OLMSTED LEGACY

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Born in Hartford, Connecticut and raised by his father, unable to attend Yale College because his eyesight had weakened due to sumac poisoning, Frederick Law Olmsted sailed off to China where he returned a year later with scurvy.  After recovering, he set out his hand at farming on Staten Island, failing miserably to profit from his land holdings.  Next he embarked for England and Wales with his brother whereupon they encountered magnificent estates, parks and rural scenery.  Such was the indication of things to come.  Most influential in his journeys were Joseph Paxton’s design for Birkenhead.

Paxton sought to bring the grandeur of the aristocratic garden to the working people of Birkenhead. The park was a declaration of civic pride to nearby Liverpool and an attempt to tempt wealthy taxpayers to either build or purchase homes in Birkenhead. It is widely believed to be the first civic park in Britain, but more importantly within this context it provide the inspiration and template for Olmsted (and Calvert Vaux's) work.  Olmsted wrote "

"five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden"."

 Illustration and photograph of  Birkenhead Park (youyesterday.com/flicker.com)

“Olmsted was much impressed with the meandering footpaths and open meadows spangled with rocks and scattered trees. He wondered how cleverly "art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty." And wonder of wonders, this was not just a sanctum for some noble lord but a park open to the public, a park for people of all stations in life. In all the cities of democratic America, he had to admit, there was nothing quite like it. Not yet, anyway.” National Geographic Magazine, March 2005.

Illustration of Central Park/Bethesda Terrace and fountain

 

Much has been written on Olmsted’s intriguing life, including the most recent bestseller “A Clearing in the Distance”by Witold Rybczynski.  Thanks to the efforts of the Olmsted Legacy a film that was initially screened last year at select locations will now be coming to public television.

The Olmsted Legacy, with its name slightly tweaked to "Olmsted and America's Urban Parks" was aired appropriately on PBS for Earth Day, April 20th.

 

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WILLIAM GILPIN AND THE PICTURESQUE

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An aesthetic revolution that occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century revolved around several main theories, but the most important theory that applied to landscape was that of “the Picturesque”, most often associated with the writings of William Gilpin.

Originally an ordained minister in the Church of England, he began writing these popular treatises as a means to raise funds for his school. 

The picturesque emphasized roughness over smoothness, boldness over elegance, and variety over uniformity. These concepts were initially influential in painting and then to landscape design.

Gilpin’s defining ideas influenced friends such as Horace Walpole and the royal family, including King George.  While the wealthy could afford to indulge themselves with the Grand Tour (the traditional travel of Europe undertaken by upper-class European society), appreciating and purchasing great paintings and ultimately contracting landscape designers such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton, Gilpin was instrumental in influencing the rising upper-middle, the minor gentry and tradesmen.  By leading tours through the countryside and publishing aquatint landscape prints he created an aristocratic taste level among the rest of the public.

anonymous engraving, Ackerman's Repository of Arts, The Strand 1809

anonymous engraving, Ackerman's Repository of Arts, The Strand 1809

 Edward Austen (Jane's brother) on the Grand Tour unknown creator, the Jane Austen trust

 Edward Austen (Jane's brother) on the Grand Tour unknown creator, the Jane Austen trust

His concept of "the Picturesque," which first appeared in the Essay on Prints as an additional concept to "sublime" and "beautiful," was intended to formulate an appreciation for landscape in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin or Claude Lorrain.  

Essay II: On Picturesque Travel is a manual for appreciating travel and sketching the landscape as a way to preserve the beauty in one’s mind.

Lorrain: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, 1660

Lorrain: The Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, 1660

Meanwhile, Jane Austin’s novels (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,

Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Emma) used the picturesque as a backdrop. While a fan of her writings illuminated his concepts to a larger audience, although at time it has been suggested that she satirized him. 

Throughout each of these novels the landscape holds a defining and center-stage role.   Her heroines are brought up in well-established homes and were receptive to the matters and opinions of current taste. Her novels reflect the social and landscape history of England.  

Her novels assimilate and promote the ideals of Gilpin, yet also satirize them.  In one of Gilpin’s publications he provided instructions for the groupings of cows in a pasture – “to unite three and remove the fourth.” Many landscape painters followed suit.  But, in Pride and Prejudice, one character refuses to join in a stroll with the teasing observation, "You are charmingly group'd, and...The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth."

