arnoUjaarno ~a Volume 53 Number 4 1993 Page . 2 Emerald Metropolis Karl Arnoldia (ISBN 004-2633; USPS 866-100) is Haglund published quarterly by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Second-class postage paid at 18 The Waverly Oaks Boston, Massachusetts. Charles S. Sargent are $20.00 per calendar year Subscriptions domestic, 20 Historic Plants in a New $25.00 in advance. are Setting: foreign, payable Single copies The Evolution of the Hunnewell $5.00 All remittances must be in U.S dollars, by Building check drawn on a U.S. bank, or by international Landscape money order. Send orders, remittances, change-of- Stephen A. Spongberg &> Peter Del Tredici address notices, and all other subscription-related communications to: Circulation Manager, Arnoldia, 26 The Asian Connection The Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Jamaica Plain, Robert E. Cook MA 02130-3519. Telephone 617/524-1718 31 subsessilis Postmaster: Send address changes to: Introducing Weigela Stephen A. Spongberg Arnoldia, Circulation Manager The Arnold Arboretum Chaenomeles x ’Mandarin’ 125 Arborway 34 Superba Jamaica Plain, MA 02130-3519 Gary L. Koller Karen Madsen, Editor 37 Index to Volume 53 Editorial Committee Phyllis Andersen Front cover: Winter at the Arnold Arboretum, Robert E. Cook looking down from Hemlock Hill to Valley Road. Peter Del Tredici This photograph, by David Akiba, appears on the Gary Koller jacket of New England Natives. A Celebration of Richard Schulhof People and Trees written by Sheila Connor, librarian Stephen A. Spongberg of the Arnold Arboretum, and published by Harvard University Press, 1994. Arnoldia is set in Trump Mediaeval typeface and printed by the Office of the University Publisher, Inside front cover: The Hemlock Gorge Reservation, Harvard University. near the juncture of Wellesley, Needham, and . Newton, was acquired by the Boston Metropolitan Copyright © 1994. The President and Fellows of Park Commission (now the Metropolitan District Harvard College Commission) in 1895. From Report of the Board of Metropohtan Park Commissioners, 1896. Back cover: The Arboretum’s thirty-five-foot Linodendron tuhpifera x chinense (a hybrid tulip tree) is moved to its permanent location in the landscape of the Hunnewell Building. Photograph by Peter Del Tredici. Inside back cover: "The Museum," the Hunnewell Building, as designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, Architects, in 1892. Pen-and-ink watercolor by Harry Fenn for "The Tree Museum" by M C. Robbins, which appeared in the April 1893 issue of Century Luiodendron chmense Magazine. Emerald Metropolis Karl Haglund .i One hundred years ago the founders of Boston’s Metropolitan Park Commission realized a transcendentalist vision by reserving as public open space "the rock hills, the stream banks, and the bay and the sea shores" of the region. At the height of the Panic of 1893 Charles port addressed the urban environment, but not Francis Adams and his brother Henry "packed by focusing on the city center as Chicago’s up our troubles and made for Chicago" to see White City had done. Nor did they advocate the World’s Columbian Exposition. Like thou- taking control of suburban development- sands of others they were captivated and aston- street plans and public transportation as well ished by the fantastic ensemble of images they as parks-an approach that Olmsted and oth- saw there-neoclassical buildings, all perfectly ers had unsuccessfully urged in New York City white, arrayed according to Frederick Law in the 1870s. Looking instead to the margins Olmsted’s site plan to display "the successful and the in-between spaces of the region, they grouping in harmonious relationships of vast envisioned an "Emerald Metropolis." More and magnificent structures." Employing the than a city in a park, more than a second Em- talents of America’s best architects, the fair’s erald Necklace, more, even, than a system of "White City" generated enormous enthusiasm parks, it was a visual definition of the region’s for what soon came to be called the City Beau- structure that could be sustained, they were tiful movement.’1 convinced, even in the face of unimagined In his autobiography, Henry Adams puzzled growth. The Emerald Metropolis would help over the exhibits and the architecture of the Bostonians feel at home by preserving what exposition. Given that these extraordinary Eliot called "the rock-hills, the stream banks, white structures had been "artistically in- and the bay and the sea shores" of greater duced to pass the summer on the shore of Lake Boston-the natural edges, paths, and land- Michigan," the question was, did they seem at marks of the region.2 home there? More than that, Adams wondered whether Americans were at home in the fair’s The Idea Defined idealized New World city. But neither of the Eliot and Baxter moved to shape the region by Adamses, in their published works