Spring 2016: Landscapes of Ruin

A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

A Journal of Place Volume xı | Number ıı | Spring 2016

Essays: Evoking the Past: The Landscapes of Ruins 3 John A. Pinto: Speaking Ruins: Travelers’ Perceptions of Ancient Rome Frederic C. Rich: The Neander Valley: The Place Where We Learned We Were Not Alone Laurie Olin: Algerian Journal: Among the Ruins of Provincial Rome Baker H. Morrow: Quarai: Notes on the Landscape of an Ancient Native American Pueblo Erin Addison: The Nature of Culture: In Search of the “Real” Landscape of Petra Kathryn Gleason: The Landscape as Ruin: The Resiliency of Design

Place Maker 19 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: John Fairey of Peckerwood Garden

Book Review 20 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society Ed. Charles E. Beveridge

Awards 23

Contributors 23 Letter from the Editor

escribing antique and mud from the base cal architects, and a source the stalls and counters of to persistent drought. The a path, hedgerow, road, and landscapes is akin of the small Feldhof Cave of pleasurable melancholy merchants, the drains and landscape remained too dry bikeway. More recently, she to reading books at a limestone mining for travelers contemplating seats of the public toilets. and inhospitable for subse- has made several trips to backwards. We site in the Neander Valley the poetics of mortality and In “The Nature of Cul- quent development, which Caesarea Maritima on the start with their unearthed a cache of the beauty-laden ravages of ture,” Erin Addison takes us accounts for the fact that eastern coast of the Mediter- Dcurrent appearance and then unusual bones that were not, time. But it wasn’t only the to Jordan, another Mediter- Quarai’s agrarian past can ranean, the most important move in reverse chrono- as they originally thought, architectural remains of clas- ranean outpost of imperial still be discerned in a series city of Roman Judea and logical order, searching for those of a bear. As it turned sical Rome that stirred the Rome. Thousands of tour- of shrub-hollow gardens. Palestine. Here she found legibility in a palimpsest out, they had inadvertently imagination of the painters, ists are familiar with Petra, Their exploration is an that the neat grid plan laid bearing the marks and era- brought to light evidence of writers, and Grand Tourists the famous Nabataean- unusual and fascinating out by Herod the Great in 30 sures of time. Their stories humanity’s nearest evolu- who flocked to the city from Roman metropolis that endeavor for archaeologists, BCE remained visible in the are historical narratives of tionary relative. Unfortu- the seventeenth century became a UNESCO World going beyond their primary city’s streets and blocks, in natural and human inter- nately, this important event onward. The pastoral land- Heritage Site in 1985, but interest in a community’s spite of the later Byzantine, vention: of transformation did not encourage a search scape of the Roman Cam- it is not the temple-tombs structural footprint as Muslim, Crusader, Bos- by geologic, botanic, and for other cave-dwelling pagna was equally a locus with their stunning Helle- found in the remains of nian, and Israeli layers that climatic forces on one hand representatives of Homo of aesthetic inspiration and nistic architectural facades ancient Puebloan plazas. covered it. and by population growth, neanderthalensis in the spiritual sensibility. carved into cistern-pocked Kathryn Gleason, a In these times in which war, technology, and icono- vicinity, although the valley, In his essay “Algerian cliffs of red sandstone that landscape architect and both the planet and the clasm on the other. In this which had long attracted Journal,” Laurie Olin docu- she discusses. Rather, she landscape historian, also traces of previous civili- issue of Site/Lines, our focus tourists in search of the ments through recent travel wishes the reader to con- has a background in archae- zations are in jeopardy, is rediscovered historic Romantic Sublime, contin- notes and sketches one sider the surrounding des- ology. In “The Landscape I would like to stress the landscapes and the knowl- ued to lure visitors. By con- ancient city after another ert landscape occupied by as Ruin: The Resiliency of importance of the mission edge and emotion they elicit trast, the chief draw today in that southern Mediter- bedouins that is now under Design,” she poses a ques- statement of the Foundation with regard to past lives and can be found in the on-site ranean country – Timgad, unrelenting pressure from tion: “Might we expand for Landscape Studies: “To civilizations. museum’s focus on the Djemila, Tiddis, Tipasa, unplanned development and the scope of archaeological promote an active under- Often serendipity plays fact that the first evidence Madauros – and places in the combined processes of investigations to include standing of the meaning of a role in the resurrection of for human evolution was between. In the process, he overgrazing, vegetation and not only architectural ruins place in human life.” Such is an important piece of the found here. is able to reanimate ancient topsoil loss, and diminish- in a landscape but also the the hope our authors project past. In his essay “The Place In “Speaking Ruins,” streets, curbs, drains, foun- ing water resources. landscape itself as a ruin?” in this issue of Site/Lines. We Learned We Were Not John Pinto elucidates how tains, basins, gates, stairs, Another ancient civiliza- She then goes on to recount Alone,” Frederic Rich tells “ruins are what make Rome and plazas, along with the tion in a desert landscape, some of her experiences in With gratitude and good how in early August 1856, Rome; their ubiquity, scale, remains of civic buildings this one in the American the field, beginning with green wishes, three years before Darwin’s and resonance combine to such as libraries, theaters, Southwest, is the subject of her discovery at the site of a publication of On the give the city its identity.” and markets. With him, we “Quarai: Notes on the Land- Roman villa in Britain that a Origin of Species, two Italian Moldering over the centu- can make out not only the scape of an Ancient Native boundary line could become workmen shoveling loam ries into Romantic pictur- sites of vanished monu- American Pueblo,” by Baker esqueness, they have been ments and statuary but also Morrow. This settlement of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers the subject of countless five or six hundred people, President paintings, a treasure trove which was formed sometime of inspiration for neoclassi- in the eleventh century, was deserted around 1674 due On the Cover: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of the Roman Forum, etching, 1772.

