A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

A Journal of Place Volume vııı | Number ıı | Spring 2013

Exceptional Grounds: The Landscapes of Institutions 2 Laurie Olin: The Campus: An American Landscape Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Representing Nature: The Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History Warren T. Byrd, Jr.: In Ambivalent De-Fence of Zoos Katherine Harmon: Plants for the People: Henry Shaw’s Enduring Missouri Botanical Garden

Place Keeper and Place Maker 19 Genevieve Munson Trimble / Antonia Adezio

Book Reviews 20 Frederic Rich: Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820-1909 By David Schuyler Cynthia Zaitzevsky: Graceland Cemetery: A Design History By Christopher Vernon

Contributors 23 Letter from the Editor 2013 Grant and Book Awards

andscapes such as existing structures not con- exemplifies the conundrums I am happy to report that 2013 John Brinckerhoff 2013 David R. Coffin campuses, botanical sidered. At best, where the of zoo design in an ecologi- there were several excellent Jackson Book Prize Winners Publication Grant Winners gardens, museums, original works of architec- cally sensitive age – an era in applications in 2012 for and zoos differ from ture have sufficient gravitas which animals are displayed David R. Coffin grants as Mireille Galinou Sonia Dümpelmann parks and gardens and grandeur, the surround- in simulations of their native well as numerous submis- Cottages and Villas: The Birth Flights of Imagination: Pow- Lin their design intentions. ing landscape typically habitats. Katherine Harmon sions of eligible books for of the Garden Suburb ered Aviation and the Art and They are an integral part of disappears from public con- discusses the transforma- the John Brinckerhoff Yale University Press, 2011 Science of Landscape Design the institutions for which sciousness and is simply tions of the Missouri Botani- Jackson Book Prize. We are and Planning they are named, with growth perceived as setting. cal Garden from the time of pleased to announce in University of Virginia Press usually driven by mission Nevertheless, many insti- its founder Henry Shaw to this issue of Site/Lines the rather than design, and so tutions are the crown jewels the present. My essay is names of the grantees and Georges Farhat they often lose their original of their cities, and although about the American Museum prizewinners who were The French Formal Garden: planning coherence as budgetary constraints exist, of Natural History’s extraor- selected by the awards com- Garden Types for grounds expand and new they are rarely dire enough dinary collection of diora- mittee. Contemporary Architecture wings and structures are to prevent at least some basic mas – theatrical displays that Please remember that Birkhäuser added. Because the passing “landscaping,” as the green- transport visitors to wild Site/Lines is entirely donor- years bring new needs, tastes, ing of building perimeters is landscapes that most would supported, and if you wish to Wybe Kuitert building technologies, and usually called. When, how- never otherwise see. continue reading essays on Gardens and Landscapes in goals, for better or worse, ever, directors and trustees In addition to these essays diverse landscape themes, we Japan, 1650-1950 institutional landscapes engage in the kind of master on the theme of institutional urge you to send us your University of Pennsylvania inevitably become more planning that makes land- landscapes, you will find contribution in the enclosed Press Todd Longstaffe-Gowan crowded and less unified scape aesthetics an integral Frederic Rich’s review of envelope. The London Square: over time. Added to these part of growth and change, Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Mark Laird Gardens in the Midst of Town inherent trends is the reality institutional landscapes can Artists, and the Hudson River With good green wishes, The Natural History of the Library of American that landscape design is fre- maintain their integrity. Valley, 1820-1909 by David Eighteenth Century Garden Landscape History quently architecture’s In this issue, landscape Schuyler and Cynthia Yale University Press stepchild; even when design- architect Laurie Olin pro- Zaitzevsky’s review of Grace- ers produce institutional vides a comprehensive his- land Cemetery: A Design His- Micheline Nilsen buildings of distinction, site tory of campus design with tory by Christopher Vernon. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers The Working Man’s Green planning is often secondary reflections on both form and President, Space: Allotments and stylistic harmony with meaning. Warren Byrd, a Foundation for Landscape and Community Gardens landscape architect and col- Studies in Britain, France, lege professor, demonstrates and Germany 1870-1919 how the Washington Zoo University of Virginia Press

William E. O’Brien Landscape of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South Library of American Landscape History On the Cover: Marshall College, Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. Drawing by Laurie Olin. 2 Exceptional Grounds: The Landscapes of Institutions

The Campus: An American Landscape the campus buildings were generally arranged closely enough gian buildings placed in the open. Subsequently they were merican universities have been, and probably still for convenient communication, although sufficiently separated augmented in a gradual, neighborly fashion with additional, are, one of the glories of our culture. Eight of the for fire protection and differentiation of purpose. They were freestanding structures. Despite not being attached or con- ten most highly regarded universities in the world small enough to finance and build without too much nected, the buildings eventually formed an architectural com- are located in the United States. Many thousands difficulty. munity, set off by relatively level or gently sloping areas of turf of students from all over the world come here Early schools such as Harvard (1636), William and Mary and trees that soon grew higher than the buildings themselves. annuallyA to study at the undergraduate or graduate level. Col- (1695), Yale (1717), and Princeton (1755) possessed what might be The mess and distraction of horses and carts, goods and ser- leges and universities are major contributors to our economy, described as a loose-fit formality. They tended to comprise vices, washhouses and outhouses were banished from one or both directly – through institutional purchases; the buying reasonably attractive buildings, well designed but not grand, more quiet, roughly rectangular, loosely bounded spaces that power of students, faculty, and staff; the creation of local jobs; arranged orthogonally to each other or the adjacent commu- were called “quads.” the building and expansion of facilities – and indirectly, nity and facing a principal street or road. While at least one Near the end of our colonial era, an alternative convention through the generation of ideas and the training of students campus (William and Mary) was originally intended to be built for the American university began in Pennsylvania with the who will be influential in their chosen fields. All this creates around a contained courtyard in emulation of the Oxford College of Philadelphia (1754). This was the urban academic jobs, innovation, commodities, and commerce. quadrangles of the founders’ alma mater, none of the Ameri- institution, which would later cross-pollinate with the earlier Far less attention has been paid to another aspect of the can schools were enclosed. Unlike Oxford or Cambridge – the rural type. Unlike its New England predecessors, the College of American university: its physical structure; the way its campus institutions where a number of early American ecclesiastics, Philadelphia wasn’t a divinity school. Founded by Benjamin is set into the landscape and interacts with and changes the tutors, intellectuals, and politicians had been educated – with Franklin in polyglot post-Quaker Philadelphia, it was intended surrounding community. Today such interrelationships are in their late medieval, Jacobean, and Georgian courts, cloisters, to foster science, the practical arts, and humanities such as the purview of the landscape architect, but they existed well arcades, towers, and quadrangles formed by conjoined struc- history, law, and the classics. The young school soon turned before landscape architecture was a profession; in fact, since tures, these New World institutions were simply a set of Geor- into the University of Pennsylvania, America’s first true univer- the first American schools were founded. Because the Ameri- sity. Like its religiously can university campus is a homegrown product, its physical oriented, country-bred pre- form has grown from its own needs and setting. It is part of decessors, it too consisted of the larger community as well as a community unto itself, and well-mannered, three-story it has evolved along with its changing landscape and environs. Georgian architecture. After The earliest and best-known institutions of higher educa- all, these were Englishmen tion in the English colonies were divinity schools. Although of the Enlightenment – not exactly monasteries, they were usually founded in rural vil- Franklin and others were lages like Cambridge, Massachusetts, or on the edge of towns members of the Royal Soci- like New Haven, Connecticut, set among farms, dozy lanes, and ety – albeit on the edge of scraps of relict forest. Almost all these schools, like many that the wilderness. Here medical would come later, began as a single building surrounded by and science buildings, like some trees, a bit of grass, and unpaved lanes. As they grew, the neighboring town houses number of their buildings increased, and campuses pushed and shops, sat on streets against or encroached upon the communities that had devel- with trees, sidewalks, and oped at their edges. The oldest institutions began to replace traffic, in what was the sec- the mud with lawn and shade trees – particularly American ond-largest English-speaking elms, but also other native hardwoods such as ash, oak, and hickory. Like the houses and outbuildings on Yankee farms,

Blanche Levy Park: proposed redesign of College Hall Green from the 1976 Landscape Architecture Master Plan for the University of Pennsylvania. 3 city in the world. While this model for university development merely occupying it. Even the largest and most imposing around them. Within a few decades, these state colleges added – that of buildings scattered amid ordinary city blocks – was a structure sits back at the edge of the great lawn. Indeed the buildings, most frequently lining them up in a row or placing less popular prototype, it too would find its admirers. largest element is this terraced lawn with rows of trees that them in two parallel ranks served by a handful of walks. By echo the colonnades. then the trees were nearly as tall as the buildings. Although the early schools in New England were for the most Despite the success of these designs, neither Ramée nor These were public institutions, open to citizens and the part built by people who referred to architectural prints, draw- Jefferson’s big idea – their parti, as architects say – had much four winds. There was plenty of room. Their drives, designed ings, and precedents, none of these institutions was conceived effect for several generations. A more ad hoc, adventitious, for carriages and given the geometry needed to turn teams of as a composition with an overall design. However, two cam- and incremental attitude toward the planning of campuses horses, had gracious, even lazy, curves. At the heart of many of puses that were major architectural compositions appeared and their landscapes suited the politics and economics of the great state universities – Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio State – nearly simultaneously at the beginning of the nineteenth cen- many communities, colleges, and leaders throughout the nine- one can still find these original structures next to and embrac- tury: Union College (1814) in Schenectady, New York, designed teenth century. ing ample lawns, quads, ovals, and commons, open areas dot- by the talented French landscapist and architect Joseph- ted with aging trees. Often they are not only the most loved Jacques Ramée, and the University of Virginia (1817) in Char- Among the remarkable accomplishments of Abraham Lin- portions of their campuses but also the most generous spaces lottesville, designed by Thomas Jefferson. Both men were coln’s two administrations – winning the Civil War, freeing the to be found. It is the rare institution where later landscape cognizant of the Palladian movement in England. They had slaves, buying Alaska from Russia – was the passage in 1862 spaces are larger or more inviting than those set out in the studied the ensemble schemes of Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, of the Morrill Act, which created land-grant colleges. This idea nineteenth century. Colen Campbell, Christopher Wren, and John Vanbrugh. Some of giving land to each of the states “to promote the liberal scholars have speculated that Thomas Jefferson cribbed the and practical education of the industrial classes” eventually led The religious fervor that engendered our earliest colleges con- now-iconic plan for his “Academical village” from Ramée’s to the creation of 108 such public institutions.1 The recogni- tinued unabated through the nineteenth century, as did immi- model, and then with Benjamin Latrobe drove him out of the tion that westward expansion would require an educated pop- gration, fostering the proliferation of institutions to educate country. Whatever the truth of the matter, there is no question ulace to build the farms, towns, and necessary infrastructure both ministers and growing communities throughout New that these schemes would inspire dozens of subsequent cam- and that teachers would be in demand to educate that popu- England, the South, and the expanding West. A significant puses. lace so it could successfully participate in democracy was far- number of America’s best architects contributed delightful On both campuses, buildings were linked together by sighted. Across the great prairies and into the most distant structures and partial plans for small private colleges – Welles- arcades, forming a coherent group framing a rectangular green Western territories, a sequence of colleges was established. In ley, Oberlin, Sewanee, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Trinity, that gestured toward the distant landscape in one direction early photographs, these solid Victorian buildings, often Ital- Amherst, Denison, Miami, Case Institute of Technology (now and had a domed, pantheon-like structure as the central fea- ianate structures of brick or stone, look lonely sitting in their Case Western Reserve University), and dozens more – as well as ture at the opposite end. This was the position occupied by a windswept landscapes. Some- for larger public schools. Often, however, the planning, layout, temple in classical times and a villa in Palladian practice. University of Virginia: the lawn, times acres of grass and a few and planting was carried out by the president and a local gar- Ramée’s centerpiece was to be a chapel, whereas the anticleri- trees, pavilions, and colonnades. young plantings can be seen dener or engineer, without an architect or landscape designer. cal Jefferson made his into a library – a temple of knowledge, so to speak. It is the rare landscape architect in America today who could not sketch out the basic plan of the University of Vir- ginia. The brilliance of its arrangement and proportion of parts, which recalls Louis Kahn’s phrase, “servant and served spaces,” reveals buildings linked together by colonnades, walls, drives, paths, and gardens. This shared architectural vocabu- lary – which creates a community of structures and gives order, access, and visibility to the community of students and tutors – is unforgettable and, in the view of many, impossible to improve upon. Central to its power and success is that the plan is “space-positive”: buildings shape the space rather than