or private reserving as open space large tracts hitherto writings, connected what they saw in Chicago unbuildable but now on the verge of develop- with Charles’ work as chairman of the Metro- ment ; the shores of rivers and beaches still politan Park Commission in Boston. marshy or shabbily built up; and the most pic- In January 1893 the six-month-old park turesque remaining fragments of the aboriginal commission had published its report, written New England landscape. The natural features by Sylvester Baxter and Charles Eliot, the of the region should establish the armature for commission’s secretary and landscape archi- urban development, not the existing haphaz- tect ; Adams wrote the introduction. Their re- ard assemblage of streets, lots, railroads, and 3 By the 1890s the Middlesex Fells was entirely surrounded by rapidly growmg towns whose boundaries met in the middle of the woods. The towns had already begun to purchase land around the ponds to protect their water supply when the reservation was created m 1894, expandmg the protecuon of the watershed. This view looks across Spot Pond toward Pickerel Rock. From Report of the Board of Metropolitan Park Commissioners, 1895. streetcar lines. Once set aside, these reserva- with another sort of open space. He looked out tions would forever enhance the city’s fitness from the State House and saw, within a ten- for human habitation, joining unique and char- mile radius, many still-surviving remnants of acteristic landscapes to the placemaking the New England wilderness. There were half power of the city’s historic landmarks. The a dozen scenes of uncommon beauty, "well park commission’s plan offered the citizenry of known to all lovers of nature near Boston ... Boston an opportunity to see the metropolis in in daily danger of utter destruction." He urged an entirely new way; the figure and ground of the immediate creation of an association to the region’s topographical features would be hold "small and well-distributed parcels of transposed. land ... just as the Public Library holds books Baxter and Eliot had begun formulating and the Art Museum pictures-for the use and these ideas several years earlier. In February enjoyment of the public." Generous men and 1890, Eliot responded to an editorial by women would bequeath these irreplaceable Charles Sprague Sargent in his new periodical properties to such a group, just as others Garden and Forest that since the cities and give works of art to the city’s museums. Eliot towns around Boston had failed to act, the pro- helped organize a standing committee of vision of "well-distributed open spaces" for twenty-five, which set to work in the spring of public squares and playgrounds would have to 1890. As an energetic member of the commit- wait for the establishment of a commission by tee, Baxter drew on his ties to newspaper edi- the legislature. Eliot, however, was concerned tors and writers across the state and to other 4 veterans of the twenty-year-old campaign to Boston appeared, Eliot read it and proposed preserve the Middlesex Fells. The legislation that they work together to realize the metro- to create a privately endowed Trustees of Pub- politan park system. At their urging the newly lic Reservations was signed in May of 1891.3 organized Trustees of Public Reservations Though Eliot did not note the distinction in agreed to convene a meeting of park commis- his letter, the analogy with the art museum sioners from across Greater Boston in Decem- and the public library suggested two ap- ber 1891. After public hearings the following proaches to preserving open space, one private spring, a temporary Metropolitan Park Com- and the other public. Even before the campaign mission was authorized by the legislature in to organize the Trustees was completed, Eliot June 1892.5 and Baxter moved-first separately and then Baxter’s concerns were the administrative jointly-to promote a public regional park au- inefficiencies and parochial jealousies of the thority. Eliot wrote a letter to his boyhood myriad cities and towns in the Boston basin, friend Governor William Russell in December and Eliot knew firsthand how the wariness of 1890, recommending that the State Board of town officials affected the development of pub- Health develop a plan for metropolitan reser- lic open space. From his extensive explorations vations. Three months later, Baxter wrote a on the region’s fringes, he knew that town bound- series of articles in the Boston Herald about aries often bisected the most scenic areas, what he called "Greater Boston." He too especially along ponds and river valleys. It scanned the ten-mile view from the State would be senseless, he said, for one town to act House, but he described an image that was the without the other, but too often one city had very inverse of Eliot’s fast-disappearing land- refused to spend money for fear that the adjoin- scapes.