2 Evoking the Past: The Landscapes of Ruins

Speaking Ruins: Travelers’ Perceptions of Ancient Rome illustrates his sensitivity to ruins in stimulating his he Italophile writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, ruins. Mistakenly believed own imagination and, 1856–1935) declared, “Poets really make places.” The in Piranesi’s day to have been by extension, those of oth- opposite is also true, however: places make poets dedicated to Jupiter Tonans, or ers. In the course of his and artists. For many visitors – and this was cer- Thundering Jove, this temple career, through his virtuoso tainly the case for artists and writers in the period is situated on the slope of the use of the etching needle, Tof Romanticism – ruins are what make Rome Rome; their Capitoline Hill, overlooking Piranesi would translate the ubiquity, scale, and resonance combine to give the city its the remains of the ancient famous vistas of the Eternal identity. Majestic, they also give rise to melancholy. They are Roman forum. Edward Gib- City into well over a thou- both evidence of astonishing human achievement and bon, standing near this site sand plates. The cumulative a reminder of the impermanence of our accomplishments.1 in 1764, found himself moved result constituted nothing For centuries, Rome had served as the preeminent cul- to begin writing The Decline less than a virtual Rome tural reservoir of classicism, the font of order and reason. and Fall of the Roman Empire. on paper – one that was From Petrarch on, the fact that the artistic and architectural Piranesi, however, was inter- diffused throughout Europe heritage of classical antiquity survived only in bits and pieces ested in the manner in which and abroad, prompting prompted repeated laments over what had been lost. Many the past was enfolded in the a new wave of artistic Renaissance artists, Raphael among them, considered the present and what could be pilgrimages. remains of ancient architecture to embody perfection and set created from that tension. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of Much as the direct experience of the ruins spoke to Pira- about measuring and documenting them with a view towards Over the course of cen- the Temple of the Divine Vespasian, nesi in ways that their abstraction, in the form of measured extracting lost secrets – the keys to ideal harmony and beauty. turies, the temple’s three etching, 1753–54. drawings, did not, so visitors found that the academic study When, for example, late in the seventeenth century, the remaining standing col- of the past paled before the impressions produced by frag- French Academy sought to clarify and codify the rules gov- umns had been buried in accumulated debris. In Piranesi’s ments of antiquity. Madame de Staël, who first visited Italy in erning classical architecture, they sent Antoine Desgodetz to print they seem to thrust up through the earth, the richly 1804, set her 1807 romance Corinne there. As her male pro- Rome to measure – yet again, and with greater precision – its carved foliage of their Corinthian capitals juxtaposed with tagonist, a Scottish aristocrat, looks out over the forum in the ruined monuments and buildings. But in the eighteenth cen- the boughs of living trees. The ruins are both sunken in company of his Italian guide, a beautiful poet, the narrator tury, certain artists and writers began to approach the past in time and enveloped in nature, which is depicted in the act muses: “The eyes are all powerful over the soul; after seeing more emotional terms. Indeed, in the work of artists such as of reclaiming them. Picturesque goatherds gesture at their the Roman ruins, we believe in the ancient Romans as if we Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), we see a highly personal grazing flocks to the right of the temple, and an ox reclines in had lived in their day. Intellectual memories are acquired response to the past, especially in its fragmented state. the foreground. The presence of livestock reminds us that in by study. Memories of the imagination stem from a more In 1743, fresh from the experience of seeing Rome for the the eighteenth century this slope was commonly referred to immediate, more profound impression, which gives life to first time, this prolific graphic artist remarked, “Speaking as the Monte Caprino, and the Campo Vaccino (cattle market) our thoughts and makes us, as it were, witnesses of what we ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate draw- flourished below, on the site the Roman forum once occupied have learned.” Like Piranesi, de Staël is fascinated by the ings could never have succeeded in conveying.” Piranesi’s (front cover). These bucolic references underscore the trans- ruins’ generative powers for the creative spirit: “But suddenly emphasis on the expressive nature of ruins is telling. So, too, formation of what had once been the functional and symbolic a broken column, a half-destroyed bas-relief . . . remind you is the distinction he makes between experiencing ancient center of the Roman Empire into a pastoral landscape. that there is in man an eternal power, a divine spark, and that architecture directly, through on-site examination, Paradoxically, by capturing the passage of time in his etch- you must never weary of kindling it in yourself and of reviv- and studying it at several removes by means of measured ings, Piranesi manages not only to portray present-day Rome ing it in others.” drawings. but also to more vividly evoke its past. Robert Adam wrote Romanticism found fertile ground in the Eternal City. One of Piranesi’s prints from the Vedute di Roma series, that Piranesi seemed “to breathe the Antient air,” and Pira- The defining features of the Romantic movement – passion, depicting the remains of the Temple of Divine Vespasian, nesi’s contemporary Giovanni Ludovico Bianconi referred imagination, individuality, transcendence, nonconformity – to him as “the Rembrandt of the ancient ruins.” Even as he thrived in the city’s artistic enclaves in the late-eighteenth 1 Portions of this essay are drawn from the author’s 2012 book, Speak- portrays the disintegration of these classical sites, he brings ing Ruins: Piranesi, Architects and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome them more intensely to life. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press) and the catalogue Piranesi’s emphasis on the importance of on-site encoun- of the exhibition catalogue City of the Soul: Rome and the Romantics, ters stressed the fundamentally creative role played by the forthcoming in June 2016 from University Press of New England. 3 through mid-nineteenth centuries. Visiting writers and art- ing reflection on mortality and the transience of human the grotto. Andersen’s youthful narrator stops here on his ists in this period found themselves liberated from one set of accomplishments. At the same time, the allied arts of poetry, way to visit one of the numerous catacombs that occupy the expectations (restraint, adherence to prescribed norms, strict landscape painting, and garden design were all invigorated surrounding subsoil. While enjoying a rustic breakfast, he logic), and thrown into another (emotionalism, revolution, by a transcendental vision of nature that asserted the pri- observes that “the walls and vault of the whole grotto were flights of fancy). The city readily lent itself to fervid imagin- macy of the spiritual over the empirical. Landscapes, whether inside covered over with the finest green, as of tapestry, woven ings and visionary renderings of itself and its past. artificial or natural, were viewed by the Romantics as sanc- of silks and velvet, and round about the great entrance hung Certainly for Lord Byron and his contemporaries, the tuaries offering the individual sensibility opportunities for the thickest ivy, fresh and