4 John Galen Howard’s Beaux Arts Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

The emergence after the Civil War of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s landscape-architectural firm – Olmsted, Vaux and Company – which continued under the name of Olmsted Brothers for nearly a century, had an extra- ordinary and beneficial effect upon the landscape planning and design of the American campus. Working at public and private institutions across the country, its partners and staff provided a clear vision and superb technical support to a remarkable number of institu- leges, among them Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Other schools where they worked possess spaces that are tions of all sizes and in nearly every region. The sheer number Colorado, Oregon, Oregon State – the list of institutions rolls grand but verge upon being overblown and vacuous, as at Ohio of institutions they shaped physically – beginning in many on. There is an enormous range in the work, from schemes State, Notre Dame, and Illinois. In part this may be an artifact cases soon after a campus was founded – reveals that between that have become iconic, even paradigmatic, such as those for of their prairie settings, but it is also a function of the dimen- the beginnings of Frederick Law Olmsted’s practice and the Stanford and Duke, to projects that were modest and at times sions of the quadrangles. The buildings, too far apart to pro- end of his sons’, their firm virtually codified the American formulaic. At their best, they demonstrate as clearly as any vide comfort or intimacy, appear small. They seem to pull campus. Between 1865 and 1900 they produced plans and plans of the firm’s best-known member, Frederick Law Olm- away from each other, rather than forming a warm ensemble designs for over thirty-six college campuses. These included sted, a concern and genius for engendering a social vision as they do at Duke and Washington University, where the trees, Amherst (1867), Trinity (1872), and, during the 1890s, Princeton, within the exigencies and particularity of a given place. in a manner similar to those at the University of Virginia, Smith, Harvard, Northwestern, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Despite the simple underlying diagram and kit of parts that produce a marvelous cross-sectional ratio of apparent height Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Vassar. Between 1900 and Olmsted Brothers frequently employed, a surprising and lively to width, creating spaces that are human in scale.2 1960 the firm was even more prolific, creating schemes for variety and sense of place usually resulted. Some campuses, Nowhere does one find a better example of how responsive more than 180 campuses. Just between 1900 and 1915 they were like Wellesley and Radcliffe, are charming and intimate in Olmsted could be to the genius loci, the spirit of the place, employed by institutions that included Brown, the University form and detail. Other Olmsted work is plain, calm, and than in the two contrasting schemes he himself developed on of Chicago, Wheaton, Wellesley, Williams, the University of straightforward – almost simple-minded, even – at Harvard, opposite sides of San Francisco Bay. These were his plans for Washington, Johns Hopkins, Ohio State University, the Univer- for example, and Colorado College. A handful of the campuses the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford Univer- sity of Colorado, the University of Pennsylvania, New York are rather loose-limbed, carved out of the woods and fash- sity in Palo Alto, prepared in 1865 and 1888, respectively. The University, Swarthmore, and Oberlin. They worked at both ioned from other, earlier ventures. The University of Washing- former was located on a partially wooded site against the hills Annapolis and West Point and at dozens of the land-grant col- ton in Seattle, which began with an oval carriage drive and a of the East Bay; the latter, in the South Bay area, in the warm few buildings, became the Alaska Yukon Exhibition. This rain shadow of the foothills of the coastal range. resulted in a fragmentary Beaux-Arts layout with a monumen- tal axis focused on Mt. Rainier – the sort of show-stopping 1 See Wall Street Journal, Dec 15-16, 2012: C1, for discussion of the landscape feature that bestows grandeur on any composition financial dilemmas of public universities in the current economic and that includes it. political context. 2 In each of these cases, when the author first saw them they were still magnificent. Today, however, the original plantations have reached the end of their normal life and replacements are seriously needed, and need to be done carefully and with understanding of the value of long-lived, tall-canopy trees, which does not appear to be evident, nor well understood by some involved at these institutions. 5 The Collegiate-Gothic towers and a courtyard. If ever one needs an Beaux Arts dome of Yale University. example to demonstrate that architecture can convey mean- ing, this is it. A clear message in Jefferson’s open-ended scheme was embodied by the view from the library: in a place of learning and privilege, one was always made aware of the world beyond, its potential and challenges. McKim, Meade, and White’s gesture in closing it off suggested not only smug confidence and complacency but also, perhaps, disdain and anxiety. It was as if the university was turning its back on the wider world, with its lower classes, immigrants, and recently liberated blacks. The contemporaneous outburst of Gothic Revival architec- ture on American campuses, with its departure from the vil- lage-green typology and a return to the medieval European prototype of an enclosed monastic court with connected struc- tures, also seems to have grown in part out of a desire for the At Berkeley, Olmsted incorporated a relict redwood grove ranch and the legacy of Spain and Mexico in the region, he security and distinction of the past. Oxford and Cambridge along Strawberry Creek, developing a set of spaces bounded produced what amounted to a xeric landscape. Linked build- were the most obvious models, but so too were Salamanca, loosely by freestanding buildings with trees and verdant ings, colonnades, and courtyards were arranged orthogonally Padua, and Heidelberg, which were often visited on tours of glades. The result amounted to a Yankee settlement in the in a hierarchy from one grand, open court (rather like a Europe. Despite a longstanding desire for a classless society woods, not dissimilar to the camps and lodges in the foothills maidan or a Mexican zocalo) to a series of smaller, more inti- on the part of many Americans, from the country’s beginning of the Sierras where Olmsted had been involved in planning mate, and lushly planted ones, with a community of bunga- there have been differences in wealth, education, and power a mining company after the Civil War. A visit to Wawona lows, an arboretum, a ranch, and hills beyond. This plan among its inhabitants. Buildings in the Gothic Revival and Hotel near Yosemite or an examination of historic photos of resulted in one of the greatest campus landscapes of all time – other European revival styles popular in the late nineteenth New England villages, with their irregular commons and a peer to Jefferson’s early nineteenth-century composition for and early twentieth century were often commissioned by edu- shade trees, give some flavor of what his plan for Berkeley the University of Virginia. cated leaders and paid for by rich patrons eager to build would have been. Unfortunately it was abandoned for a Beaux- But at Stanford as at Berkeley, in part due to hubris and impressive facilities. Arts design by John Galen Howard, with a central mall and lack of comprehension, Olmsted’s successors abandoned his But if the trend was conservative, the results were often library that never quite fit the site topographically, leaving the master plan. They too were beguiled by the fashion for Beaux- exciting. There were spectacular stone towers and picturesque campus an awkward jumble to the present day. Once you Arts planning and neoclassical architecture that had been ush- compositions, such as the chapels and theological school put something as large and important as a main library in the ered into America at the end of the Victorian era, in part by at Duke by Julian Abel, who worked in Horace Trumbauer’s wrong place, it’s hard to make things work forever after. the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the Gilded office, or Harkness Tower at Yale by James Gambell Rogers. Unlike Christopher Robin, who was charming when halfway Age and the decade prior to World War I, an insular class rose There were more modest Collegiate-Gothic, brick-and-lime- up and halfway down the stair, the disastrous building that embraced the Grand Tour of Europe, imported masses of stone quadrangles by Cope and Stewardson at Washington arrangement at Berkeley has produced one of the most disor- art, and indulged in a remarkable building spree. One result University, Penn, and Princeton as well as in Bebb and Gould’s derly and unfortunate campus landscapes in America. was a turning inward – and not just into suffocating, dark, and plan for the University of Washington. Under the planning At Stanford Olmsted persuaded both client and architect overladen domestic interiors that made Frank Lloyd Wright and design influence of Olmsted Brothers, a number of these that a New England, greensward-based campus was unrealistic, and European modernists want to dynamite architecture to let sites were ample and lined with canopy trees (Duke, Washing- given the climate, soil, limited water, and cultural history. the light and space back in. Institutions were closed off or ton University). Pointing to the Mediterranean quality of Leland Stanford’s cocooned as well. The most dramatic and blatant example of this was Stan- ford White’s unforgivable design and construction of a build- ing that closed off the great open lawn at the University of Virginia, turning it into a conventional, if elegant, internal

6 Also to be included among the revival styles are the host their visual charm and authority. Farrand not only established with plants then being imported from Asia, Australia, New of derivative campus plans based on Thomas Jefferson’s design palettes for the plantings and architectural elements of innu- Zealand, South Africa, and South America. A number of land- for his “Academical Village” in Charlottesville. Some were merable courts, quads, and gardens, but also proposed, and in scape architects of my generation used this campus as a living inspired by the publication of The American Vitruvius by a few cases developed, sources, staff, and nurseries to supply, textbook to learn and identify much of the flora that we Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets in 1922, but others maintain, and restore the required vegetation. have come to think of as defining the character of Southern appeared even earlier, before the end of nineteenth century. All Warren Manning, who had been a key designer and California gardens and parks. look to the University of Virginia and emulate its design of a employee at the Olmsted office, went on afterwards to have a central mall terminating at one end with a library or other distinguished national career that included developing land- The final closing of the Olmsted office in Brookline around major building. The design of the buildings themselves varied. scape plans for the University of Minnesota and Lake Forest 1959 unfortunately coincided with an enormous building While some were of brick with limestone trim in a Georgian College, where he visited annually to consult for several boom in American academia. At the time, few universities had Revival style, such as those composing the Old or Freshman decades. Another early and important professional in the field much planning or design capability in-house. The G.I. Bill for Campus of Duke University, designed by Horace Trumbauer of landscape architecture was Edward Huntsman-Trout. A World War II and Korean War veterans, the baby boom, and and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., a number were built in the pioneer in the use of native plants, this California native with the increased affluence of the middle class in the Eisenhower classically inspired Beaux-Arts style, including buildings unusual horticultural knowledge was responsible for the years prompted a dramatic expansion of school systems at all planned by Henry Hornbostel for Carnegie Mellon and Emory, influential landscape of Scripps College in Pomona. Then levels. In state after state, public universities expanded from or the initial portions of MIT and Cal Tech, with their central there was Alden Hopkins, who, on returning from a fellowship one or two campuses to systems with many. quads and domes. The number of architects who came under at the American Academy in Rome, became involved in the Many of these institutions, which had been largely devoted the spell of the Charlottesville scheme is remarkable. restoration and revival of colonial-era gardens. Anyone who to undergraduate education in the past, also were becoming has visited the many courtyard gardens behind the pavilions at centers of graduate research. An unforeseen outcome of the As the landscape architecture profession in America emerged the University of Virginia knows his work – which, despite rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s was the mass immigra- at the beginning of the twentieth century, and with it the being of his own invention, has come to represent for several tion of scholars, scientists, and intellectuals from Europe. creation of prominent schools and departments offering acad- generations what colonial gardens should have looked like. Almost overnight, the newcomers dramatically enhanced the emic training, designers besides those affiliated with the These Hopkins gardens are now inextricably bound to the scope and reach of our universities. Facilities had to be Olmsted firm began to collaborate with architects on cam- image, quality, and spirit of the campus. expanded accordingly, with new science and research build- puses around the country. One of the most exemplary was Pomona College, the University of California at Los Angeles, ings, dormitories, and teaching and library facilities. Hous- Beatrix Farrand, whose work at and the University of Hawaii benefited from plans by Ralph ing shortages and problems with increased commutes and A relict grove at the University of Yale, Princeton, Cal Tech, Cornell, who by the 1950s was considered the dean of Califor- automobile use were widespread. It is difficult to find a major Washington, since incorporated into and the University of Chicago nia landscape architects. His masterpiece in the genre of American university that didn’t encounter problems with a garden dedicated to the composer markedly affected their campus landscapes was UCLA, which he turned into a virtual accommodating this growth while trying to maintain the Edward Grieg. character and our sense of arboretum, incorporating native and Mediterranean vegetation amenities and ambience of its earlier landscape. Most early academic and administrative buildings faced onto a bucolic central green or a sequence of courts or greens. This simple formula, ubiqui- tously employed in the layout of so many of the campuses, which had worked well when they were small, did not lend itself gracefully to subsequent expansion. Behind and outside that pleasant zone were drives,

7 roads, parking areas, service buildings, power plants, athletic the privileged class which their founders once belonged to or astation, a pronounced and unpleasant social malaise could be fields, woods, and farm fields – or an encroaching but useful, owned, places that had shaped their ideas on how to run a detected on the perimeter of many prominent campuses. Crime and at times charming, community. Growth, when it came, school. As in many corporations, long-term cost benefits were rates were high; businesses were battered or gone. Harvard, Yale, inevitably occurred in this outer zone. For financial and politi- often sacrificed for short-term economic goals and budgets. Penn, Berkeley, Columbia, New York University, the University of cal reasons it was usually incremental and opportunistic. One result was a drastic increase nationwide in deferred main- Chicago, and many more were engaged in border wars and buf- Driven by the need for additional buildings and quantities of tenance of buildings and grounds. The cumulative neglect feted by real-estate crashes and union strife. The universities parking, it was rarely accompanied by significant new land- ultimately forced a response, but this did not occur for several survived, but many became defensive and fortress-like. Walls, scapes or spatial structures. Central quads and greens may decades. gates, locks, and lighting worthy of prison yards proliferated. have been held sacred, and the historic core remained intact at One exception to this pattern was the University of Pennsyl- a large number of schools, but nearly all suffered on their The late 1960s brought a different sort of change when escalat- vania. In 1976 the faculty of the Department of Landscape Archi- expanding perimeters. Many began to move aggressively into ing conflicts between universities and their adjacent commu- tecture developed a Landscape Architecture Master Plan (LAMP) adjacent residential and commercial communities, setting off nities affected campus life, and ultimately campus landscapes, for the university that called for opening up the campus and town/gown feuds that sometimes continued for decades. Aes- in several parts of the country. In 1968 Columbia University healing its borders with vernacular solutions. In effect, the plan thetically many of these additions came to be known in the clumsily attempted to build a new athletic facility in Morning- reversed a decade in which the university had turned its back on field as “train wrecks.” Buildings appear to have been dropped side Park, adjacent to Harlem, sparking immediate controversy. the city streets. Instead the campus was reconceived as a major from the sky and left wherever they landed and bounced. The following year, the University of California demolished an urban park, serving neighbors as well as the academic commu- Although many universities developed architectural and entire block of its residential community in Berkeley, only to nity. The master plan was followed almost immediately by a planning offices to manage all of this activity, almost none of end up in a bloody confrontation that hospitalized more than development plan prepared by the architecture and urban- those offices included landscape architects until fairly recently. 120 people, ignited weeks of hostilities, and led to the arrival design faculty that proposed future development through infill At one university after another, regardless of age, prestige, or of the National Guard. Confrontations at dozens of institu- rather than expansion. The university simultaneously launched a size, landscape improvements (if there were any) were nearly tions were sparked by social issues, whether protests over the quiet campaign to purchase struggling and low-end commercial always tied to building construction projects. They were Vietnam War or deeply flawed urban-renewal schemes. In 1970, properties in order to redevelop them with higher-quality shops, treated as peripheral enhancements, used to adjust existing after the National Guard fired on students at Kent State Uni- offices, and residential structures. situations just enough to allow new buildings to function versity in Ohio, killing four and wounding others, nearly every In 1996, galvanized by a particularly shocking murder of a physically. Even transportation and utilities received more university and college in the United States erupted with student, the university’s president, Judith Rodin, began a multi- attention than landscape in campus plans. student strikes, mass rallies, teach-ins, and marches. Ironically pronged engagement with the city and community that set out Despite many remarkable or merely workmanlike examples these events often took place from the Olmsted firm, the notion of a landscape plan that in the shared common areas sets out to understand and direct the spatial framework of the of academic campuses, whole institution and its infrastructure from an environmen- which had by then become tal and shared social experience was, in the postwar era, quite the most prominent and rare. Many university administrators were resistant to this sort welcoming public spaces in of planning because they saw it as limiting their freedom to many communities. make deals and call the shots. Campus landscapes were there- As the Vietnam War fore conceived and built in disjointed bits and pieces, some- ended and America’s cities times adding up nicely but often failing to do so – especially and universities recovered when, as frequently occurred, landscape funds were cut drasti- from nearly a decade of cally or eliminated as building costs ran over budget. protest, riots, and urban dev- Universities and colleges came more and more to be man- aged like the corporations that many of them actually are and less like the gentleman’s clubs and extended estates of