William Gilpin illustrations of how to group cows Bodelian Library In Sense and Sensibility, one character is dismayed that another is apparently ignorant on picturesque theory and promptly instructs him… “ I shall call the hills steep, which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged: and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be indistinct through the sift medium of a hazy atmosphere. It unites beauty and utility – and I dare say it is a picturesque one too.”   When Elinor Dashwood teases her sister about her passion for “dead leaves” she responds by reminding Elinor that it is her appreciation of the picturesque.

Humphrey Repton, General View of Longleat, Stapelton Collection

Humphrey Repton, General View of Longleat, Stapelton Collection

Thomas Cole (Hudson River School), The Garden of Eden 1828  wikimedia commons

Thomas Cole (Hudson River School), The Garden of Eden 1828  wikimedia commons

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FOUNTAINS

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Once upon a time it became the fancy for many of the ruling class in Europe to include concealed fountains, controllable at a distance in their ornamental gardens.  Seats became flooded, grottoes became showers, trees sprouted a shower of water, water jets would spring up under ladies dresses and statues would spray passing visitors from their body parts… including (the statues’) private parts. These amusing “joke fountains” were used to provide entertainment for the visitors and guests at significant estates and castles.

Water had originally been used in Rome within sculpture as a way to animate these allegorical figures. This evolved as fountains created in medieval times (overflows from spring-heads) were in the shape of an animal heads spouting water. (Windsor Castle had a stone fountain on its grounds in the mid 1200’s). A popular feature of the Italian Renaissance garden (including

Villa d’Este

) was these hidden fountains, which could be turned on to drench unsuspecting visitors.

Among the fountains of

Peterhoff Palace

, one of Russia’s most famous tourist attractions a joke fountain was constructed -- one which sprays passers-by who step on a particular paving stone. The Palace is sometimes referred to as the Russian Versailles, built and primarily designed by Peter the Great, beginning in 1714. Peter had visited the Garden of Versailles and had been so impressed by the fountains there that he was inspired to make the fountains in the same cascading style.  Subsequent Russian rulers and regimes had augmented it up until the Second World War when the German Army essentially destroyed it. Thankfully, restoration work began immediately after the war, and continues today where it has become a UNESCO World heritage site.

The Bench Fountain - walking on the cobblestones initiates the spray of water

images: flicker.com

The water for the Peterhoff fountains is drawn from springs and aqueducts at a higher elevation, thereby creating the technological achievement of eliminating the need for pumps by the use of a gravity fed system!  All the fountains run simultaneously. As a contrast… there were so many fountains at Versailles that it was impossible to have them all running at once; when Louis XIV made his promenades, his fountain-tenders turned on the fountains ahead of him and turned off those behind him. “Louis built an enormous pumping station, the Machine de Marly, with fourteen water wheels and 253 pumps to raise the water three hundred feet from the River Seine, and even attempted to divert the River Éire to provide water for his fountains, but the water supply was never enough.”1

Young Princess Victoria, who was to become Queen of England, was particularly fond of the artificial willow tree at

Chatsworth

Gardens, originally created by William Cavendish in 1693. Cavendish hired Grillet, a pupil of

Andre LeNotre

to design it.  It was composed of 8,000 pieces of copper and brass and had 800 jets of water hidden in the branches and leaves. Supposedly, it would spurt into life squirting water from every branch and leaf over the unsuspecting passer-by. To be soaked to the skin in the early 1700s was generally no laughing matter, as fine clothes were very expensive and not usually washable.

Spouting Willow 

image:www.linklux.com/rosemaryvereyfavourites.htm

Was that anyway to treat your guests?

1.

Robert W. Berger, The Chateau of Louis XIV, University Park, PA. 1985, and Gerald van der Kemp, Versailles, New York, 1978

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HERBERT BAYER

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''I believe that the artist must achieve creative control over the whole of his environment.''- New York Times, October 21, 1984

Herbert Bayer was intimately involved in the celebrated Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920s and 30s: first as a student, and then as one of its directors. He emigrated to the United States in 1938. As an advocate of Bauhaus principles he produced works which expressed the needs of an industrial age, the positive collaboration between business and art, mirroring the advanced tendencies of the avant-garde.

typography by Herbert Bayer, entrance to Bauhaus    image: Wikipedia

The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that spoke of art meeting the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It was also dependent on the more forward-looking principles that modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. This Bauhaus style, could also be described as the absence of ornament and ostentatious facades and by a harmony between function and the artistic and technical means employed.

For over 60 years Bayer created pioneering works in painting, sculpture, environmental works, industrial design, typography, architecture, photography, and applied design.  He was truly what can be referred to as “a renaissance man,” one of the few "total artists" of the twentieth century. 

