After finishing his schooling at sixteen, he worked in his father's nursery in the Town of Newburgh, and gradually became interested in landscape gardening and architecture.

[5] The book was widely read and consulted, spreading the so-called "Carpenter Gothic" and Hudson River Bracketed architectural styles among Victorian builders, both commercial and private.

Completing extensive drawings for interiors and furniture, Davis's talents as an artist engaged readers and served as early reference guides for homeowners to decorate their own spaces without hiring additional designers.

[citation needed] This brought a friendship with Luther Tucker, publisher and printer of Albany, New York, who hired Downing to edit a new journal.

The journal was his principal influence on society through horticulture, pomology, botany, entomology, rural architecture, landscape gardening, and, unofficially, public welfare in various forms.

Downing worked to educate and influence his readers in his view of refined taste regarding architecture, landscape design, and even moral issues.

In 1850, as Downing traveled to England, an exhibition of continental landscape watercolors by Englishman Calvert Vaux captured his attention.

They designed and remodeled Hudson Valley residences for the historian Joel T. Headley, China Trade merchant Warren Delano, and brewer Matthew Vassar.

[9] Instead of L'Enfant's "Grand Avenue," Downing envisioned four individual parks, with connecting curvilinear walks and drives defined with trees of various types.

"[10][11] President Fillmore endorsed two-thirds of Downing's plan in 1851, but Congress found it to be too expensive and released only enough funds to develop the area around the Smithsonian.

[11] Downing's building designs were mostly for single family rural houses built in the Picturesque Gothic and Italianate styles.

Downing saw that the family home was becoming the place for moral education and the focus of middle class America's search for the meaning of life.

In his Architecture of Country Houses,[17] he included designs for cottages, farmhouses, and villas and commented on interiors, furniture and the best methods of warming and ventilating them.

[18] His own residence, Highland Gardens, in Newburgh, New York, was quite large with meticulous grounds and many greenhouses with plants and trees from around the world brought to him by his whaling father-in-law.

After his death, writer and friend Nathaniel Parker Willis referred to Downing as "our country's one solitary promise of a supply for [the]... scarcity of beauty coin in our every-day pockets.

[23] The most intact structure designed by Downing is his house for Joel T. Headley, "Cedar Lawn," in New Windsor, New York, one of his first collaborations with Vaux.

Another of Downing's surviving structures in the Italianate style, the Robert Dodge House, which stands today in Georgetown, D.C., significantly altered.