A palimpsest of ancient forest trees, original building and cupola, a Collegiate-Gothic quad, and recent planting at the University of 8 Washington. to improve neighborhood safety, services, and capacity; pro- layout of communities, roads, boulevards, park systems, and two of a number of campuses that have recently created artifi- vide high-quality and diverse housing choices; revive commer- civic spaces. There are reports on zoning and the economic cial wetlands for filtering, bioremediation, and attenuated cial activity; accelerate economic development; and enhance outcomes of development. As early as the post-World War I release of storm water into vastly improved local streams. local public-school options. This was followed in 2000 by a period, a Department of City and Regional Planning grew out Planning for adjacent commercial and residential districts new development and landscape plan for the university and of the Landscape Architecture Department at Harvard. is also continuing. Replacing and rebuilding four city blocks of community that was not only implemented but also suc- When city planning shifted its focus to economics, sociol- tawdry and struggling businesses and surface parking lots ceeded. Critical to that success was a growing understanding ogy, and political science in the 1970s in an effort to become a adjacent to the Penn campus with better and more successful that Penn was then the largest employer in the city of quantitative science, it decamped from one leading design retail, hospitality, residential, and service enterprises in appro- Philadelphia and the fourth largest in the state of Pennsylva- school after another. But the concern for larger-scale, physical priately scaled structures may not have produced the charm nia. With an expanded concept of “campus,” a number of land- urban problems continued to interest landscape architects, that remains in the quasi-medieval urban pattern of Harvard scape architects carried out a series of projects that greatly eventually leading to the creation of urban-design programs. Square. Still, the importance of understanding that these adja- transformed both the university and a portion of the adjacent Later many of these wandered off on their own or disappeared cent, supporting communities need active involvement – and, city. into architecture departments; nevertheless, a belief that at times, outright intervention or subsidy – can be seen in In a development reminiscent of Palo Alto’s “Professor- cities (and universities) are not merely a collection of buildings the contrasting examples of Berkeley, where Telegraph Avenue ville” – a planned neighborhood of streets, trees, houses, shops, has continued to haunt the generation that came through and adjacent streets have become distressed and abandoned, and public schools that proved crucial to the growth of the the upheaval of the 1960s and 70s. As anthropologist Claude and New Haven, where Yale has finally begun to help invest, university – Penn decided to build a new, public neighborhood Levi-Strauss wrote in 1938, “cities are not an architectural rebuild, and reinvigorate the downtown beyond the small por- school with an award-winning facility to bolster community problem, they are cultural landscapes.” tion of Chapel Street that remained healthy. Whether one vis- pride. The university would subsidize and participate in the A renewed emphasis, taking up some of the old city-plan- its the handsome and lively commercial portions of Lawrence, school’s teaching and curriculum. ning and urban-design concerns, has recently emerged in the Kansas; Madison, Wisconsin; or Charlottesville, Virginia; in The project had an immediate effect upon the surrounding Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn and at various each case the vibrancy of the cafes and shops is the result of a real estate. It also stopped the flight to the suburbs on the part centers in Europe. It has come to be referred to as “landscape joint effort on the part of residents, faculty, city officials, uni- of faculty. These efforts, combined with mortgage guarantees, urbanism.” Although the trend has been barely noticed, the versity planners, and design professionals. home-improvement loans, and the creation and support of a American university campus has become an early laboratory nonprofit business- and neighborhood-improvement district for practitioners of landscape urbanism. While there are many kinds of landscapes in the world, there with security, sanitation, and programming services, turned Most recently, in the first decade of the present century, are a limited number of typologies, most of which have been West Philadelphia into a model for other institutions. The idea campus plans have begun to incorporate substantial environ- in existence for many centuries. Inevitably a new typology, as of what was entailed in campus planning was evolving. Today a mental components. These include setting goals for energy in architecture, is the result of new programmatic purpose, number of other prominent urban universities have embarked use, water and habitat treatment and management, and such as the development of the railroad station and the upon strategies similar to those developed at Penn. The lesson sustainability. They deal as well with issues of transportation department store in the nineteenth century. These were totally here is that, like Yeat’s inextricably interrelated Dancer and and infrastructure. In recent years, schemes have developed new types with new purposes for a changing society. The Dance, our university campuses are not and cannot be sepa- beyond green roofs and storm-water basins to living-systems American college campus was one of those rare things – a new rated from their neighborhoods if they are to remain vibrant. approaches to academic precincts. Rather than, say, treating landscape typology – and since its inception it has evolved, storm water as an isolated problem building by building, plans flourished, and metamorphosed. A remarkable number of It may seem to some that the current urban, sociological, and are now commonly watershed-based and conceived campus- campuses across the nation have become unique and treasured bioengineering aspects of campus development are remote wide, thereby engaging adjacent lands and other property places. They have inspired envy and emulation from the cor- from the traditional practice of landscape architecture. Olm- owners as well. Duke and the University of Virginia are only porate world, and from foreign countries – especially China sted, however, was engaged continually with the city’s social and Middle Eastern nations – that are now madly trying forces and infrastructure. In addition, a number of the found- to build them at a great rate. For many Americans, however – ers of the American Society of Landscape Architecture were even academics who have grown up with them – the excep- deeply involved in urban planning and design. Early volumes tionality of the American campus is hard to see clearly, bring- of their professional journals are filled with articles on the

9 ing to mind Ian McHarg’s quip, “fish will be the last creatures Representing Nature: The Dioramas collage in compositions of extraordinary fidelity. For him to discover water.” of the American Museum of Natural History these men are revered progenitors, great naturalists who were Overall, though, American academic institutions are hen we think of landscape as an art form we explorers, specimen collectors, and taxidermists all in one. The becoming increasingly committed to landscape design – if for tend to think of painting. In this case the fact that they bagged their quarry with a gun, just as Audubon no other reason than to appear desirable as they compete for names Claude Lorrain, Constable, and Corot killed his subjects in order to accurately draw and paint them prospective students and alumni support. They have hired a come to mind, along with American artists of for The Birds of America, is not a problem for him. “Whether growing number of design and planning professionals, and a the Hudson River School such as Thomas bird or mammal, all the specimens in dioramas have necessar- professional organization called the Society for College and WCole, Alfred Bierstadt, Asher Durand, and Frederick Church. ily been collected in the wild by men who were good shots,” University Planning has developed. In fact, whether preparing But who recalls the names of Frank Chapman and Carl Akeley? he told me, as we stood in front of the magnificent diorama of for the future or attempting to correct the mistakes of the And yet, for the past century, hundreds of thousands of adults a herd of bison in the recently restored Jill and Lewis Barnard past, virtually all the most prominent landscape architects and children have observed their three-dimensional land- Hall of North American Mammals. “These were not hunters have worked almost continuously on academic campus pro- scapes with curiosity and wonder – those exhibitions of birds for sport. Rather they were scientists with an important con- jects in recent decades, many of them producing some of their and mammals from Asia, Africa, and North America that are servation message, early defenders of the world’s vanishing, most important or beautiful work. Money spent on quality of displayed in replicas of their native settings in several pristine landscapes – particularly the wildlife habitats in life can, after all, become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I once lofty halls of the American Museum of Natural History. Seen America and Africa that in early twentieth-century were seri- told a university president and his board members, “If you through frames of glass, ously endangered by wealthy consider the fact that with laptops and modems, scientists and these illuminated animals sportsmen, food harvesters, prize-winning faculty can work anywhere these days, and the are not only set against and plume hunters – much palm trees are waving in the sun at a number of outstanding painted landscapes but also as they are today by clear- institutions on the West Coast, why would I want to be on a surrounded by actual plants cutting, natural-resource campus that looks and feels like hell, with the cold and snow or highly realistic simulacra, extraction, and overdevelop- on top of it?” The landscape of a university is the one thing as well as rocks and stones ment. This is what this that everyone shares every day; it shapes people’s sense of not gleaned from specific sites museum was all about from only the institution but of themselves. or fabricated when originals the beginning – collecting Of course the American campus will continue to change, as were too large to collect. wildlife and creating displays it has since its beginnings. Once-bucolic and semirural cam- Chapman and Akeley to show people the wonders puses are continuing to become more urban in character, and were the esteemed pioneers of nature and wake them up this will remain the case for the nation and the world. At the of this exhibition technique, to the fact that a lot of it was same time, the image of the early pastoral idyll is still power- and their collaborators and in danger of being lost.” ful, and as we fight to make our cities and campuses healthier followers – William R. Leigh, After mid-twentieth-cen- and more sustainable, the perennial urge for rus in urbs Robert Rockwell, James Perry tury modernism cast a cold reasserts itself. A new generation of shared green spaces is Wilson, Belmore Brown, eye on representational being introduced on urban campuses, often atop or within Francis Lee Jaques, and art and wildlife films and complex and hybrid architecture and infrastructure. The land- Robert Kane – furthered the Stephen Quinn. television shows became popular, some discredited the scape is satisfying our need for it by coming inside. The Amer- museum’s reputation as the museum’s dioramas as outdated – a position Quinn has always ican campus has been, is, and probably will always be many premier institution committed to this type of display. strongly opposed. On the contrary, he staunchly maintains things, but it is also a state of mind. – Laurie Olin The descendants of cycloramas – 360-degree panoramic that the three-dimensionality of these lifelike and life-size ani- paintings of important sites and historical events mounted on mal forms renders them more emotionally compelling than Two superb books for those who wish to learn more about the the inside of cylindrical drums – and Louis Daguerre’s theatri- animals are when seen on television or a diminutive computer history of many of these institutions are: cally back-lit scrims giving painted scenery an illusion of spa- screen. He firmly believes that the sophisticated techniques Paul Venable Turner. Campus: An American Planning Tradition. tial depth, habitat dioramas portray natural specimens in that provide illusory spatial breadth and depth make the dio- MIT Press, 1984. three-dimensional settings of great verisimilitude. This lin- ramas much more real than their photographic counterparts. Judith Rodin. The University & Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory eage begs a further question: are habitat dioramas science or Tower and Into the Streets. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. art? Stephen Quinn, who has helped to conserve and create them for the past thirty-nine years in the Exhibition Depart- ment of the museum, believes they are both. Quinn considers Chapman and Akeley masters of this form of landscape depiction, which fuses sculpture, painting, and