luxuriant as the vine foliage in the ruins of the Colosseum were a “still exhaustless mine / of inspiration, renewal, and self-discovery. valleys of Calabria.” Contemplation.” In the famous “moonlight stanza” of Childe In Childe Harold, Byron captured the fusion of art and Percy Bysshe Shelley was not merely inspired by the mar- Harold, Byron invests the structure with magic powers: nature nowhere more perfectly than in his evocation of an riage of ruins and nature in Rome but, like Piranesi, created ancient fountain grotto popularly associated with the nymph from within it, writing parts of Prometheus Unbound while But when the rising moon begins to climb Egeria. In a passage known to Byron, the ancient poet Juvenal perched atop one of the piers of the Baths of Caracalla. One of Its topmost arch, and gently pauses there; had criticized the way this grotto, sacred to the nymph, had his letters provides a richly detailed description of his bower When the stars twinkle through the loops of time, been desecrated by the hand of man: “We go down to the amid the ruins: And the low night-breeze waves along the air, Valley of Egeria, and into the caves so unlike to nature: how The garland forest, which the gray walls wear, In one place you wind along a narrow strip of weed-grown much more near to us would be the spirit of the fountain if its Like laurels on the bald first Caesar’s head; ruin; on one side is the immensity of earth & sky, on the waters were fringed by a green border of grass, and there were When the light shines serene but doth not glare, other, a narrow chasm, which is bounded by an arch of no marble to outrage the native tufa!” Then in this magic circle raise the dead: enormous size, fringed by the many coloured foliage & In his own verses in Childe Harold describing the grotto, Heroes have trod this spot – ‘tis on their dust ye tread. blossoms, & supporting a lofty & irregular pyramid, over- Byron responds to Juvenal’s complaint, pointing out that, grown like itself by the all-prevailing vegetation. Around Through the medium of Byron’s verse and the agency of with the passage of time, shrines originally fashioned from rise other crags & other peaks all arrayed & the deformity moonlight, the Colosseum is transformed from a ruined nature but subsequently profaned by the artifice of man even- of their vast desolation softened down by the undecaying edifice into a “magic circle” capable of raising the dead. tually become ruins and revert to a state of nature: investiture of nature. Come to Rome. It is a scene by which Of course, the dead abide everywhere in Rome; their The mosses of thy fountain still are sprinkled expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey. animating presence affects everyone who walks its streets. With thine Elysian water-drops; the face Ancient heroes live on, as do the writers and artists who have Writing in this setting was a total sensory experience for Of thy cave-guarded spring with years unwrinkled, flourished in Rome over the centuries. These ghosts all con- Shelley, who observed that the wildflowers “scatter through Reflects the meek-eyed genius of the place, tribute to the soul of the city, making it a constantly renewed the air the divinest odour, which, as you recline under the Whose green, wild margin now no more erase source of artistic inspiration. shade of the ruin, produces sensations of voluptuous faint- Art’s works; nor must the delicate waters sleep, ness, like the combinations of sweet music.” Prisoned in marble, bubbling from the base If historical cycles of decline and fall, for which ruins pro- In 1845 Shelley’s retreat was immortalized by the painter Of the cleft statue, with a gentle leap vided tangible and eloquent testimony, were central to the Joseph Severn, who painted a posthumous portrait of his dead The rill runs o’er, and round, fern, flowers, and ivy creep, Romantic experience, so, too, was the natural world. Prior to friend in this very setting, codifying some of the principles Fantastically tangled . . . 1870, much of Rome within the circuit of the Aurelian Walls of the Romantic sensibility in his picture. It is instructive was given over to nature as formal gardens and vineyards, and The mythic associations of the Grotto of Egeria, together to compare it to Tishbein’s portrait of Goethe, created more many of its ancient monuments like the Colosseum – where, with its isolated and picturesque setting, appealed to the than half a century earlier. In the earlier painting, the in Byron’s words, “dead walls rear / their ivy mantles” – Romantic sensibility. Charlotte Anne Eaton’s 1818 descrip- subject – who is considered by many a precursor to the were overgrown with brambles and wildflowers. The painter tion is typical: “The sides of the grotto are overhung with the Romantics – is set against the expansive backdrop of the François-Marius Granet commented on the picturesque beautiful Capillaire plant, that loves to grow on rocks that Roman campagna, with the ruins of the tomb of Cecilia vegetation enveloping the ruins of the Colosseum: “You find drink the water drop. This spot . . . is now abandoned to a Metella and the Claudian aqueduct in the distance. Goethe growing on it yellow wallflowers, acanthus with its hand- solitude as profound as when Numa first sought its enchanted reclines on what appears to be the broken shaft of an Egyp- some stems and its leaves so beautifully edged, honeysuckle, glade.” tian obelisk, while other fragments, including a capital and violets – in short, such a quantity of flowers you could put The abundance of flora hanging from the damp, moss- a bas-relief, occupy the right foreground of the composition. together a guide to the plants from them.” In fact, botanists covered walls and vault so impressed Hans Christian Ander- The figures composing the classical frieze may allude to compiled catalogues of the flora growing on the Colosseum, sen that he set a scene of his novel The Improvisatore (1835) in Goethe’s play Iphigenia in Tauris, which he was writing while one listing over four hundred different species. in Rome. Nature is present, but relatively subdued; ivy ten- The organic cycle of growth and decay intensified the drils curl over the bas-relief, and a tree is visible in the far-off elegiac message encoded in the ancient architecture, prompt- distance. The unmistakable profile of Monte Cavo and the

4 Alban Hills close the horizon. yielded fresh interpretations of familiar subjects. Early pho- The Neander Valley: The Place We Learned We Were Not Alone While Goethe’s literary genius is clearly meant to be tographers creatively employed technology to represent the rchaeological and anthropological landscapes are aggrandized by his classical setting, Severn’s portrait takes invisible passage of time, producing what John Stiligoe much those largely defined by traces of the human past. such inspiration one step further and depicts Shelley in later called “permanent evanescence.” Sometimes those traces are visually prominent, as the very act of writing, pen in hand and notebook open on The Romantics would have loved that characterization. in places dominated by architectural ruins, and his thigh. The earlier writer dominates his surroundings, Mutability, with a hint of melancholy, was at the heart of sometimes they are subtle, but in all cases, it is whereas Shelley’s figure takes up less of the canvas; he is, many Romantic works of imagination. Rome and her ruins Asome element of the human story that, by association, creates instead, within the landscape. Nature, too, is more prominent answered the Romantic longing for the ambiguous, the mys- a distinctive sense of place. There is a small valley just outside in the later painting; flowers bloom at the base of the wall tical, the ineffable, the transcendent. It provided the mise-en- of Düsseldorf where