challenging both to mortal combat – the object: to tame both so that they looked and behaved like the landscape and inhabitants the Colonists had left behind in the English countryside. The Reverend John Eliot's converts, the “Praying Indians,” were dressed as English yeoman farmers and settled in model (English) farm villages on the outskirts of Massachusetts Bay Colony.