10 He also believes that the dioramas’ re-creations of specific set- of North American Birds was modernized in the 1960s. And then there was the American Museum of Natural His- tings, inhabited by creatures most people will never see in the Quinn himself is widely considered to be one of the most tory. “It was just thrilling to climb those grand steps and walk wild, are compelling testaments to nature’s sublimity – and a expert birders in the region, and the museum-sponsored bird into the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda,” he said. “It was like visceral means of educating the museum’s five million annual walks he leads in the Central Park Ramble during the May being in St. Paul’s Cathedral or some other great religious visitors about the importance of landscape conservation. migration season have a large following. His ornithological space. You could say that this place was the temple where I According to Quinn, the conservation ethos of the museum skills were honed when he was a boy growing up in Ridgefield worshipped nature. After I graduated from Ridgefield Park is built into the institution’s DNA; by the end of the nine- Park, New Jersey. He credits his parents with sharing their rev- High School, my guidance counselor directed me into a career teenth century, not only the great diorama artists but also the erence for nature with their children, taking them on vaca- in wildlife management. Since I had been painting and museum’s science curators and philanthropic supporters were tions to national parks and other wilderness areas. Even more sketching my entire life until then, I decided to transfer to the viewing vanishing wildlife species with justifiable concern. formative for his career as a naturalist and avian expert was his Ridgewood School of Design. When I graduated in 1974, as “The passenger pigeon was rapidly becoming extinct,” Quinn older brother, who took him on many adventurous explo- luck would have it, the New York State Council on the Arts was explained. “Game birds for the table were being shot in rations of the Hackensack Meadows next to their home. “In sponsoring an internship program that had been started here vast numbers, the railroads had turned buffalo hunting into those days it was a paradise,” he recalled. “For me it was just at the museum. Even though dioramas were somewhat out of a sport, and the market for plumes for the millinery trade like being Tom Sawyer. On Saturdays we would go out early in fashion at that time, it was a farsighted way for the museum caused the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of egrets, the morning on rafts, and I would help my brother collect to train a new generation of diorama artists, since the old ones flamingos, and other shore birds.” Then in 1885, Morris K. Jes- birds for the aviary and ponds he kept in the back yard. Some- were all gone or about to retire.” sup, third president of the museum, traveled to London and times we would filch one or two eggs from a nest, incubate Chapman’s creation of the Hall of North American Birds saw the mounted bird specimens in the British Museum. them in a warm place at home, and then raise the chicks. Of provided only a sample of what lay ahead in the museum’s “Upon his return, he found a dedicated young ornithologist – course, it is completely illegal nowadays to keep wild birds, development of the diorama as its principal mode of natural- Frank Chapman – and hired him to collect birds within a fifty- and even back then the game warden would occasionally pay history education. It was Carl Akeley, by combining the skills mile radius of New York City. This was the beginning of our us a visit. Then when my brother got his driver’s license, of a sculptor, a naturalist, an explorer, and a taxidermist, who earliest dioramas. Come, I’ll take you upstairs to see the Hall whenever we read about an oil spill in the newspapers, we brought this art form into its golden age after the museum’s of North American Birds.” would go patrol the beaches and run into the surf and catch fourth president, Henry Fairfield Osborne, hired him away There Quinn showed me several of Chapman’s early efforts ducks. After we brought them from the Field Museum in Chicago in 1909. There he had per- in a series of four-sided glass cases containing mounted bird Carl Akeley’s elephant grouping, home, our mom would let us fected what came to be known as the Akeley technique, a life- specimens and botanical models, which at first appeared to be Hall of African Mammals. wash them in the bathtub.” like presentation method he had earlier demonstrated with three-dimensional versions of Audubon paintings of birds the creation of a relatively posed on branches. Quinn described how Chapman had later small muskrat diorama. improved his displays by adding curved backdrop panels Now, with Osborne’s sup- with paintings depicting the original habitats from which the port, he was ready to apply specimens had been collected. Moreover, he brought artists his skills to the mounting of with him into the field in order to portray the landscapes they two fighting bull elephants. encountered as accurately as possible. As Quinn ushered me Chapman went on to create window-protected, theatrical, downstairs to the Hall of stage-style dioramas, the earliest being the Pelican Island African Mammals, he diorama of 1902. “He chose this subject because the pelican extolled Akeley’s unsur- was one of the many water birds that were about to become passed prowess as the cre- extinct,” Quinn said. “Plume hunters would lie in wait in ator of dioramas. When I the mangroves near their nests so that they could kill them as asked him to describe the they came in to feed their young. As president at the time, process of creating the taxi- Theodore Roosevelt, a naturalist himself, whose father was one dermic specimens on dis- of the founders of the museum, was able to get Congress to play, he explained how enact legislation in 1903 designating Pelican Island the first Akeley took extensive field federal bird reserve.” Much to Quinn’s regret, the Pelican measurements; modeled clay Island diorama was destroyed when Chapman’s original Hall

11 around a skeletal armature to create a detailed sculpture of the vision and tenacity were involved as well. Near the end of They understood the kinship between gorillas and human animal; and then covered the clay with the beast’s stripped his 1909 African expedition, while shooting photographs in beings. Akeley even wrote of the remorse he experienced when hide, which had been processed at a tannery to make it supple the bamboo forest on the lower slopes of Mount Kenya, he was he killed the great silverback gorilla you see here. He called and insect-proof. charged and mauled by a rogue elephant. It was while he it ‘a magnificent beast with the face of an amiable giant who But this was not the end of the process. Quinn went on to was still in the field during months spent convalescing from would do no harm’ and said he felt like a murderer. And describe how the wet clay within the now-skin-clothed animal this almost fatal accident that he conceived of the Hall of because of the beautiful surroundings, he said that he ‘envied would have been further manipulated by Akeley to ensure a African Mammals. Back at the museum and on subsequent this chap his funeral pyre.’ ” subtler detailing of the musculature, wrinkles, and folds, and expeditions to Africa, Akeley dedicated the rest of his career to Akeley returned to the site in 1926 with an accomplished to perfect the lifelike pose he had conceived for the manikin. its realization. plein-air landscape painter of the American West, William R. When Akeley was satisfied, a plaster cast was made that Although Akeley did not live to see it completed, the grand Leigh, in order to ensure that the diorama’s background would encased the entire hide-covered clay sculpture. Once hard, the Hall of African Mammals – with its forty-foot-high ceilings, appear as site-specific as possible. To achieve an equally realis- plaster and underlying pelt were incised and separated into handsome Art Deco architectural detailing, and twenty-eight tic foreground he brought along staff to collect the botanical two halves. The hardened clay was then removed from these illuminated diorama encasements encircling the ground floor specimens that would serve as models for their fabricated molds and the skeleton sent back to the Department of Mam- and mezzanine – is in accord with the scheme he had envi- counterparts. It was at this time that Akeley fell gravely ill and malogy, after which Akeley’s team filled the plaster shells with sioned. The freestanding elephant grouping at its center, died. Fittingly the intrepid explorer cum wildlife artist was papier-mâché. Once it was dry, they reunited the two halves of which is visible from the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda at the buried on site, which was the place he had declared the most the animal, removed the plaster from the exterior, sewed the museum’s main entrance on Seventy-ninth Street and Central beautiful on earth. skin together again at the seams, and concealed the stitching Park West, could be seen as the institution’s iconic heart. In November of 2010, Quinn visited the region on another where the specimen had been cut apart. Although some curators have disagreed, Quinn believes that museum expedition to paint plein-air paintings – this time for This revelation took me a moment to absorb. “Do you the room should remain dimly lit like a theater, its walls of the purpose of pairing recent images with the diorama in New mean,” I asked, “that these huge elephants are lightweights – serpentine – a dark green stone composed of ferromagnesian York in order to document the environmental changes that just papier-mâché figures with hides covering them?” minerals – free of labels, so that the dioramas are always the have occurred in the area around Mount Mikeno. Not only has “Yes,” Quinn replied, “they weigh a lot less than an actual principal focus of the visitor’s attention. When I asked him its tropical sublimity been compromised by clear-cutting on elephant, but they are very sturdy. There is a picture of Akeley which of Akeley’s dioramas in this hall was his favorite, he the slopes but the green valley visible in the diorama has been riding on top of one.” took me over to the window in front of the mountain gorilla parceled into agricultural fields as well. Many of these are now The centerpiece of the Hall of African Mammals is a free- specimens. Akeley had collected them in 1921 in the rain used as encampments for refugees who have been displaced by standing herd of eight elephants that include a cow elephant forests of Mount Mikeno among the Kivu volcanoes, in what the ongoing war and civil unrest in the Democratic Republic collected by Theodore Roosevelt and a calf collected by his son was then the Belgian Congo. “Remember,” Quinn said, “Akeley of the Congo and Rwanda. “You see,” he concluded, “a large Kermit on a 1909 expedition to Africa for the Smithsonian. and the other scientists of this museum were Darwinians. number of the dioramas here at the museum serve as records Akeley was leading an expedition for the museum at the same of various landscapes as they were before time, and the two parties met up. With Roosevelt’s donation human intervention and disturbance. Today, of his and Kermit’s elephants to the museum, Akeley was able when there are no more than an estimated to unite them with the two bull elephants he had previously seven hundred mountain gorillas left in the collected and mounted and present the four in a grouping world, this is how we can remember what called The Alarm, which was placed on exhibit in a hall called these places once were like and why we the Akeley Elephant Room. The splendid Hall of African should preserve the remaining ones like Mammals where they now stand would not open until 1936, them.” ten years after Akeley’s death. At that time, four other ele- As we moved downstairs to the Hall of phants collected by then-museum president F. Trubee David- North American Mammals, I asked Quinn son and his wife were added to the group. about the other taxidermists, background The story behind this multi-animal grouping testifies to painters, and foreground specialists who had the courage of naturalist collectors who were willing to risk helped to create the museum’s fascinating their lives in pursuit of dangerous creatures. In Akeley’s case, windows on nature. To introduce me to another of the diorama artists who are his heroes, Quinn took me to the mule deer dio- rama painted by James Perry Wilson, whom

Mountain gorilla diorama, Hall of 12 African Mammals. ings they wished to transfer onto large sur- if aware of our presence. On the realistic gravel- and grass- faces. More important, as Quinn explained, covered ground near their feet, I saw that the shadows corre- once Wilson had sketched his scenery sponded perfectly with the slant of the light source. Quinn according to his mathematically formulated explained, “Some shadowy tones had to also to be painted grid, he referred back to his plein-air paint- into the vegetation in the foreground in order to get just the ings to ensure that the color and values of right effect of reflected light in the outdoors.” Returning the diorama’s background approached those to the American bison and pronghorn antelope diorama – the seen by the naked eye when looking into the largest in the museum – I could see how Wilson and his distance outdoors. apprentice Fred Scherer, with the help of mammalogist In the manner of an art historian, Quinn T. Donald Carter and foreground artist George Peterson, had analyzed Wilson’s technique. Viewing the managed to achieve similar effects by the same means on an mule deer diorama with the butte called even grander scale. Devil’s Tower in the background, I could As we circled around the perimeter gallery in the Hall of appreciate the subtle gradations in the sky North American Mammals, we stopped by another Wilson from the acme to the horizon line, and the masterpiece, the wolf diorama. As we stood in front of this way in which the artist used a weaker nocturnal snow scene, Quinn pointed out Wilson’s under- chroma to convey the haziness of the distant standing of meteorology and astronomy as well as nighttime mountain ridge and the pinkish amber light light. “You can see the luminous streaks of the aurora borealis, of late afternoon. Quinn pointed out that the and there is Polaris and the constellations in exactly the matte surface made the scene more natural- positions they occupied at 3:00 a.m. on December 7, 1941, at istic; paint mixed with medium is glossier. the place where Wilson stood in a forest, somewhere between Mule deer diorama, Hall of North he considers to be the most Wilson, moreover, never used blacks. Instead he employed Minnesota and Ontario, painting his background sketch.” American Mammals. important background painter more nuanced tones achieved by mixing complementary col- He called my attention to other accurately studied details. of all time. ors, and this also increases his paintings’ verisimilitude. “Notice how the shadows of Wilson, who started his career in the museum under the The trickiest part of diorama creation may be seamlessly Wolf diorama, Hall of North Ameri- the two running wolves were tutelage of William R. Leigh in the Hall of African Mammals, melding the painted background into the arranged foreground can Mammals. fabricated by the foreground developed a method that took into account perspectival optics. with its real or artificial plants, rocks, grass, gravel, sand, or Heretofore it had been a matter of guesswork for an artist to snow in a tableau in which the sculpted taxidermies are the compensate graphically for the inevitable distortions that star attraction. Beyond this, the hues, values, and directional occur when a flat image is transferred to a curved surface by illumination of the background painting must be consonant means of an ordinary grid. Wilson, however, who had trained with those of the three-dimensional foreground objects, and as an architect, developed a grid that he was able to geometri- the sections must appear to merge with no apparent dividing cally alter in such a way that its squares change in size and line between them. shape toward the edges of the diorama’s curved background “Lighting is a critical factor,” Quinn told me. “Getting the wall, although they appear orthogonal when viewed from a electrical light source – which is concealed the same way that central position. stage lights are in a theater – evenly directed and dispersed so Before plotting the diorama’s background scenery accord- that background and foreground appear to share the same ing to his manipulated grid, Wilson used panoramic stereo- time of day is important. There can’t be any hot spots, and the scopic photographs as references in placing the horizon line at whole scene has to be illuminated in a way that makes the exactly five feet two inches from the ground, which he consid- light appear to be coming from one side. Here in the mule ered to be the average viewing height of a museum visitor. If deer diorama you can see by the background sky and how the all this sounds overly mechanical, one must recall that Renais- light falls across the landscape that the time of day is late sance painters also used grids to accurately enlarge the draw- afternoon. Look at the way it lights up Devil’s Tower in the background and how the foreground shadows are all in the same direction.” Just on the other side of the plate glass window a doe was grazing, and an antlered male was looking about alertly, as