the physical traces are mere shadows, on which Shelley casually sits, while other blossoms appear scene for personal interpretation of what was simultaneously but the story told is monumental. The valley is called Nean- behind him. A gnarled tree trunk rooted in the ancient unceasing and fleeting. Rome, eternal and metamorphic, derthal (Neander Valley, thal meaning valley in German), and masonry divides the composition in half, further enveloping charged the imaginations of artists and writers exactly that story is about the origins of mankind. It begins with a the poet in a regenerative landscape. Shelley may be dead, but because it was both eternal and ephemeral. distinguished theologian named Joachim Neander, who lived his genius, Severn suggests, will always be with us, inscribed for only thirty years in the second half of the seventeenth in not only the classical arches behind him but also the page The decision to lay bare the masonry of the Colosseum in century. on his knee and the grass under his foot. 1870 marked the passage from a Romantic view of ruins to Neander’s family name in the German vernacular was Rome had a long tradition of landscape painting – extend- one driven by the stern imperatives of scientific archaeol- Neumann, meaning “new man.” As a scholar and a bit of ing back to the seventeenth century and the works of Anni- ogy; today this ancient monument presents a starker spec- a pedant, the borrowed dignity of classical association led bale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain – but in tacle, shorn of its ivy mantle. Happily, Egeria’s grotto has not him, like his grandfather, to refer to himself by the Greek the nineteenth century artists brought new sensibilities and suffered the same fate: still it appears to revert to a state of equivalent of his surname, Neander. His reputation now rests approaches to the depiction nature, with pendant vines suspended from the vault and a exclusively on his work as a hymnist, particularly his author- Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of nature. The plein-air oil leafy crown of verdure silhouetted against the sky. ship of the lyrics to the popular hymn “Praise to the Lord, the of the Arch of Constantine and the sketch, the watercolor, and the Nevertheless, concerns of preservation condition the way Almighty, the King of Creation.” Colosseum, etching, 1746–48. novel medium of photography we interact with this and other ruins. Visitors are no lon- Although the story may be apocryphal, Düsseldorfers ger permitted to enter the relate that shortly after Neander’s arrival in their city in 1674, Grotto of Egeria and experi- work began on a new church (now called the Neanderkirche) ence its embrace as Piranesi adjacent to his residence. This proved to be a mixed blessing. and Byron once did, but are Construction, then as now, dragged on, and the cleric found instead kept at a distance the noise and commotion of a building site inconducive to by barriers and restricted his scholarly and spiritual pursuits. In search of peace and to a viewing platform. This quiet, he adopted as his retreat a quiet valley outside of town, has the unavoidable effect then known as the Gesteins. The frequent visitor became a of muting the ruins’ voice. familiar presence to the residents of two nearby villages, who Fortunately, that voice will began referring to the cave and river landscape as Neander’s always be audible in the thal. The name stuck, leading to the incredible coincidence works of those artists who that the place where, two centuries later, we discovered for the came before us. As Nathan- first time another species of human was already referred to as iel Hawthorne observed in “new man’s valley.” his introduction to The Mar- During the two centuries following his death, Neander’s ble Faun (1860), “Romance valley became a major attraction for tourists and travellers and poetry, ivy, lichens, and due to its unique landscape: a dramatic gorge of cave-studded wallflowers, need ruin to limestone walls rising vertically from the base of the Düssel make them grow.” River, all draped in extravagantly lush vegetation. Joachim – John A. Pinto Neander had regarded it as a quiet spot to contemplate the glories of God, but by the end of the eighteenth century the valley was imbued with a Romantic sensibility. Count Leo- pold of Stolberg’s 1791 report of his visit to the valley reveals

5 clearly the Romantic infatuation with the sublime: the Neander Valley discoveries and others helped scientists stein rock, there remain no signs of the celebrated gorge, prove that Darwin was right: modern man evolved in the vertiginous views, lush vegetation, or damp cliffs. It is as if Crossing cornfields that had been harvested, we entered a same way as other animals and was not created in his con- the entire ravine has been lifted out – plucked from the face beechwood and suddenly found ourselves facing a jagged, temporary form. The box of sixteen bones from a cave outside of the planet. massive wall of rock. Through a broad opening, we then Düsseldorf sparked a clash between science and religion In 1918 the damaged valley faced an additional threat: the entered a winding corridor . . . Suddenly, a deep ravine that continues to this day, but science has never looked back: commencement of large-scale forestry operations, which yawned at our feet; opposite us, majestic rocks – like those in 2012 we finally sequenced the complete genome of Homo included a plan to clear-cut the surviving forests to the north in whose caves we were standing – were crowned with neanderthalensis. Thanks to a combination of archaeological and south of the original gorge. This would have had dev- woods and covered with brushes and ivy on one side. Below and genetic evidence, we now have a clearer picture of the astating consequences, both ecological and scenic. Happily, us the Düssel rushed past. numerous human species and subspecies that preceded Homo this new threat coincided with the early stirrings of ecologi- Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, artists sapiens – some our direct ancestors, and some, like the Nean- cal concern in Germany and a growing nature-preservation and printmakers celebrated this unusual landscape, exagger- derthals, kissing cousins who eventually suffered extinction. movement in this part of North Rhine-Westphalia. A local ating its Romantic qualities and advertising it as a destina- Once Johann Fuhlrott understood what he was seeing, group, the Nature Protection Association Neander Valley, was tion. The Neanderthal Museum has identified over 150 such one might assume that the quarrying would have been organized to oppose the deforestation and succeeded shortly images, including the 1803 engraving by Johannes Vergurgh stopped and the site properly investigated. This did not thereafter in having most of the area declared a nature reproduced here, Three Hikers Overlook the Neander Cave. happen. Archaeologists now believe that at least eight other reserve. Although the original Gesteins caves and gorge were These images succeeded in attracting visitors hungry for the caves on the site contained Paleolithic remains, all of which lost forever, the twentieth-century story became one of a thrill of the sublime. By 1843, a visitor writing in her diary were destroyed by continued mining. (Remarkably, no other deeply valued pocket of nature in a fast-growing region saved noted that the rocks, “one the most fascinating places in our archaeological work was carried out in the Neander Valley and stewarded by concerned local citizens. Today approxi- country,” were “swarming with people.” until the late twentieth century.) The eventual effect of the mately ten million Germans live within thirty kilometers of Fame and tourism proved no defense against the impera- quarry operations was that Neander’s