"Metamophosis"1936 photographic montage (image: metmuseum.org)

Marble Garden, 1955 - Aspen Meadows Hotel

In this experimental garden, Bayer introduced modernist imagery into the environment for perhaps the first time. Slabs and blocks of white marble were sourced from a nearby abandoned quarry for this thirty-eight foot square experimental garden that begins to suggests the notion that all gardens are nothing more than three dimensional sculpture. The "Grass Mound" (1955), came to inspire a whole generation of earthworks artists and initiated the ground for ecological design and restoration projects of today.

Sketches for earthworks by Bayer...

Installed in 1982, the "Earthworks" was hyped for its fusion of art and infrastructure, making the installation a powerful precedent for landscape designers, architects, engineers and artists.  A series of sculpted spaces that feel both ancient and modern, the Earthworks’ pure forms of geometry -- cones, circles, lines and berms—are built into the alluvial delta at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon. Grass and concrete, a wood bridge and steps: these are the materials at work, joined by the natural forces of Mill Creek itself.  According to Landscape Architecture magazine, "the city of Kent, Washington,  through its Arts Commission and Parks and Recreation Department, commissioned this project as a solution to urban stormwater runoff and its resultant soil erosion problems. The environmental artwork was a means of enlivening the plans for a proposed stormwater detention basin and creating an unusual entrance to an existing public park. The city's goals were to control flooding, to restore fish runs, and to create an aesthetically pleasing facility that would contribute to enhancing the park."

Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks 1982 (image: landscapemodeling.org)

previous images: flicker.com

Photo by John Hoge and Nancy Leahy

"Layered Landscape" 1944 gouache on paper (image: aspen journal)

In his commercial graphic design work, he was an advocate of social responsibility in design – products or services that promote positive ideas and behaviors while promoting the company. In 1941, the Container Corporation which produced 90 percent to 95 percent of its cardboard from wastepaper hired Bayer to oversee a series of posters promoting the companies ability to recycle products on a grand scale, linking corporate responsibility with the environment.  

Subsequently, Bayer also oversaw another series of posters linking entitled "Great Ideas of Western Man".

"The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life."--Theodore Roosevelt. 

From the series Great Ideas of Western Man. 1959 Herbert Bayer 

“In a response to the Earth Day of 1970, the Container Corporation announced a design competition for a trademark for recycling in the spirit of Bayer. The competition was won by a student at the University of Southern California presenting the symbol at the Design Conference in Aspen (Figure 7).87 Now universally known, its history goes back to the Bauhaus ideal for living in harmony with the natural world.”

-Environmental History, Peter Anker  April 2007

original design for recycling (image" wikipedia)

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WHAT SHOULD I PLANT?

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WHAT SHOULD I PLANT?

Within the last ten years the argument for planting natives over exotics has become heated.  As exclaimed by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West, in their new text "Planting in a Post-Wild World", "the recent rally around native plants bears a bit of irony.  The belated discovery of the virtues of native plants comes at the moment of their definitive decline in the wild.

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WHAT DO I PLANT?

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Should gardeners plant native, exotic or spontaneous plant material? There’s a debate on what plants we as homeowners should plant.

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LANDSCAPE + LAND ART IN SCOTLAND

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A review of “Close: Landscape Design and Land Art in Scotland” by Allan Pollok-Morris. A monograph photography of conceptual landscape design.

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FAMILY IN THE GARDEN

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Edith Wharton, Beatrix Ferrand and Mildred Bliss.

Within the last two months I have had the pleasure of visiting both Edith Wharton’s estate “The Mount” in Lennox, Massachusetts and “Dumbarton Oaks” in Georgetown, D.C. 

As I recall both visits and the design of the sites I thought it would be interesting to research some background material regarding the two sites, the property owners and the relationships with and about Beatrix Ferrand.  Beatrix Ferrand was arguably the first female landscape architect of note (although she preferred the term “landscape gardener”) and the lone woman among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

The Mount reflects the taste of Wharton and to some degree her indirect influence on the future masterpiece that Ferrand created with the owners Robert and Mildred Bliss - Dumbarton Oaks.  Through Edith Wharton’s social connections, Beatrix was introduced to many of her future clients, among them the owner of Dumbarton Oaks, Mildred Bliss.