13 artist Raymond deLucia, who sprinkled dry color onto the In Ambivalent De-fence of Zoos only traces remain of the original character and distribution of artificial snow, which is made from marble dust and sparkling n a just world there would be no zoos. We would share our the animal enclosures, there are still a scattering of Beaux- mica chips. That is because the low-level florescent lamps with sundry habitats with thousands of species of animals Arts-era buildings surviving from that turn-of-the-century blue filters used to simulate nocturnal light are incapable of in a mutual accord, allowing each of us the territory and project. Olmsted’s sensitivity to landform prevailed in much of casting shadows in this scene. You can see that the dry-color resources to thrive. There would be no boundaries, no the subsequent development, although demanding and shadows fall according to the position of the full moon, which constraints, no restraints – that is the improbable, Edenic expanding programs and collections, coupled with the zoo’s can’t be seen but can be imagined to be somewhere outside Idream. ever-increasing visitation – now at over two million visitors the diorama. At present, however, we must have zoos in some form – not per year – has meant a considerable sublimation of the gently “Now look at the wolves’ tracks in the snow, and you will merely for public entertainment but for the more noble causes forceful Olmstedian hand. see how accurately they depict the way a wolf runs at high of conservation and preservation. At least, that is the prevailing We are all too familiar with the century-long reign of con- speed. This is called a ‘gathered suspension’ – the point in each argument for their existence. When Nelson Byrd Woltz Land- crete-and-steel caging that dominated zoo enclosures every- sequence of strides when all four feet are off the ground and scape Architects (NBW) was approached by the National Zoo where (and unfortunately still persists in vestigial roadside gathered below the animal.” Quinn then pointed out a differ- a few years ago to collaborate on a renovation with them, our zoos, circuses, and official zoos of some developing nations). ent set of tracks, also apparently made at top speed but with designers and landscape architects soon found themselves Animal welfare seems to have been a minor consideration for all four feet outstretched for the next stride, the resulting pat- caught in the camouflaged snare embedded in the evolving the first hundred years of zoo development, if it was consid- tern indicating an animal that runs with an “extended” sus- field of zoo design: the paradoxical challenge of designing ered at all. That began to change in the 1960s, when research pension. “Now these are the kind of footprints that show enclosures that still, somehow, hint at boundlessness. led by animal behaviorists like Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas exactly the way the tracks of a white-tail deer fleeing from its “Niko” Tinbergen influenced the redesign of zoo enclosures, predator would appear,” he explained. “A lot of people who see The zoo has its origins in the menageries and hunting parks popularizing the notion of more environment-based, “natural” these dioramas won’t notice such things, but this is what of earlier centuries. In various sizes and forms, such animal habitats. makes them valid in the eyes of the naturalists who come here collections persisted into the mid-1800s, when the first official Soon designers such as Jones and Jones (in Seattle), Jon Coe to study them.” zoological gardens were conceived. As the initial public zoos (Seattle, Philadelphia, and currently Australia), David Hancocks For Quinn, however, there is also a moral – and even a reli- emerged in Europe out of royal holdings, it is likely that they (Seattle, Arizona, currently also in Australia) and others were gious – dimension to his work. He firmly believes that in our were conceived with thoughts of some academic correlation to creating more expansive and extensive habitats. These new zoo homocentric era of global transformation and climate change the earliest, university-sponsored botanic gardens (Padua, designs evolved not only from increased empathy for the the museum’s dioramas are testaments to nature’s divinity, Leiden, Oxford). These compressed and edited assemblages of caged animal but also from greater knowledge, research, and echoing Thoreau’s dictum that “in wildness is preservation of the world’s known flora – ostensibly gathered for education, understanding of its habits and behavior. This meant more the world.” Their scientific accuracy, combined with exquisite propagation, research, and dissemination – supported com- topography, more vegetation, more diversity, and more envi- craftsmanship, is what makes them so morally instructive. merce, agriculture, and medicine. Such collections also incor- ronmental richness and stimulation. It also meant dissolving “Now that there are tremendous threats to biodiversity and porated a little beauty and amusement as the entertainment of the perceptible barriers between people and animals, and habitat destruction going on all around us,” he said, “visitors visitors became part of their mission. It was perhaps inevitable presenting animals (or possibly even hiding them from view) to this museum can see how beautiful these places are, or once that the idea of interior and outdoor museums would ulti- in a wilder, less-kempt context. were. You can’t destroy nature heedlessly; these creatures and mately expand to include living specimens from the animal The mission was about providing more choice – both for we are part of a single web of life on this planet.” kingdom, under the broad umbrella of curiosity, education, the animals and the humans observing them. This usually When Quinn first came to the museum, he worked under and – much later – conservation and preservation. meant provisions for more shade and sun gradations, more the tutelage of deLucia; over the years since then, he has In the 1890s Frederick Law Olmsted contributed an early layers to the forest (assuming that was relevant to the animal’s advanced to the position of senior project manager. “I never prototype to zoo design. This was his layout of the Smithson- native habitat), more and different forms of water. It has also liked that title, really,” he told me. “I think of myself primarily ian Institution’s National Zoo in Washington D.C.’s Rock Creek translated into ever-more-sophisticated interpretations of the as an artist.” Quinn is retiring from his job in a few months, Park. The National Zoo had been established by an act of Con- expressed geologies that might represent the native terrain of and then he is planning to paint full-time. “But that doesn’t gress in 1889 for “the advancement of science and the instruc- these animals. This has inevitably led to more fake rock work, mean that I won’t be coming back to help on projects,” he tion and education of the people.” Olmsted’s contribution – because the budgets of zoos are not infinite, and the exigencies quickly added. “After all, this place has been my whole life.” in collaboration with William Temple Hornaday, then head of – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers the Smithsonian’s vertebrate division, and Samuel Pierpont Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian – was to organize the zoo and its primary path system along the spine of the rather linear and challenging Piedmont/Fall Line topography. While

14 of time, space, and safety have collectively mandated a practi- relationships. In other A young boy peers through a glass cal set of strategies for making these new exhibits. We try to words, all the world’s bears wall into the Giant Panda’s con- make them as “real” as possible, but the reality is, these are would be grouped together structed “naturalized” world along stage sets – part of an elaborate and expensive form of outdoor in adjoining, rather dismally the Asia Trail at the National Zoo. theater. designed, concrete/rock ensembles with moats and dens and a noticeable absence of In 2002 the National Zoo asked NBW, in collaboration with vegetation. There would also be very little differentiation Chatelain Architects and a tremendous team of consulting between, say, a grizzly bear’s environment and a sloth or spec- specialists, to design a significant upgrade to a corridor of tacle bear’s environment. habitats identified as the Asia Trail. At the core of our effort With the Asia Trail, we (NBW) worked closely with Coyle was the creation of unobstrusively enclosed environments for and Caron, exhibit-design specialists, as well as with the zoo’s seven Asian animal species: the giant panda, red panda, sloth exhibit team and the contractor, to create habitats that closely bear, Asian small-clawed otter, fishing cat, clouded leopard, evoked the animals’ native territory. Living bamboo dominated and giant salamander. These environments were generously the red and giant panda exhibits – though more on the outside woven around a meandering, not-quite-two thousand-foot- than within their actual ground, as the giant panda would long path that negotiated sixty feet of vertical grade within a destroy any growing bamboo within days. But the exhibit 5.5-acre site. designers conceived of an original, painted-steel-rod detail for tree trunks scattered around gentle waterfalls and pools. Hid- The project derived much of its impetus from the zoo’s the sloth bear exhibit that replicated bamboo groves while den misters provide a cooling fog to counter Washington’s desire to expand and improve the yards for the giant pandas, providing an imperceptible barrier to the enclosure. We con- relentless summer heat. who are a huge draw. The larger goal, however, was to redress tinued the bamboo theme by proposing that bundles of har- The red panda peers down at us from a perch high in the the woefully inadequate living quarters of some of the lesser- vested (dried) bamboo canes serve as trail and exhibit markers carefully positioned tree in its new environment, adjacent to known Asian animals, such as the red panda and the sloth at key locations along the Asia trail. Their size hinted at the the giant-panda yards along the Asia Trail. There is some small bear, while simultaneously congregating all seven species in story of just how much bamboo each panda consumes on a solace or satisfaction here, to have made a place – a series of closer, more logical, geographic and ecological proximity. daily basis – a remarkable amount because of their seemingly places – where animals can gaze down on us. We understood Like the great majority of inefficient digestive system (they only “use” 17 percent of what this to be good, empathetic, contemporary-design practice – to An early design study section twentieth-century zoos estab- they consume). devise a world (albeit an artificial one) that in some modest through several adjacent Asia Trail lished before the 1960s, the The fishing cats’ constructed microcosm reproduces small measure allows animals a position of prominence. That sug- habitats, depicting a variety National Zoo had animal col- forest ponds and mud-bank stream environments; the Asian gests, if only symbolically, that humans are not the dominant of strategies for engaging both lections that tended to be small-clawed otters have a fast-flowing, rock-strewn creek being. These judiciously designed spaces often serve as both a animals and visitors within a grouped according to species, replete with drifts of Equisetum. The giant pandas ramble prospect and a refuge. We can view the animals in multiple very steep site. rather than by biogeographical amid climbable trees, rock outcrops and dens, and decaying habitats or locations: high, low, eye level; on rock outcrops, in trees, pools, falls, and streams; clambering up and down tilted and decaying logs. And they can observe or experience us from numerous vantage points as well. Chinese officials with Aba Prefecture’s Wolong National Nature Reserve so liked our re-creation of the giant-panda habitat within the Asia Trail that they invited us to China to help them remake the antiquated designed environments in which their own pandas were contained. Such was the state of things that we found ourselves in a charrette, exploring this World Heritage site in Sichuan Province, trying to bring a westernized take on “natural” animal environments to the stunning and vanishing real world of the last one thousand pandas. How was our Asia Trail in Washington, D.C., any different from numerous zoo remakes (or new zoos) that had recently

15 opened? Perhaps in its incorporation of the best contemporary The bamboo-enshrouded threshold habitat that we are trying to practices in design, layout, and choice of materials, in combi- of the Asia Trail. replicate here, from the sweep nation with stimulating strategies and programs. The latter of the Sichuanese highlands to were not only meant to enrich the daily lives of the animals the Indian tropical lowlands, is influenced by humans. but also to engage the observer in ways more tangible than So zoos today are increasingly not just about the revivifica- passive viewing. We do note, and fully appreciate, that the zoo- tion of forest pools but the preservation of gene pools as well. management team at the National Zoo/Smithsonian considers One of the more heartening aspects of the Smithsonian’s com- the Asia Trail the most significant upgrade at the National Zoo mitment and investment in sustaining the zoological world in the past forty years. The zoo averaged 1.8 million visitors is the magnitude of its research and breeding efforts. The per year in the three years leading up to the opening of the National Zoo’s 160 acres within Rock Creek Park are comple- Asia Trail. For the two years following its opening, the number mented and reinforced by the 3200-acre Smithsonian Conser- jumped to 2.6 million people. It has since settled back to about vation Biology Institute just outside Front Royal, Virginia, an 2.1 million people a year. They don’t all come because of the hour’s drive from the District of Columbia. Here animals do pandas, but it is generally accepted that the Asia Trail has con- have the territory to roam and live a somewhat more “natural” tributed to the increase in attendance. life. Some animals are quarantined here for health and Certainly visitors comment favorably on the virtues of the safety reasons, but it is also in this less-stressful context that expanded, animal-friendly habitats along the Asia Trail as endangered species are bred to combat the possibility of well as on the dynamic path corridor created for them to expe- their extinction. This environment also serves as one of several rience these habitats. The animal inhabitants, less forthcoming stepping-stones in the reintroduction of selected animals to in their commentary, at least appear to enjoy their new and the wild. improved digs – rolling, scampering, splashing, and climb- Back at the top of the Asia Trail, a sloth bear draws a mighty ing – although one of the clouded leopards, Mook, did chew breath through the openings in a constructed termite mound her way through the steel InvisiNet. They found the overnight that is just at the edge of the glass barrier wall. We can feel the escapee the next morning, snoozing right next to her newly suction at the end of the long, narrow feeding tube that has designed habitat. Perhaps she spent the night wandering in been inserted from our side of the world. It is a momentary search of better worlds but ultimately decided – at least within sense of other beingness, of sharing a very small moment the larger confines of the National Zoo grounds – that her in the life of another sentient creature. It is a reminder of one newly designed home was the best local option. of countless reasons we go to the zoo. As Diane Ackerman The Asia Trail’s designed habitats exceed the accepted stan- expressed in a series of lovely contradictions and bamboozle- presents it in her concluding paragraph of a New York Times dards for these particular creatures (by whose standards seems ments. Here we are attempting to represent an Asian world essay on why we love zoos: “What a lonely species we are, a fair question to ask – obviously not their own). Nevertheless amid a Rock Creek corridor of tulip poplars, beech, and oak; searching for signals of life from other galaxies, adopting com- it never seems adequate enough. Especially for animals that negotiating our way down a slope at 5 percent through panion animals, visiting parks and zoos to commune with like to, or expect to, roam. But part of the impossible design bounded borders we are trying to disguise; and directing other beasts. In the process, we discover our shared identity. challenge is to make whatever square footage we are accorded waters into reservoirs hidden beneath the trail. We even man- We flock to zoos for many reasons, not least to shed some of seem as expansive and diverse and complex as possible. So we aged the sleight-of-hand efficiencies of tucking animal-hold- the burden of being human.” incorporated twists and turns, ups and downs, and ins and ing areas and maintenance (back-of-the-house) zones It is hard to fully reconcile or justify zoos. Except to say, outs, designing multiple nooks and crannies for both protec- underneath portions of the quarter-mile-long trail. The trail what choice do we have if we feel compelled to preserve our tion and exposure. One aim is to create hiding places that itself avoids the more typical materials of concrete or asphalt biological brethren? It would be marvelous if we could move maybe don’t completely hide, because people visit expecting to in favor of a natural, resin-based paving surface. With the help these animals back to their lands of origin – or at least to see what they came for. This is certainly one of zoo design’s of many specialists, including a very engaged zoo staff and places where they might roam more freely. In most cases, how- most challenging conundrums. administration, it succeeds as an artful display of animal and ever, that dream future is highly unlikely to arrive. In the As for accessibility and sustainability, the Asia Trail is heav- human environments, a set of experiences designed to meantime, recent efforts like the creation of the Asia Trail at ily invested in these twin, twenty-first-century expectations. acknowledge that we share the limited resources of this finite the nation’s zoo are safeguards against losses we do not wish Beyond the essential provisions for animal welfare and enrich- world and that animal cultures and human cultures are ever to imagine. – Warren T. Byrd Jr. ment, these two human values are served up in both grand overlapping. Whether misting ourselves in proximity to the and quiet ways throughout the project. Their counterpoint is pandas brings us any closer together is for others to argue. We try to literally and figuratively dissolve the barriers between animals and humans, understanding that most of these crea- tures exist, even in the wild, in a no-longer-wild world. Every 16 Plants for the People: Henry Shaw’s Enduring In assembling his garden, Shaw enlisted the help of some were placed on high pedestal planters in the manner of sculp- Missouri Botanical Garden of the most highly respected names in the field of botany, tures; changeable beds of cacti were laid out in flower patterns; he Missouri Botanical Garden, a seventy-nine-acre including Asa Grey, William Hooker, and George Englemann. and shrubs were arranged to highlight the color and foliage of sanctuary for weekend floraphiles and serious Englemann, a German doctor who had opened a practice in each bush. scholars alike, lies in the thick of urban Saint Louis. Saint Louis, was an avid student of botany and organized many In addition to these individual plants, Shaw decided that About three-quarters of a million visitors pass collection expeditions throughout the still-wild Americas. He both an arboretum and fruticetum were necessary elements of through the garden’s main entrance each year – encouraged Shaw to give equal weight in his garden to science a comprehensive garden. The design of these features mir- Tsome to see a flower show or glean new home-gardening tips, and research, two main components of the newly established rored the ethos of botany. Trees in the original arboretum, for others to study preserved specimens in extensive herbariums. discipline. Although Shaw stood firm in ensuring that his gar- example, were positioned in rows that allowed for systematic A patchwork of themed gardens, carefully designed beds, den was from the beginning open to the general public, he study. The highly regimented landscape that reigned at the and modern and historic structures, the garden has been a also established a museum and library. There was a herbar- botanical garden was as remote from the purely aesthetic gar- resource for visitors from near and far for 154 years. ium, too, to which Englemann donated a 95,000-specimen col- dens Shaw had seen on his tours of Europe as from the natu- Now a National Historic Landmark, the garden owes its lection. Shaw himself was a diligent student. He made copious ralistic landscapes championed by Fredrick Law Olmsted and enduring success and popularity to its founder, Henry Shaw, as notes about his botanic acquisitions and indicated which his followers. (In fact, Olmsted visited the Missouri Botanical much as to any current or recent director. Shaw’s deep interest exotic imports failed to survive the harsh Missouri climate. Garden and was notably unimpressed.) Shaw did, however, in plants as individual subjects for study, his strong belief in From the beginning the institution would cater not only to later give the city a 289-acre piece of adjoining land that was the abilities of gardens to improve life for all, and his keen eye scientists but also to amateurs. In the mid-nineteenth century, sculpted into Tower Grove Park, a more picturesque landscape for institution-building and maintenance have kept this botany, as both a hobby and a science, was expanding from an that remains a popular destination for recreation and repose gem of Midwestern horticulture flourishing for more than a upper-class gentleman’s pursuit to an activity that middle- today. century after his death. class men, women, and children could enjoy as well, a change By 1859, the untamed patch of prairie Shaw had seen in the Shaw’s vision for his garden was both Victorian and democ- that practically ensured the botanical garden’s popularity. To 1820s had been utterly transformed into his ambitious and ratic. He wanted a garden designed more for active study than support the “botanizing” movement, Shaw decided, as he meticulously assembled garden. It opened that June as the passive repose. He saw it as a much-needed force for refine- explained in his Guide to the Missouri Botanical Garden, that his Missouri Botanical Garden. The forty-five-acre landscape was ment and education in what was then a rough-and-tumble garden would display a “systematic arrangement of classified free to the public and accessible every day except Sunday. frontier city. These goals, slightly modified, endure today, as plants.” But his was a refined and exactingly Victorian ideal for According to Shaw’s records, it was not uncommon for more visitors continue to seek diversion and education in a hectic what a botanical garden should be: a plant display in the Gar- than a thousand people to visit on a single day. Shaw himself and changing world. denesque style, meaning one in which plants are elevated to lived in a villa called Tower Grove House, which was located the level of artworks, to be studied and admired from every on the garden’s grounds. From the tower, he could proudly Born in 1800 in Sheffield, England, a town already trans- angle. With individual specimens taking precedence over land- watch the throngs of visitors. formed into a manufacturing center by the Industrial Revolu- scape composition, massive century plants (Agave americana) Shaw’s grand project reflected his pride in his adopted tion, Shaw traveled to Saint Louis in 1819. There he established country. The diverse species on view at the a hardware business that he ran and expanded over the next garden would “stimulate all amatures [sic] in two decades. Venturing forth one day on horseback from his the city and state,” he wrote. “A botanical col- newly adopted city, he arrived at an enchanting swath of open lection open to the public acts as a stimulus prairie. The land extended westward, he later recalled, “uncul- to ornament and beautify our country.” Shaw tivated, without trees or fences, but covered with tall luxuriant viewed the project as ongoing: the same year grass, undulated by the gentle breezes of spring.” Decades the garden opened, he drew up a trust – “a later, it was this tract of land he would acquire from a local permanent fund for all time” – to maintain farmer and turn into his public botanical garden. his creation. He also wrote a will that A naturalized citizen after 1843, Shaw amassed a great for- charged a board of trustees with safeguard- tune in the frontier economy. As a middle-aged bachelor, ing for the public’s use “a Botanical garden he then traveled back across the Atlantic, taking in the art, cul- easily accessible, which should be forever ture, and gardens of Europe and the British Isles. Inspired kept up and maintained for the cultivation by what he saw – especially by the Royal Botanic Garden at and propagation of plants, flowers, fruit and Kew – he decided to establish a public botanical garden of his forest trees, and other productions of the own devising, located in his new country and connected to vegetable kingdom; and a museum and his country estate. library connected therewith, and devoted the