Valley was not simply the park. The riverine landscape and limestone outcroppings tives of the industrial age, however, and the railway’s 1841 defaced but utterly obliterated. Mountain, cliff, and cave alike host an impressive diversity of plant and animal life, includ- penetration of the German countryside foreshadowed a were cleanly excised with a cut just above water level, only the ing two endangered species of ferns, a rare dormouse, and a dramatic change in the landscape. Just over a decade later, Düssel River itself stopping the miners from cutting deeper. couple of woodpecker species in danger of extinction. German industry’s demand for limestone – as both a build- With the exception of the last quarry cuts in the hill to the The concept of the nature reserve was gradually expanded ing material and a vital ingredient in iron smelting – led to north and a single, stumpy fragment of the famous Raben- to embrace its Paleolithic associations, beginning in 1935, the commencement of mining in Joachim when a large part of the site was dedicated to breeding and Neander’s valley. providing habitat for animals associated with Ice Age Europe, In early August 1856 two Italian work- including bison, aurochs, reindeer, elks, and wild horses. The men were shoveling loam and mud from the size of the reserve also has been expanded repeatedly and now base of the small Feldhof Cave; the laborious, includes 257 hectares along the Düssel River between Erkrath manual process was necessary so that these and Mettmann. Today, in addition to the Ice Age animals, impurities would not contaminate the lime- a sculpture path through the reserve called MenschenSpuren stone rock following blasting. The diggers (human traces) uses contemporary art to engage the viewer were startled to unearth a cache of unusual aesthetically and emotionally with the landscape and its bones and had the good sense to alert their meaning. foreman. The bones they found, initially In 1996, an ambitious museum designed to interpret the thought to be those of a bear, were sent by the discovery of Homo neanderthalensis and tell the story of human mine’s owners to a teacher and fossil enthu- evolution opened adjacent to the site of the original find. The siast in the nearby town of Elberfeld, Johann building’s distinctive shape, echoing the spiral of DNA, and Carl Fuhlrott. It was Fuhlrott who eventually its surface of bluish-green Japanese glass are the creation of advanced the theory that the bones were evi- German architect Günter Zamp Kelp and his team. Between dence of an earlier species of human. 1997 and 2000 excavations along the southern bank of the The timing of the discovery could not have Düssel River resulted in the discovery of the original loca- been more fortuitous. Only three years later tion of the Feldhof Cave (its floor was approximately twenty Darwin would publish On the Origin of Species meters above the present grade). They also yielded additional by Means of Natural Selection. In short order Engraving by Johannes Vergurgh, Three Hikers Overlook the 6 Neander Cave, 1803. Neanderthal bone and tooth fragments and cultural artifacts that although symbols and allusions can give a landscape Algerian Journal: Among the Ruins of Provincial Rome contained in newly excavated debris from the mining works. depth, they ultimately will frustrate those they are designed rying to ignore my Kalashnikov-bearing escort, These findings, together with the then-approaching 150th to inform if they are not intelligible to the average visitor. who is peering over my shoulder to see the sketch anniversary of the original discovery, led the foundation that The foundation plans to try again. In 2014 it launched a I’m making, I focus upon a clump of flowers grow- operates the Neanderthal Museum to sponsor an interna- second competition and workshop that resulted in a new plan ing from a ledge in front of me. They are aspho- tional landscape-architecture competition for the design of a to modify the original design. This includes a tower at the dels. The location is Tiddis in Algeria, the site of a site plan that would integrate the museum building with the height of the former Feldhof cave, where visitors can climb a Tonce-thriving Roman city that now consists of a constellation newly discovered location of the lost caves and interpret their four-hundred-meter ramp to experience the view of its origi- of red blocks and stumps of stone scattered down a moun- significance for visitors. The competition was won by Corne- nal Neanderthal inhabitants. Three-dimensional anima- tainside; far below I can see the pale glint of a river winding lia Müller and Jan Wehburg from the Berlin-based landscape tions are planned to illustrate different moments in the long its long way north to the Mediterranean. The sun, refracted firm Lützow 7. history of the valley. As of this writing, the two million euro through the clouds that have settled over the valley, picks out These designers were presented with the ambitious task project has not been funded, and execution of the new plan is countless flowers on the hillside – a profusion of red, yel- of creating what the museum calls “a museographic-artistic stalled. The Neanderthal Museum does a highly effective job low, and white – but at present it is the spectral green of the landscape of remembrance,” linking the museum building presenting the story of the Neander Valley, the 1856 discovery, asphodels that preoccupies me. For the ancients, asphodels to the greater valley, interpreting the location of the 1856 and the discovery’s implications. It deserves an interpretative were the flowers of Pluto, representing the souls of the dead. find, putting Homo neanderthalensis and the history of the landscape plan of similar quality, worthy of the importance of The group I have come with has disappeared over a hill, and valley in perspective, and challenging the visitor to deep self- the place. the ruins about me are quiet. I concentrate on my sketch, reflection. For the project they developed a symbolic language The word “iconic” is overused, especially in the world of although it will fail to contain the cool breeze that is moving dealing with orientation in space and time. Stone crosses, landscape history and design. Not everything symbolic is the stalks of the wild grasses, or the swallows that are wheel- set horizontally on the ground like remnants of a grid, iconic. The things, events, and ideas represented by an icon ing above the ruins. signal north and south axes. Most contain images not easy must be truly important to be iconic in the more robust sense This was the Roman city of Castellum Tidditanorum, one to decipher, such as a concrete slab featuring naked human of the word. The Neander Valley meets that standard. The of many in the region that existed as a military outpost to footprints contrasted with an unfamiliar pattern that I had to discovery of our nearest evolutionary relative and the result- defend villagers and their plentiful harvests of grain, which be told represented the impression made by Neil Armstrong’s ing confirmation of the fact of human evolution was funda- were destined for the hungry city of Rome. A handsome boots on the moon. The walkway through the site forms a mentally disruptive to humanity’s worldview. The Neander Trajanic arch still stands over the main street, which leads time line illustrating the occurrence of events along a tempo- Valley is now inextricably associated with this cognitive from the valley below into what remains of the town. Like ral axis. revolution: it was there that modern humans first gazed down many former Roman cities in what we today call Algeria, this In the large fields that occupy the location of the 1856 dis- at the bones of another type of human, figured out what they particular set of ruins doesn’t resemble those one