Joseph Forsyth Johnson

Joseph Forsyth Johnson (1840 – 17 July 1906) was an English landscape architect and disciple of John Ruskin.

Johnson was the son of Joseph Johnson, a baker. He had a family background in horticulture. His Scottish maternal grandfather John Forsyth, a florist, was the son of William Forsyth, a botanist who co-founded the Royal Horticultural Society in 1804.

Johnson had a successful career designing the grounds for a number of estates in England, Ireland and Russia. By 1869, he was the Curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Belfast. He subsequently set up a landscape gardening shop on Bond Street in London.

He went to the United States of America in 1885 where he was employed by Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York City as superintendent of horticulture. The park was overgrown and his plan was to create a number of vistas so the entirety of the large park would be visible. This would have necessitated the removal of a large number of trees, which proved unacceptable to the community. As a result, Johnson was terminated from the project.

A recommendation in 1887 by New York florist Peter Henderson convinced Joel Hurt to bring Johnson to Atlanta to work on his streetcar suburb, Inman Park. Johnson went to Atlanta and he spent the next five years there. He joined Hurt again for Piedmont Park.

In 1891, he designed Latta Park in Charlotte, North Carolina and the next year may have designed the neighborhood of Cloverdale in Montgomery, Alabama.

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