Pool and Climatron, Missouri Botanical Garden. 17 same and to the science of Botany, Horticulture, and allied enclaves include a Japanese garden, the Chinese Garden, an some of Shaw’s studious intentions for the garden. Visitors objects.” Ottoman garden, and a mock-Western town for children’s play. strolling between the Tower Grove House area and the main Since Shaw’s death in 1889, the will has remained the gov- The garden’s most significant addition is the seventy-foot-tall axis are treated to a meandering path of carefully labeled spec- erning document guarding and guiding the garden as it has geodesic dome called the Climatron, which was built in 1960 imens – more than fifteen hundred irises and more than two grown and changed. “It was a very astute beginning for this according to the principles of R. Buckminster Fuller. thousand daylily species – inviting both appreciation and institution,” says Bob Magill, vice president of science and con- In spite of these changes, the landscape retains deep insti- examination. Shaw hoped that the specimens on display would servation at the garden. He speaks proudly of how the organi- tutional roots. The brick-and-glass Linnean House was built in inspire visitors to take on their own “botanical improvement” zation continues to fulfill its mission, using – as do many 1882, seven years before Shaw’s death, to display citrus trees, of the world; now the garden even has an outreach program others at the garden – the institutional “we” when explaining palms, and other fragile plants during the long Missouri win- based at the Kemper Center for Home Gardening. Opened in its history. But time has hardly stood still; although Shaw’s ters. It is the oldest continuously operated greenhouse west of 1991, it operates in partnership with the University of Missouri will has been amended in only about a dozen instances – and the Mississippi. James Gurney, the garden’s first head gar- Extension and Master Gardeners. Twenty-three neat and man- then only by formal appeal to the Circuit Court of the City of dener, and George Pring after him embraced the Victorian fas- ageably sized demonstration gardens have been laid out in Saint Louis – the fact that it does not provide firm landscape cination with water lilies, breeding and displaying them in curved tiers around a central building where even the indoor instructions per se has given its custodians considerable free- reflecting pools that help create the main axis in front of the plants are arranged around windows to demonstrate optimal dom. As McGill remarked, “We’ve taken it and run with it.” Linnean House. The first director, William Trelease, worked placement. And experts are on hand to answer any garden- The garden is now open every day of the year except Christ- with Olmsted’s firm in an effort to expand the garden and related question – or just for a friendly chat with visitors. mas. Admission is no longer free, as it was in Shaw’s time, incorporate more picturesque elements. By 1912, when George Although the garden might have changed physically, as an but Saint Louis-area residents can enter for just four dollars Moore assumed the directorship (serving until 1953), the gar- institution it has maintained much of its idealistic vision. Rec- (half of the standard admission price), and children twelve den underwent even greater changes, gaining naturalistic vis- ognizing early the lack of qualified gardeners in the United and under can visit at no cost. Additionally, in 1983, the garden tas. Shaw’s formal arboretum and fruticetum were gradually States, Shaw established a garden-research program in 1880. In became part of the city’s Metropolitan Zoological Park and filled in with other botanic offerings. Now, instead of the 1885 he endowed the Washington University School of Botany, Museum District, joining other institutions in the area in founder’s original, linearly planted arboretum, trees through- which continues to offer courses in partnership with the gar- receiving tax money from the city. (It also gains income from out the garden are labeled. The Cherbonnier English Wood- den. And the garden’s research program has flourished, far memberships, gifts, grants, and education programs.) The gar- land Garden – a wild, forestlike enclave that is in dramatic exceeding anything that Shaw and his contemporaries could den now also operates two other centers. The 2,400-acre Shaw contrast to the modernistic Climatron – opened in 1976. have foreseen. Nature Reserve, thirty-five miles southwest of Saint Louis, was There are some things, however, that cannot change, says For Magill and others, the founder’s mandate in his will purchased by the garden in 1925 when the air pollution from Andrew Wyatt, the garden’s vice president for horticulture. The that the garden further botanical study is as relevant now Saint Louis threatened the survival of orchids, pines, and other center of the garden, he notes, should retain its traditional as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the physical plants on the main campus. The Sachs Butterfly House, Victorian vistas. Wyatt and his team are plotting small alter- herbariums – which currently contain more than six million an 8,000-square foot conservatory with butterflies and plants ations they plan to make across the garden over the next few specimens – remain key to this mission, the institution now in Chesterfield, opened in 1998 and was taken over by the years, such as rotating the plants featured in the Linnean has massive online databases. Botanicus, for instance, is an botanical garden in 2001. House and reimagining beds and displays for different sea- annotated, online repository for scientific plant resources, sons and years. They also have their eyes on the biggest histor- resembling a hyperlinked library; and Tropicos is a digital When I visited Saint Louis on a bitingly cold Monday last ical marks in the landscape – namely, the trees, which need resource cataloging more than 1 million genera and 4.2 mil- December, I had nearly the entire garden grounds to myself, to be replanted when a void opens up. “We’re thinking for the lion specimens. Studying the Web traffic to these free sites, exchanging friendly greetings only with groundskeepers and next one hundred and fifty years,” Wyatt says, noting that “his- Magill notices that people are visiting the garden’s offerings gardeners as they zipped around in golf carts installing holi- tory develops over time” and each layer adds richness and from all over the world – a development squarely in line day decorations at Tower Grove House or tending to winter opportunities for interpretation. with Shaw’s original aim to share botanical knowledge and beds outside the Chinese Garden. The temperate and tropical Currently, for example, Wyatt and his team are looking to appreciation of plants with a broad public. greenhouses, however, were bustling with casual visitors and enrich the Boxwood Garden, which has its origins not with visiting students alike. Shaw but with former garden director Edgar Anderson. Ander- The eastern stone wall that once separated the garden from Despite the fact that the garden still operates as a charitable son collected the first specimens of these long-lived plants in farmland now stands between it and rows of early twentieth- trust, I found that much of it would be unrecognizable to 1934 when he was a staff researcher during a trip to the century brick houses. Bringing the surrounding community Shaw today. I encountered a mélange of preserved or recon- Balkans. Some of his finds are still on display. Wyatt believes and the rest of the region’s population into the garden’s structed Victorian-era features – a hedge maze, water lily dis- that highlighting historic individual plants provides an oppor- welcoming embrace is both a challenge and an imperative. plays, a nineteenth-century, brick-and-glass greenhouse – but tunity to tell a story for visitors and help them connect with Although the garden still attracts crowds for its plant shows also numerous contemporary additions. These self-contained the garden and its past. Newer gardens, including the Iris Garden and the Daylily Garden – established in 1984 and 1988, respectively – revive 18 despite the myriad distractions of modern life, the collection Place Maker/Place Keeper is not just something to be studied and admired. Says Sheila Voss, director of education, “It’s about something bigger.” Voss and her staff are striving to interact with visitors in new ways and engage them on new levels. Efforts such as free public Place Maker: Genevieve Trimble concerts on summer evenings can draw as many as ten thou- Genevieve “Gen” Trimble is the owner of Afton Villa, a two sand people in a single evening, of whom many have never hundred fifty-acre plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana. before set foot in the garden. Voss notes that Shaw’s original, After the destruction of the forty-room, Gothic Revival man- carefully constructed landscape has become more “like a sion by fire in 1963, the plantation’s nineteenth-century garden forum – not just a one-way exhibit,” adding that the garden’s languished until Trimble and her husband Morell – ”Bud” – staff feels compelled to do the best it can before passing on its bought the property in 1972 to save it from imminent subdivi- responsibilities to the next generation of caretakers. She sion and development. With advice from Dr. Neil Odenwald, referred to Shaw’s legacy as “humbling.” FASLA, professor of landscape architecture at nearby Louisiana Emphasizing his continuing presence, Shaw is buried on State University, the Trimbles elected to add their own the grounds of his adjacent estate. His remains rest in front of influence to the garden. It reflects their lives and her strong Tower Grove Home in a granite mausoleum containing his sense of garden design, yet its origins, existing plant materials, life-size marble effigy. The garden’s current mission, adopted and historic evolution are respected. Explaining her philoso- in 1999, like that dictated for it in Shaw’s will, is simple yet phy of sensitively integrating historic character and current demanding: “To discover and share knowledge about plants intention, Trimble once remarked, “All old gardens are and their environment, in order to preserve and enrich life.” If haunted, one quickly discovers, in that their former owners, the founder’s era was one of botanical discovery and explo- who have loved and worked them, seem forever in the shad- Place Keeper: Antonia Adezio ration, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have ows, possessively prescribing and dictating what not to tamper The mission of the Garden Conservancy is to preserve excep- demanded research in the cause of conservation and battles with or change.” tional American gardens and find ways to save them for the against habitat destruction. The celebration of plants may still education and enjoyment of the public. Antonia Adezio served be intended to civilize, but now it is supposed to encourage as the head of this four thousand-member organization for sustainability as well. Toward this end, a small, state-of-the-art twenty-three years, from the organization’s founding under the weather station is tucked into the corner of the Kemper Cen- leadership of legendary gardener Frank Cabot until the end of ter. This Remote Automated Weather Station gathers real-time 2012. During this time she has helped perpetuate the artistic information on humidity, precipitation, soil moisture, solar vision of the creators of dozens of major gardens across Amer- radiation, temperature, and wind. The data it collects are being ica, including five that have been declared National Historic stored and analyzed to help garden staff and researchers track Landmarks and seventeen that are listed on the National Reg- climatic changes. Surrounding the station is a display of speci- ister of Historic Places. Notable among the gardens that have mens that used to be hearty locally; it demonstrates the shift- benefited from her strategic planning, whether in fine-tuning ing of plant-hardiness zones. This little outpost of technology their organizational structures or planning for ongoing main- is quietly signaling the future of the landscape it monitors. tenance and funding, are the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut This quiet way of showing – not telling – visitors about sus- Creek, California; the John P. Humes Stroll Garden in Mill tainability and climate change is just the latest effort to lead Neck, New York; Henriette Suhr’s Rocky Hills in Mount Kisco, the garden into the next one hundred and fifty years. “We have New York; Peckerwood Garden in Hempstead, Texas; Green- the beauty to attract the public,” Wyatt says. The challenge is to wood Gardens in Short Hills, New Jersey; and the topiary gar- involve visitors in the larger discussion so that they leave the den of Pearl Fryar in Bishopville, South Carolina. In 1995 garden with an expanded sense of plants’ importance and the Adezio inaugurated the Garden Conservancy’s national Open issues at stake. If the garden’s caretakers succeed, Shaw’s cre- Days program, making possible public visits to private gar- ation might make us more aware of the landscape around us, dens. Subsequently she was instrumental in forming a part- but also more conscious of a wider landscape – namely, our nership between the Garden Conservancy, the National Park changing environment. – Katherine Harmon Service, and the Golden Gate Conservancy to spearhead the restoration of the historic gardens on Alcatraz Island in With gratitude for Carol Grove’s thoughtful historical research in San Francisco Bay. her book Henry Shaw’s Victorian Landscapes.