encoun- covery, the visitor is soon distracted from the seemingly ran- were seeing, and gave the name of the place to our new-found ters in Italy or Spain, or found in treatises on Roman town dom scattering of stone crosses by a cluster of curvaceous but relative. planning. The rational grid planning derived from the Greek clunky concrete daybeds, meant to induce visitors to recline, In addition, the story of the valley illuminates man’s evolv- mathematician and planner Hippodamus, which was codified look up, and contemplate the location of the original base of ing relationship with the natural world. The landscape in in the typology of Roman military camps, is hard to detect the Feldhof Cave twenty meters above them. Two patches of which our anonymous Neanderthal cousins were laid to rest here. Instead, as at a number of evocative Greek sites, the plantings evoke Stone Age plant life. An assemblage of red- survived for thirty thousand years. In the nineteenth century layout is adapted to the uneven topography. Streets wander and-white-striped metal poles, no longer quite plumb, marks it became a vessel for modern man’s notions of transcendence off at angles along slopes; fora and piazze are truncated and the location of the excavation area. One of the few literal through nature – perhaps not so different from the sensibili- wedged into hillsides. What should be the cardo – normally an visual cues is a void cut in a large steel plate in the shape of ties of the Neanderthals who chose the gorge as their burial all-defining north-south axis of the urbs – enters somewhat a full-size, standing Neanderthal figure. The negative space place. But then, in an evolutionary instant, that landscape cockeyed and then dribbles away down a steep slope. A tiered conveys the figure’s profile and scale. Despite the obvious vanished. The industrial activity that destroyed it has proved set of still-crisp stone arcs form an intimate hillside theater, implications of a void, this object, confusingly, is placed along equally ephemeral. And now the ecological sensibility that tucked into a hill with its back to the city. the path-cum-time line at the point when the Homo neander- saved the place from further destruction is being displaced by After wresting the region from the Carthaginians, the thalensis appeared, not when they disappeared. a conviction that the place’s highest value lies in its associa- Romans managed to build more than five hundred towns The 2002 design was a thoughtful and clever approach to tions with our discovery that we once were not the only type and cities in what is now Algeria. For several centuries the interpreting a site with no physical remains, but in time it of humans on the earth. In turn retreat, romantic idyll, combined territory comprising modern Algeria, Tunisia, proved too clever. Few visitors understood what they were see- quarry, and nature reserve, the Neander Valley now has found Morocco, and Libya supplied 60 percent of Rome’s grain ing. The foundation’s current leaders admit that the original meaning as a truly iconic landscape that belongs to all of supply. The borders separating these countries today have interpretative approach has failed or, as my host put it, “Our humanity. – Frederic C. Rich little to do with their topography, ecology, or history. Several visitors are not satisfied.” This kind of focus on the landscape ranges of mountains rise abruptly in a series of bands along visitor is commendable; it also serves as a useful reminder 7 the southern coast of the Medi- A view today down the valley from terranean Sea. Between them Tiddis, the site of the Roman city are hills, valleys, and upland Castellum Tidditanorum. plateaus. A partially discon- tinuous group of peaks of the southernmost range, generally known as the Atlas Mountains, divides this northern strip of Africa from the Sahara desert. It is possible to grow citrus and palms along the ocean, but only a few miles inland the win- ters can be cold, even harsh. It is an ideal region for growing wheat, however, which, like most grasses, prefers warm days and cool nights, especially for germination. As is true throughout the Middle East, the countries in this region, carved from nineteenth-century European colonies, are plagued with violent political and ideological upheaval. At best, this makes visiting many of the region’s historic sites deeply problematic. Although our group was grateful for a friendly escort of national and local police, which accompanied us everywhere, it was impossible to slip into a site unnoticed. Yet there was something strangely appropriate about arriving at each site in a caravan of jeeps and vans, with a well-armed escort. Nearly all of the Roman sites in the uplands and mountain valleys of eastern Algeria columns and arches that still stand on these ancient sites an impressive set of ruins of the future.) Imbalance, asymme- began as military posts intended to protect farmers and crops today. They would carefully reposition some, but not all – try, and collage – hallmarks of the arts in recent centuries – from raiding bands of Berbers, Tuareg, and others living in often for evocative effect. For example, a few tumbled columns are attended by both a yearning for an imagined grandeur the mountains or the desert beyond. might be set up at a corner to suggest a missing structure, and a rejection of perceived authority and restrictive, clas- A considerable number of the largest Roman towns lie east shaping a space while standing in equipoise against the sical precedents. And yet there are few European records of Algiers in the region of Kabylie and the Aurès mountains. horizon; or a group of fragments would be assembled off to of ancient remains in this part North Africa. The artists, Some are located on open plateaus, while others are perched the side, leaving other architectural elements strewn artfully principally French, who visited Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia upon elevated sites, with gorges and forested mountains about. (The visual trope behind this imagery, of course, is the were mesmerized by the pulsing color and energy of Islamic nearby. A few settlements have disappeared almost entirely elevated group of three columns that stand at a corner of the culture and architecture; dusty stones and partially buried beneath their modern counterparts, as at Constantine and Forum in Rome, which has been endlessly drawn, painted, columns of Roman cities weren’t engaging to them. It was Batna, but in most cases the ruins are extensive, sixteen and photographed.) At several sites, enough of a theater has for late-nineteenth-century French and German archaeolo- hundred years of plundering notwithstanding. Topography been cleared and rebuilt to indicate its shape and offer a dra- gists to notice and represent the visual power and strength of permitting, the settlements often exhibit the prototypical matic view. Algeria’s classical era. plan used throughout the empire and its colonies – that of a Visiting Roman sites in former French colonies is, there- One of the most engaging sites in all of Algeria is Tipasa, north-south and east-west, solar-oriented, rectangular grid fore, to experience archaeology filtered through a painterly located a few miles west of Algiers. There on a curving bay, with two principal streets crossing in the center: the cardo aesthetic. This is not necessarily a negative thing; it is simply with a dramatic, conical peak for a backdrop, are the remains and the decumanus. Both falling down and piling up in vary- one form of curatorial management. Scholars of our era, of a harbor with villas, streets, temples, and plazas that have ing states of erosion and deposition, such ruined cities often however, are often critical of this approach, feeling that such attracted artists and visitors since antiquity. Today the