Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society

by Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Beveridge (Editor)

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is most often remembered as America’s preeminent landscape architect—a profession he named, helped to define, and elevated into an art form in beloved parks and public spaces, among them New York’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Biltmore Estate, and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace.” But landscape design was just one outlet for Olmsted’s extraordinary creative energies over the course of a long and eventful life. As gentleman farmer, journalist, publisher, abolitionist, Civil War reformer, and conservationist, Olmsted’s readiness to serve the needs of his fellow citizens embodied the democratic ethos of “communitiveness” that was his lasting contribution to American thought.

Gathering over 100 items—letters, travel sketches, newspaper articles, essays, editorials, design proposals, official reports, and autobiographical reminiscences—this volume charts the emergence and development of Olmsted’s unique vision of restorative public green spaces as an antidote to the debilitating pressures of urbanization and modern life. It opens with a substantial selection of his early writings, including letters from China when he was an apprentice seaman, an account of his inspirational visit to the “People’s Park” at Birkenhead near Liverpool, and many of his perceptive dispatches from the American South on the eve of the Civil War. A number of pieces recount Olmsted’s service in the war, when, as executive secretary to the United States Sanitary Commission (a forerunner of the Red Cross), he organized relief supplies and hospital ships. Others trace his work as cofounder of the Union League Club and The Nation, as designer of the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and as a champion of the preservation of public lands at Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Niagara Falls.

The heart of the volume focuses on Olmsted’s magnificent design projects and his theory and practice of landscape architecture, as reflected in formal proposals and reports, letters to clients about sites both great and small, narratives of corruption and patronage in park management, histories of the profession and of landscape and garden aesthetics, notes to gardeners, and reflections on the value of parks and urban design. Included here are his original “Description of a Plan for the Improvement of the Central Park”; a meditation on “Trees in Streets and in Parks”; and a defense of the modest homestead as “the true wealth of our country.”

Along with Olmsted’s original writings the volume presents a 32-page portfolio of illustrations, including design sketches, park plans, contemporary photographs, and portraits and featuring the complete series of proposed views he submitted with the Olmsted & Vaux “Greensward” competition entry for New York’s Central Park. A detailed chronology and extensive notes give further information on the biographical and historical contexts of his work.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Landscape Architecture, Urban Studies, Design, Geography, Gardening

822 pages, Hardcover

First published November 17, 2015

About the author

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903)

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ranging from personal letters, articles, speeches to formal landscape architecture reports and proposals for such projects as New York's Central Park and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, this collection is a wide-ranging cross section of the life, work, and thought of one of the pioneers of modern landscape architecture. As with every Library of America edition, the notes are thorough and very helpful for understanding topical references. Highly recommended as a starting point and overview of Olmstead's work.

[Grady · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very long book, and inevitably, parts of it are tedious. Parts are also brilliant. Olmstead, who helped birth the modern field of landscape planning, is a prolix writer. It’s also not entirely clear whether he could articulate his genius insights and creativity. He certainly had opinions; they go on and on, sometimes striking, often pedantic, often moralizing. They may explain the success of many of his designs - of New York’s Central Park; Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; Boston’s Emerald Necklace; the Biltmore estate in Asheville, NC - but pushing my way through page after page of insistent, confident, unreflective prose, I doubt it. I think Olmsted was an intuitive artist, and his intuition rarely led him astray; and he was also a talker with a gift for spilling out words in a style respected at the time, and these two streams of creativity were only related in the sense that they both poured out of him. You can visit a bunch of Olmsted landscapes and then design another that speaks in his vernacular. I’m deeply skeptical anyone could design a successful ‘Olmsted landscape’ on the basis of his written explanations alone.

In any event, this is not the place to start on Olmsted. I tried, and gave it up partway through to go read Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, which is very readable, and provides context and stories about the man that no collection of his own writings will include. Then I came back, and started skipping around.

Selections that I’ve found of particular interest: Olmsted’s letters from his time administering a Union hospital ship during the Civil War; his plan for Central Park; his discussion of Yosemite Valley and the giant sequoias; his observations of the ongoing urbanization of America and its implications for urban planning, discussed in the context of the Riverside suburb of Chicago and Boston’s string of parks. For my money, Olmsted the writer is at his best when he’s recording what he sees - spectacles, trends - rather than explaining his art.

[Mills College Library]

973 O515 2015