19 Books what Simon Schama calls the the New York Historical Washington Irving, N.P. accumulation of detail human history and culture – “frame,” which is crucial in Society’s contribution to the Willis, Andrew Jackson builds gradually to the big- so imperfect and so often turning mere geography into quadricentennial was Linda Downing, Jervis McEntee, ger picture. deeply troubled. No wonder landscape. The revolutions Ferber’s The Hudson River and John Burroughs. These Some of his choices are Wordsworth bemoaned that Sanctified Landscape: in transportation and indus- School: Nature and the Ameri- are not comprehensive conventional, such as using the civilized man had no Writers, Artists, and the try that made modern Amer- can Vision, the most signifi- biographies, but collections Thomas Cole to set his choice but “To look on Hudson River Valley, ica possible – the Erie Canal, cant book of its kind since of vignettes from the lives theme of “the artists’ river”; nature, not as in 1820-1909 Fulton’s steamship, and the John Howat’s seminal Hud- and works of his subjects. some are less obvious the hour / Of thoughtless By David Schuyler Hudson River Railroad – also son River and its Painters in Interwoven with these but familiar to students of youth; but hearing often- Ithaca: Cornell University had their roots in this one 1988. We now even have a sketches are three thematic the Hudson – for example, times / The still, sad music Press, 2012 place. As a result, the river semiannual journal, the essays: on the origins of the selecting the writer N. P. of humanity.” and its valley provided many Hudson River Valley Review, “tourist experience” in the Willis to complement the Increasingly that “still, sad The case for significant which publishes both serious early century; on the process better-known Washington music of humanity” became the Hudson elements of scholarship and amateur of “sanctification” that later Irving; and some choices manifest in the valley, and Valley as the the young essays in the burgeoning arose in response to indus- appear at first blush down- Schuyler’s subjects are prototypical country’s field of regional, or place- trial change and threat; and right eccentric, such as his acutely sensitive to it. Cole cultural land- emerging based, studies. The question, on subsequent attempts to lingering look at the life bemoans the ax felling the scape is well national iden- then, is what David revive the landscape’s histor- of the late-century Hudson Catskill forests and omi- known. It was tity, and in Schuyler’s Sanctified Land- ical associations, climaxing River School artist Jervis nously paints into his River the setting for return Amer- scape: Writers, Artists, and the in the Hudson-Fulton Cele- McEntee. By the end, how- in the Catskills (1843) the new many of the ica endowed Hudson River Valley, 1820- bration in 1909. ever, the more-obscure Canajoharie and Catskill critical events this place with 1909, adds to this body of In his chapter on Bur- figures like McEntee prove Railroad, Leo Marx’s of the Ameri- countless lay- work. roughs, the author quotes to be the most interesting, “machine in the garden.” Irv- can Revolu- ers of associa- Schuyler – a distinguished his subject, who explains and Schuyler tells his and ing curses the railroad that tion, thus tion and scholar best known for his that “the facts in the life of the others’ stories with con- cut between his idyllic Sun- acquiring his- meaning, and editorial work on The Freder- Nature that are transpiring siderable charm. nyside and the water, “pro- torical associa- thus value. ick Law Olmsted Papers; his about us are like written Sanctified Landscape has a fan[ing]” the river itself. Even tions so vital to national The Hudson River litera- excellent biography Apostle of words that the observer is to distinctly melancholic tone. Burroughs must retreat pride of place. Accessible ture has long been extensive, Taste: Andrew Jackson Down- arrange into sentences.” McEntee lived a life of con- from Riverby, his house on from the country’s main port and anticipation of the 2009 ing; and other books on Perhaps inspired by this, stant disappointments, and the Hudson, to the more of entry, it provided many quadricentennial celebra- the urban landscape – limits Schuyler gives us closely his preference for painting completely bucolic and early nineteenth-century tions of Henry Hudson’s his ambitions in Sanctified observed cameos, points us autumnal and winter scenes wholly rustic Slabsides. Of Americans and Europeans 1609 voyage spurred addi- Landscape. He confines in the right direction, but is a haunting metaphor course these resentments with their first glimpse of tional scholarship. Fran his exploration of the valley largely leaves it to us to con- for his era’s rapidly waning eventually sowed the seeds the New World beyond the Dunwell’s excellent 1992 to a period of about eight nect the dots. He presents interest in American land- for the sensibility and values coasts. It offered in one trip work, Hudson River High- decades, seeking to answer the propositions that the scape painting. The consid- that would come to full both the sublime terrors of lands, was completely revised three questions: how Ameri- Hudson helped to build erable reputations of flower later in the twentieth the wilderness and the and republished in 2008 as cans first experienced this America’s national identity Burroughs and Willis faded century, in the movement to promise of a new American The Hudson: America’s River. landscape; why they thought and produce “new ways of fast. Downing died young in protect the historic places pastoral. The representatives Tom Lewis gave us a com- it was special; and how they thinking about the human an accident, and even the and iconic landscapes of the of our earliest native move- prehensive scholarly work, reacted to the region’s rapid relationship with the natural magnificent 1909 Hudson- Hudson Valley. But in 1909, ments in art and literature The Hudson: A History. Art of industrialization and alter- world,” but he does not sup- Fulton Celebration is pre- the year Schuyler closes chose it as their subject, pre- the Hudson River School ation at midcentury. His port these hypotheses with sented by Schuyler as a flop. his narrative, there was little senting the landscape to continues to fascinate, and approach is not analytical a closely argued analysis. Perhaps this melancholy also cause for optimism. those who could not visit in but episodic. He builds his Instead his approach is gran- reflects our continuing person and investing it with answers through five short ular; as in a large mosaic, the ambivalence at the very idea essays on six nineteenth- of a landscape that burdens century citizens of the Hud- nature with the imprint of son Valley: Thomas Cole, 20 Sanctified Landscape does transcendentalism. Tran- As Wallace Stegner, who Another interesting were of a slightly different cultural identity, and leave not contribute substantively scendentalist thinking is carried forward into our own aspect of Hudson River cul- ilk. In 1886 tobacco heir Schuyler’s book convinced to cultural landscape theory deeply woven into the sanc- century so many of the val- ture during the period cov- Griswold Lorillard, who had that the historic and envi- – that is, to our understand- tified landscape of the Hud- ues and sensibilities that are ered by Schuyler is the rise settled with friends in the ronmental preservation ing of the processes by son and influenced much the subject of Sanctified of the eccentric and its con- Hudson Valley enclave of ethos that flowered but a few which history, allegory, myth, of the literary and artistic Landscape, famously put it in tribution to the valley’s dis- Tuxedo Park, revolutionized decades ago was, in fact, and metaphor turn geogra- output in the era Schuyler his superb novel Crossing to tinctive character. John dinner wear with the shock- deeply rooted in “the search phy into landscape. It does describes. I have always Safety, “Hudson River School Stuart Mill observed that ing innovation of a short for continuity” that began in not aim for the chronologi- enjoyed the metaphor for painting [unites] the philo- “eccentricity has always dinner jacket, ever thereafter the middle of the nineteenth cal or geographical scope philosophy grounded in sophical-contemplative with abounded when and where referred to as the “tuxedo.” century. – Frederic C. Rich and depth of Simon nature provided in 1858 – the pastoral-picturesque.” strength of character has Illinois Central Railroad Schama’s superb Landscape four years after Thoreau That philosophical-contem- abounded; and the amount President William H. Osborn Graceland Cemetery: A and Memory, which provided published Walden – by the plative strain – where, like of eccentricity in a society built a whimsical castle on Design History remarkable insights into expedition of a distin- the camping philosophers, has generally been propor- a high hill instead of a more By Christopher Vernon what cultural landscape is. guished group of thinkers we experience natura natu- tional to the amount of conventional estate house. Amherst, MA: University of Instead the book is a well- into the real wilderness, a rata (created nature) but look genius, mental vigor, and This whimsy is now a deeply Massachusetts Press in crafted and concise illustra- spot on the banks of Fol- for natura naturans (the moral courage which it con- rooted part of the Hudson association with the Library tion of that process at work lensby Pond known there- transcendent or creating tained.” Given the abundance Valley architectural vernacu- of American Landscape in one time and place. The after as the Philosopher’s aspect of nature) – is critical of genius, mental vigor, and lar. To this day, buildings History, 2012 author takes his title from Camp. The party consisted of to an understanding of nine- moral courage in nine- up and down the valley still Cole’s famous remark that two poets, Ralph Waldo teenth-century America’s teenth-century New York, it sprout octago- For some the struggle for freedom has Emerson and James Russell engagement with the land. should be no surprise that nal towers time – espe- “sanctified many a spot.” It Lowell; two scientists, Louis That sensibility still rever- the great city’s backyard without con- cially since the is, of course, a secular sort of Agassiz and Jeffries Wyman; berates strongly in the hosted a marvelous concen- scious knowl- 1989 publica- sanctity. For Schuyler, it is two lawyers, Ebenezer Hoar nation and the valley, which tration of eccentrics. Orson edge of their tion of also an active type of sanc- and Horatio Woodman; two struggles more than ever Squire Fowler, for example, debt to Fowler, Blanche Lin- tity, an idealization of place doctors, Estes Howe and with question of man’s rela- who was responsible for the and celebrate den-Ward’s that compels what he calls a Amos Binney; John Holmes, tionship with, and moral briefly popular science of their remark- Silent City on a “preservationist impulse.” the younger brother of responsibility for, the natural phrenology (reading charac- able setting Hill: Land- Schuyler explains that “the writer Oliver Wendell world. And – like the mix ter from the shape of the with an exuber- scapes of Mem- sanctification of landscape Holmes; and William James of poets, lawyers, doctors, skull), lived in an octagonal ance not found ory and united attitudes toward Stillman, an artist, writer, artists, and scientists gath- house on the banks of the elsewhere in Boston’s Mount scenery, history, political cul- and skilled woodsman. The ered at the Philosopher’s Hudson and advocated for the Northeast. Auburn Ceme- ture, and change into a con- “philosophers” spent a Camp – every branch of the octagon as the perfect The power of tery – histori- servative worldview that month at Follensby Pond human knowledge and shape for rooms and houses place is ans, architects, helped contemporaries adapt engaged in hunting, fishing, endeavor continues to con- in his 1848 best seller, A strong – in few places as landscape architects, and to the social and economic exploration, nature study, tribute to this question. The Home For All. During the strong and pervasive lovers of peaceful oases in forces that were transform- and deep conversation about scholastic distinction Gilded Age, when most as in the Hudson Valley. the city have become ing their lives.” man’s relationship with the between natura naturata and wealthy New York families Although Sanctified Land- increasingly interested in the Schuyler is selective in his natural world. During the natura naturans has been flocked to the North Shore of scape could have been many American rural cemetery choice of themes, and as a rigorous expedition, Emer- recently resurrected by a Long Island or to Newport, times longer and explored a movement. Its first exem- result some important son wrote his poem “The quantum physicist, Wolfgang many of those attracted to plethora of additional Hud- plar, Mount Auburn Ceme- strands of the then-emerg- Adirondacks” and Stillman Smith, who sees the collapse the Hudson – while perhaps son Valley characters and tery, was founded in 1831; ing Hudson River culture chronicled camp life in his of the wave function, not full-blown eccentrics – themes, the author’s selective two other important exam- receive less attention than painting The Adirondack whereby potential becomes approach is a successful one. ples were established before they might. One is the philo- Club. manifestation, as the action We get a rough sketch of the sophical foundation pro- of natura naturans creating 1 Wolfgang Smith, The Quantum topography of the Hudson’s vided by American natura naturata.1 Enigma, 3rd ed. (Angelico Press/Sophia Perennis, 2005), 105-110. 21 the decade ended – Laurel these engravings are solitary scape unity in the cemetery the burial grounds of ethnic old trees. He had studied A. England work, including Hill in Philadelphia (1836) and sunk in melancholy; by making the plan more and religious minorities. J. Downing’s writings as well four cemeteries, and also for and Green-Wood Cemetery others are accompanied by scientific, and he was Before this year, however, as G. M. Kern’s Practical implementing Olmsted and in Brooklyn (1838) – and children, subdued in manner appointed Spring Grove’s Chicago’s famous cemetery Landscape Gardening (1855), Vaux’s plans for Prospect Spring Grove in Cincinnati but attentive, whom the landscape gardener and then Graceland had never been which includes a section on Park in Brooklyn. He then was chartered in 1845. adults appear to be lecturing its superintendent. (He the subject of a book-length layouts for cemeteries. moved to Chicago from Chicago’s Graceland, founded on the virtues of the remained in Cincinnati for study. Robin Karson, execu- Most of these well-known Boston and did the same for in 1860, was one of the last. deceased. In 1852, Smith’s the rest of his life and tive director of the Library rural cemeteries were their designs of the south During the Civil War years, Illustrated Guide to and is buried on an island in the of American Landscape designed sequentially by one parks of Chicago and the the rural cemetery would be Through Laurel Hill Cemetery lake at Spring Grove.) History, and the trustees of person or at most two, as in nearby community of River- gradually supplanted by appeared, written by R. A. Strauch’s revisions of the the Graceland Cemetery the case of Daniels and side. When The American other types of burial Smith and illustrated with Spring Grove landscape Improvement Fund agreed Strauch at Spring Grove. By Builder and Journal of Art, grounds. wood engravings. (It is now were so successful that in that one was urgently need- contrast, Graceland was the which published articles on Although cities in New available online.) 1875 Frederick Law Olmsted ed. Karson invited Christo- subject of plans by at least landscape matters, was England and the Mid-Atlan- Another major rural described it as “the best pher Vernon, an American five landscape professionals, founded in Chicago in 1869, tic states were quick to cemetery was Spring Grove [cemetery in the United living in Australia, to write generally little known. The Cleveland became a contrib- follow Boston’s lead in estab- in Cincinnati, chartered in States] from a landscape gar- the book. Previously Vernon first was a Swedish landscape utor with “A Few Hints on lishing rural cemeteries, a 1845. Its trustees chose a site dening point of view.” had written an introduction gardener, Swain Nelson, who the Arrangement of Ceme- phenomenon that Arthur J. and then approached John These, then, are four of to a reprint of Wilhelm had settled in Chicago. Next teries.” A few years later, he Krim examined in his article Notman, a Scots-born archi- the most significant pre-1860 Miller’s Prairie Spirit in Land- on the scene was William wrote a booklet entitled The “Diffusion of Garden Ceme- tect who had designed Lau- rural cemeteries in the scape Gardening and had Saunders, a Scots landscape Public Grounds of Chicago: teries in New England” rel Hill Cemetery. Notman’s United States – Mount contributed to a 1992 report gardener with an established How to Give Them Character (1983), modern monographs plan for Spring Grove was Auburn, Laurel Hill, Green- on Graceland. He had also reputation in Philadelphia. and Expression. It was almost on these cemeteries have overly formal, however, and Wood, and Spring Grove – been a student of Walter L. Nelson and Saunders appear inevitable that Cleveland been slow to appear. Fortu- did not address the difficul- and some important publi- Creese, who included a chap- to have worked in tandem would be asked to do further nately, early guidebooks were ties of the land. Next, the cations about them, both ter on Graceland Cemetery for a time, with Saunders the work at Graceland. (Although published to most of the trustees approached a local early guide books and mod- in his book The Crowning of principal designer and the cemetery itself was first rural cemeteries – architect, Howard Daniels, ern monographs. Among the American Landscape: Nelson executing his plans. well outside the range of the Mount Auburn, Laurel Hill, asking him to design a pic- modern studies, an essential Eight Great Spaces and Their An undated lithograph Great Fire of 1871, Cleveland’s and Green-Wood – and they turesque scheme that better reference is The Last Great Buildings. Now an associate of Graceland attributes the 1870 plan was destroyed, but have become important dealt with the realities of the Necessity: Cemeteries in Ameri- professor in the School of design to both men. it was also described in an sources of information and terrain. Daniels’ plan was can History by David C. Architecture, Landscape, and Although water-stained and official pamphlet, which Ver- images. The two for Green- adopted, but the landscape Sloane (1991), which covers Visual Arts at the University marred by a large tear, it non has made use of here.) Wood and Mount Auburn, became cluttered when indi- the entire chronological of Western Australia, Vernon is a key document, showing a In 1877, Graceland’s published in 1847, are often vidual owners began to sweep of the American accepted the offer, even regular layout but with an founder left Chicago to take bound together, the text embellish and plant their cemetery in its every form though it required him to area reserved for parkland – a post in the Rutherford for the first written by lots. In 1854, Robert and stylistic manifestation. make frequent long flights to one feature of which was a Hayes administration. Before Nehemiah Cleaveland and Buchanan, a member of Also of value is Silent Cities his home hemisphere. grotto. leaving, however, Bryan for the second by Cornelia Spring Grove’s board, met by Kenneth T. Jackson, with Like nearly all rural ceme- Horace W. S. Cleveland hired William Le Baron Jen- W. Walter. Both are illus- Adolph Strauch, a young photographs by MacArthur teries, Graceland, founded would also provide an early ney to carry out the last trated with line engravings Prussian landscape gardener Fellow Camilo Jose Vergara just before the Civil War by design for the cemetery. major improvements at by James Smillie. Some of and adherent of the famous (1989), which is not limited Thomas Barbour Bryan, is a Cleveland had gained a repu- Graceland. Today best known the mourners portrayed in garden designer Prince to “elite” rural cemeteries but private entity. In 1856, Bryan, tation primarily for New as the architect of the struc- Pückler-Muskau. Strauch also discusses and illustrates a lawyer and land developer, turally innovative Home convinced Buchanan that he formed a committee and Insurance Building (1885) in could achieve greater land- purchased land to the north Chicago, Jenney had studied of Chicago, which had undu- engineering in Paris. How- lating terrain and a grove of