Edith Wharton was many things -- writer, socialite, gardener a supreme arbiter of taste.  (She claimed to be a better garden designer than writer!) Among the forty books she authored – best selling novels and collections of short stories, were authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design and travel. Wharton is credited with designing the gardens at The Mount, with additional landscape design/architecture by Beatrix Ferrand.  While Edith Wharton was laying out the gardens she was also working on the book “Italian Villas and their Gardens” – a strong Italian influence can seen in the Mount’s landscape design.  According to the Edith Wharton Restoration organization, Ferrand completely designed the maple-lined drive leading to the house and an elaborate kitchen garden (no longer functioning) that occupied the field in front of the stable.

The Mount is essentially a house with a grand terrace built overlooking the Italian inspired gardens.  A broad Palladian staircase leads down from the terrace to gravel walks that descend to a lime walk (linden trees).  This serves as a connecting hallway between the two major garden rooms.  

View of the flower gardens

View of the flower gardens

View of the flower gardens

View of the flower gardens

Views of the giardino segreto from the house and return view looking back at the house. 

The “giardino segreto” was paid for with the proceeds from Wharton's first bestseller, “the House of Mirth.”

dolphin fountain

dolphin fountain

dolphin fountain

dolphin fountain

To the right, facing away from the house is the walled garden (or “giardino segreto”).  On the left there is a French-style flower garden with arborvitaes arranged around a pool with Wharton’s dolphin fountain.  Other items of interest include two flights of grass covered earthen steps, which lead up to the terrace, a rock garden, and various other niches. What I found of pure delight was the pet cemetery.

Grass steps

Grass steps

Grass steps leading up to the house

Pet cemetary

Pet cemetary

As a supreme arbiter of taste within her social circles, Wharton carefully planned the grounds of The Mount. Similarly, Mildred Bliss had a very controlling “hand” in the creation of Dumbarton Oaks.  Bliss’s ideas for the gardens began well before she brought a professional onto the scene. Her ideas were primary to the design of the Oaks. British Landscape Architect Lanning Roper, a friend to both Bliss and Ferrand, has stated that ‘Mrs. Bliss knew from the start what she wanted to create.  She had definite conceptions, some of which she treasured from childhood.” *

Grass steps at Dumbarton Oaks

Both properties/gardens have strong Italianate influence – in the topography built upon, design of the garden rooms and aesthetic within these “rooms.” Historian Walter Whitehead suggests that the pre-existing, rudimentary terracing of the steep slope that Dumbarton Oaks was built upon suggested to Mildred Bliss the siting of many of the great Italian country house of the 16th through 18th centuries.  She was familiar with such renaissance villas both from her extensive travels to Italy and from Edith Wharton’s influential Italian Villas and their Gardensof 1919. *

Plan of Dumbarton Oaks

Plan of Dumbarton Oaks

Several years earlier Bliss had arranged to meet Edith Wharton in Paris after reading her novels and influential articles on interior decoration. Later in her life, Bliss eventually wrote of her admiration for Wharton who had been “her stimulus for nearly forty years.” 

From that meeting in Paris, they consistently traveled in the same social circles – during WWI both sharing France’s highest civilian award for their wartime charitable activities in Europe. 

“Years later when Milded Bliss returned to the United States, she used memories of civilized life in Europe before the war as the model for the home she planned to create.  The Oaks would be based upon the Mediterranean model, first developed by the Romans, in which outdoor spaces, and especially those nearest the house would be treated as rooms – extensions of the interior living areas.” The steep slope at the Oaks suggested an organization along the lines of the Italian Renaissance gardens, with these individual rooms dropping down the hillside in terraces, their character gradually devolving from formal and architectural near the house to informal and naturalistic at the perimeter.” *

Ferrand had the good fortune to grow up in the gilded age with her aunt, Edith nurturing her career that began with her design of the Kitchen garden at the Mount. Wharton was only ten years her senior and in much of my readings, is seemingly just as much a close friend and confidant than niece.  She was introduced to many of her future socialite clients not only by her aunt, but her lifelong dear friend, Henry James.

Interestingly, while Edith eventually introduced and spoke of her niece to Mildred Bliss, the first commission of Ferrand’s career was working with a swampy area on a family’s property in Bar Harbor, Maine.  The property owner was Anna Bliss, Mildred’s mother!  (Mildred was several years younger than Beatrix and in her writings had no recollection of this coincidence.) Twenty-five years later they worked together on Dumbarton Oaks.

*

Dumbarton Oaks, Garden into Art; Susan Tamulevich, Monacelli Press, N.Y., N.Y.

** All photographs ©ToddHaimanLandscapeDesign 2014 New York City