entire seem more melted than broken, forming a unique topography arrangements produce a misleading fiction: a manipulation site has become a public pleasure ground. Locals and tour- of shapes and suggestions. of what the remains truly represent. ists climb among the fallen columns, taking photos of one The ruins in Algeria and Tunisia have an undeniably To a degree, the Western aesthetic appreciation of ruins another, and lovers camp out behind fragments of walls, picturesque quality. This is in large part because the French is related to an embrace of partial remains of artworks; our among invading olives and pines. Forest groves frame stone archaeologists who worked on the sites between 1900 and museums are replete with armless, headless torsos; heads rooms and mosaic carpets, set upon a terraced hillside as 1920 were imbued with an aesthetic derived from nineteenth- without bodies; and fragments such as the giant foot of if arranged for picnicking families. The forum, once sur- century Romantic painting, and they reerected nearly all the Constantine at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. And visits to rounded by commercial, civic, and residential buildings, is ruined landscapes have inspired artists and architects since now reached via a path through a wood. The walls of atria and the Renaissance. (Some, like the architect Sir John Soane, even went so far as to envision and depict their own works as 8 dining rooms of seaside villas have been reduced to ledges ago carted off to Paris and Berlin. It is a bewitching demon- the Huntress (apparently the protector of the troops once sta- and stumps, like so many benches and seats. stration of metamorphosis: an entire world of streets, tioned there) that was carved into the keystone of one of the There is a decidedly scenographic air to it all. Four con- squares, columns, pavements, doors, and windows appears monument’s arches, a shepherd arrived with a flock of dirty nected arches pose together for visitors on an escarpment at to be emerging from the earth and subsiding into it at sheep mixed with black and white goats. Soon his sheep and the edge of a plaza, framing views to the sea and a mountain. the same time. goats had fanned out ahead of him among stones of virtually An ancient olive tree recorded by visiting Allied military per- In contrast to Tipasa and the coast around Algiers, the the same size and bulk and become visually confused with sonnel during World War II still stands behind the first arch, Roman sites inland are harsher on first encounter. Tiddis them. Suddenly a flock of swallows appeared, darting about where young Arabic couples lounge with their children. Half and Djemila were built in key locations on low mountain and swooping over the ruins, feasting on insects rising from a dozen boats filled with weekend fishermen and teenagers ridges along what was once a contested frontier in the first the patchy turf as the day began to warm up. In a few weeks in swimsuits bob about below, where the town tumbles into and second century CE and has become so again in the years they would be headed north, to their summer home. The the bay. More walls, pavements, and what appear to be pieces following the Arab Spring, which began nearby in Tunisia. soldiers, traders, farmers, and their convoys of goods are long of columns can be seen beneath the clear water. The omni- They, along with Timgad and Tébessa, were garrison towns gone, but the birds still return – not the same birds, of course, present, brilliant blue expanse of the sea and sky; the scent of that grew into sizable centers of trade. Laid out on grids, their but their descendants. eucalyptus and pine; the shimmer of leaves on ancient olive orderliness and obvious efficiency is evident as one wanders As one travels through the fields and forests and ragged trees; the glitter of blades and spines of palms, agaves, yuccas; about in what seems to be a vast sea of square and rectangu- villages of northeastern Algeria, military posts, too, become the faint lapping of the sea below; and the soft buzzing of lar stone pens and corrals – all that remains of the barracks, a familiar feature of the landscape. They are simple, boxlike bees combine to stimulate and nurture a visitor’s senses as apartments, warehouses, mills, and workshops that were structures located at regular intervals on hills and peaks, they have for centuries. toppled by earthquakes and quarried by successive waves of often within sight of one another. As in ancient times, they Strolling along one of the streets, I came to an intersec- invaders and settlers over the past fifteen hundred years. are there to keep track of trouble, which today means Islamist tion with the remains of a fountain. At one ruined city after Strangely, the last things standing are often gates – revolutionaries or terrorists, who move about in the moun- another across Algeria, the buildings themselves may be whether once civic and ceremonial or part of a defensive tains nearby and are a constant threat.1 The agriculture, too, missing but the elements that held the city together and pro- perimeter. Visitors are inevitably drawn to these features. In evokes an earlier era. Small flocks of sheep and goats appear vided its connective tissue – streets, curbs, drains, fountains, Lambaesis, another town where legions were quartered, an and disappear; occasionally one sees a donkey with a cart or basins, gates, stairs, and plazas – are largely still in place and enormous quadrilateral arch, referred to as the Praetorium a stray cow; rarely a horse. Tractors are unusual; instead men intact, forming a structured landscape. Without difficulty for the guards who apparently lived within it, has become the and women work the fields with hand tools. Agribusiness, one can distinguish the important civic buildings, such as winter home for dozens of storks that have built their nests with its large-scale use of pesticides, fertilizers, and motor- libraries, theaters, and mar- on top of it. Made of large blocks of honey-colored sandstone, ized equipment, has not yet arrived. As a result the spring At Timgad, an arch honoring Trajan kets; the stalls and counters of like many of the Roman structures that survive in Alge- brings great drifts of wildflowers, vast sweeps of poppies and a group of columns glow in the merchants; and the drains ria, the monument stands alone on a level plain in a sea of and marguerites, daisies and campanulas – not only in fields the sun as a late afternoon storm and seats of the public toilets; wildflowers, grasses, and scattered stone fragments. among the crops, but also along the roads and in the woods. builds in the East over the Aures even the former location of As we observed the big birds landing and taking off in the mountains. monuments and statuary long early morning sun, and peered at the small image of Diana When first glimpsed from a distance, the ruins of Timgad are extensive and spectacular. There is something stunning about a city reduced to rubble and yet with all of its streets open and traversable. The vista is punctuated by arches and a handful of gigantic columns gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, as a storm builds on the horizon. To the east are forested foothills, and behind them the snowcapped massif of the Aurès Mountains. I enter the city through a gate and up a slight incline, between a textbook allée of Italian cypress. It’s a bit of cheap theater but effective, decanting the visitor into the cardo and headed straight for the forum. The city spreads out sym-

1 In “Jihadists Widen Their Networks in North Africa” (New York Times, January 2, 2016), eight recent episodes of political violence or terrorism by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb were shown on a map of the region of northeastern Algeria visited on this trip.