22 ever, his tenure was short. emphasized but did not use Daniel Chester French and Contributors Laurie Olin is a professor of Virginia School of Law, and By 1881, Thomas Bryan’s them exclusively to create architect Henry Bacon in a landscape architecture at the studied moral philosophy nephew Bryan Lathrop, Vice- what Wilhelm Miller called garden setting, and the University of Pennsylvania as a Keasby Fellow at King’s President of Graceland’s “long views” – a fine example mini-Parthenon designed by and founding partner of College, Cambridge. Board of Managers, had of which is the grass path McKim, Mead & White in Warren T. Byrd, Jr. is founding OLIN, a landscape architec- named Ossian Cole Simonds depicted in Vernon’s book. 1921 for Mr. and Mrs. Potter principal of Nelson Byrd ture firm in Philadelphia. He Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is the landscape gardener at Grace- Carefully graded and sensi- Palmer, which overlooks Woltz Landscape Architects, is the author of Across the president of the Foundation land, bestowing upon him tively planted, this path Lake Willowmere. Professor Emeritus of the Open Field: Essays Drawn for Landscape Studies, a life the titles of “Superintend- has an intriguing but almost Vernon’s research on this University of Virginia, and a from English Landscapes (1999) trustee of the Central Park ent, Landscape Gardener, certainly accidental resem- book was exemplary. Where Fellow of the American Soci- and coauthor of La Foce: A Conservancy, a fellow of the Engineer, and Surveyor.” blance to the walk past Ray documents were lacking, or ety of Landscape Architects. Garden and Landscape in Tus- American Academy of Arts Traditionally the design of Wood at Castle Howard lost in the 1871 fire, he dili- He has led the firm in a cany (2001) and Vizcaya: An and Sciences, and a member Graceland is attributed in North Yorkshire, England, gently sought sources else- broad range of award-win- American Villa and its Makers of the boards of The Battery to this last contributor to its which terminates first at where. He located the ning public park, campus, (2006). The designer for the Conservancy, the Library of planning. Vanbrugh’s Temple of the American Builder, in print for and town planning projects, transformation of Bryant American Landscape History, Simonds had just com- Four Winds and then in a a scant four years, which including Citygarden in St. Park and Columbus Circle in and the Regional Plan Asso- pleted his architectural stud- distant view of the Howard contains valuable informa- Louis (winner of the 2011 New York City, the grounds ciation. She is the author ies at the University of family mausoleum designed tion about Cleveland’s ULI Amanda Burden Urban of the Washington Monu- of several books on land- Michigan. Aside from a rural by Nicholas Hawksmoor Chicago years. He also Open Space Award), the ment in Washington, D.C., scape history and the nature upbringing, he had no spe- (1731). obtained a transcript of Flight 93 National Memorial and the new Getty Center in of place, including Landscape cial knowledge of plants Simonds resigned as Simonds’s account of Grace- (with Paul Murdoch Archi- Los Angeles, he received the Design: A Cultural and when he arrived at Grace- Graceland’s superintendent land’s plantings from the tects), and WaterColor in American Society of Land- Architectural History (2001), land, but during the course in 1898 but remained as University of Michigan. His Florida. A monograph of the scape Architects Medal for Romantic Gardens: Nature, of his tenure there he landscape gardener for a few bibliography is exhaustive. firm’s work, Garden Park Lifetime Achievement in Art, and Landscape Design became an expert plantsman. more years, a total of two- The book is illustrated with Community Farm: The Land- 2011. (2010), and Writing the Gar- He and Lathrop immediately and-a-half decades of intense fine black and white historic scape Architecture of Nelson den: A Literary Conversation began planting the site, then involvement at the site. Ver- photographs chiefly from Byrd Woltz (Princeton Archi- Frederic C. Rich is a partner Across Two Centuries (2011). barren and practically tree- non gently suggests that pos- two sources: eloquent turn- tectural Press, 2013), will be of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP Her most recent book, Learn- less. While few planting terity has been perhaps too of-the-century views by released in May. in New York, where he was ing Las Vegas: Portrait of plans for Graceland have kind to Simonds, giving him Arthur G. Eldredge, some co-head of the firm’s corpo- a Northern New Mexican Place survived, Simonds left an credit for concepts devel- from the collection of the Katherine Harmon is an rate practice and is currently will be published in Spring account of his first planting oped by his predecessors, Chicago History Museum award-winning writer living head of its Global Project 2013. activities there, writing that who had done considerable and others from a 1904 book in Colorado, recently trans- Finance Group. He is an he went out into the country groundwork before his on Graceland published planted from Brooklyn, New active member of the boards Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Ph.D., his- to select “native growth” arrival. Nevertheless, when by the Photographic Print York. She is a contributing of several environmental torian of architecture and from farms, including elms Simonds retired, Graceland’s Company. It also contains editor for Scientific American, organizations, including landscape architecture, is a and other trees “fourteen, evolution as a landscape was contemporary photographs and her work has also Scenic Hudson and the Land former professor in the Rad- sixteen and eighteen inches essentially complete, and two in both color and black- appeared in newspapers, Trust Alliance. Mr. Rich cliffe Seminars Landscape in diameter.” He also pur- of its most famous monu- and-white by Carol Betsch. magazines, and literary jour- serves as chairman of the Design Program (now part of chased wagonloads of ments were in place: the Both trained landscape nals. Her first book is about Foundation for Landscape the Boston Architectural shrubs. Like Olmsted in his Martin Ryerson tomb (1889) historians and other readers octopuses and will be pub- Studies and as vice-chairman College). Her books include design of the Boston parks, and the Carrie Eliza Getty of Site/Lines will be happy lished this fall by Current, a of The Battery Conservancy. The Architecture of William under way at the same time, mausoleum (1890), both by to have this book in their division of Penguin. She A gardener, musician, and Ralph Emerson, 1833-1917 Simonds was not a purist Louis H. Sullivan. Later libraries. studied English at Vassar author, his first novel, Christ- (1969), Frederick Law Olmsted about native plants. He memorials in Graceland – Cynthia Zaitzevsky College and holds a masters ian Nation, will be published and the Boston Park System include the Marshall Field degree from the Missouri by W. W. Norton in Spring (1982), and Long Island Land- monument (1906), a collabo- School of Journalism. 2013. He received an A.B. scapes and the Women ration between sculptor from Princeton University Who Designed Them (2009). and a J.D. from University of 23 Volume viii, Number ii Spring 2013

Publisher: Foundation for Landscape Studies Board of Directors: Vincent Buonanno Kenneth I. Helphand Robin Karson Nancy Newcomb Therese O’Malley Laurie D. Olin John A. Pinto Reuben M. Rainey Frederic Rich, Chairman Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Margaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Associate Editor: Alice Truax Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan Copy Editor: Margaret Oppenheimer Designer: Skeggs Design Contributors: Warren T. Byrd, Jr. Katherine Harmon Laurie Olin Frederic Rich Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Cynthia Zaitzevsky

For more information about the Foundation for Landscape Landscape Studies Landscape Studies, visit www.foundationfor landscapestudies.org., or contact for [email protected] 7 Street 81st West New York, NY 10024 Foundation Foundation