9 metrically to the left and right across a level plateau, offering Built in mountainous terrain, it thrived as a regional agri- curves, cubes, and diagonals, once embodied qualities that we a sense of completeness similar to that of Pompeii or Ostia cultural center until the fifth century, when it was sacked still use Latin vocabulary to describe today: voluptuousness Antica near Rome. Walls, doors, and columns of hundreds by the Vandals; later it was plundered by Arabs. The main and luxury. Djemila has to have been one of the most beauti- of rooms in innumerable houses stretch away into the spine of the city, its cardo, follows a long sloping ridge that is ful and ingenious of all the Roman sites in North Africa. distance. Passing a set of public baths and a library, I arrive oriented north-south. Its decumanus climbs steeply up from In contrast, cold and windy Madauros doesn’t seem like at the forum to ascend a broad set of shallow steps into a the western valley. After crossing the cardo, it passes through much at first, despite its handsome mountain site, but the paved piazza. Straight ahead is a hillside theater that has a handsome caramel-colored arch (attributed to the reign of town becomes interesting on exploration. An industrial quar- been cleared and partially restored. Like other stone the- Caracalla) that opens directly into a forum, which is cranked ter houses the remains of extensive olive oil factories. Dozens aters around the Mediterranean, it is remarkably handsome, almost forty-five degrees from the main street – an alteration of heavy, grey, stone presses, with their matronly waists and more irresistible standing empty than it would be filled with that was almost inevitable if such an architectural space square holes for the handles used to turn them, are intact in people. Those who climb the steep stairs are rewarded with a space were to fit on the mountainside. This innovation has their original places in the work yards. A Byzantine fortress, superb panoramic view – including a forest of columns set up the remarkable effect of placing its two principal structures cobbled together of scavenged bits, sits in the Roman forum. in atria across the city – because the frons scenae, or multi- into opposing, dynamic views as one approaches from any Downhill is a charming theater; extremely intimate, it is the tiered back stage, and side walls that originally enclosed the direction. From the east and north, a long set of steps of the smallest in all of Africa. Prowling about, one discovers a pair seats have not been reerected – itself a theatrical choice on now-vanished basilica, running the length of the forum, of well-proportioned baths side by side. One for men and one the part of archaeologists. A carpet of green and flowers is seen receding diagonally from the foreground into the dis- for women? A separation of classes? Who knows? This was the fills virtually every cubicle of the theater’s partially restored tance; approaching the forum from the south or west, one city where the young Saint Augustine was sent to study Latin, and stabilized walls. An air of curated neglect permeates is presented with a set of tall, monumental stairs leading to and where he got into some of the youthful scrapes – like the scene. the imposing mass, walls, and columns of a temple to the stealing fruit from an orchard with his companions – that he Founded in the first century during the reign of Trajan, Severan family. later described in his Confessions. Timgad was the largest city in the region and thrived until Below the forum one encounters the remains of the Capi- As one draws near the coast in the eastern region of Alge- the fifth century when Berbers sacked it. Despite the com- tolium. As one passes through a sequence of open cubicular ria, there are frequent references to Augustine. Hippo Regius plete lack of any labels or maps, it is one of the most visited rooms and heavy elegant arches, it is startling to come across is the city most identified with him; he became its bishop in historic sites in Algeria. A public market with a unique set of the headless, limbless, giant torso of a god or emperor – 395. Unlike many inland ruins with attractive hilltop situa- shops is arranged in an inventive set of radiating arcs around it’s difficult to tell which, as their bodies were presented tions, the remains of Hippo are somewhat morbid. The site of a central court, with a major fountain in an exedra opposite in much the same way by the second century – propped up this once grand city – sinking, largely flooded, and overtaken the entrance. There are at least a dozen neighborhood baths, into a standing position against the wall. Adjacent to the by rank terrestrial and aquatic vegetation – is difficult to as well as several larger thermae. The most notable edifice is a Capitolium is a public bath; a second bath lies north of the visit or understand. A Punic seaport before it became a major handsome Trajanic arch. Tall and broad, with two side arches forum. Larger and built later, it is a disorienting architectural harbor for grain shipment in the reign of Augustus, Hippo for pedestrians and a taller center opening for vehicles and exercise in geometry, with baroque diagonals and unexpected has been overtaken in the twenty-first century by the large horses, the warm sandstone with its fine carving and detail views among the principal spaces. The rooms for hot and industrial port city of Annaba. A gargantuan basilica domi- glows a warm amber in late afternoon light. The lowering cold water, steam, massage, etc. are assembled in a series of nates the scene from above – the hideous offspring of French light also dramatically picks out the deep grooves and ruts triangular relationships and worn into the pavement by centuries of iron-shod wheels softened with curves and passing through the archway, leaving one to imagine the apses. Once decorated with noise they must have made as one walks through the silence polychrome marbles and back downhill to the city gate. Who today knows who lived, mosaics – scraps of which worked, wrote, loved, and died in ancient Timgad? And yet still litter the ground and here it still is, sort of, with hundreds of columns and dozens cling in bits to the stone of avenues overlooking its broad valley and distant range, structures like shedding which is now turning deep purple under a gathering storm. bark – this building, with its mazelike juxtaposition of Faced with awkward or difficult topography, the Romans proved as skillful and deeply artistic in their adjustments and Sketches from Djemila: a heroic adaptations as the best of the Greek planners and designers. torso in the Capitolium south of A particularly striking example is that of Djemila, origi- the forum; the plan to the right nally named Cuicul when it was founded in the first century. illustrates the radical adjustments the Romans made to fit their civic structures onto this mountainous 10 site. nineteenth-century, Roman Catholic architecture – as one Quarai and Its Gardens: Notes on the Ancient Pueblo drives through an industrial expanse analogous to Hoboken Landscape of the American Southwest and Perth Amboy but grimmer. The remains of the Roman he old Tiwa town of Quarai, which lies in a pic- city are bafflingly hard to find – possibly because the govern- turesque, spring-fed valley at the southeast end ment intends to discourage visitors from seeing their shock- of the Manzano Mountains, an hour’s drive from ing state. Although they were well excavated and studied Albuquerque, has a remarkable history of planned between 1900 and 1920, not much is available for viewing gardens. This small settlement of five or six hun- today; the Muslim population of the city appears to have little Tdred people, which flourished from the eleventh century until interest in Saint Augustine. Puzzling one’s way past subur- drought closed in about 1674, developed a series of shrub- ban walls and portions of pavement glimpsed between reeds hollow gardens and related landscapes that a keen-eyed visi- under the water, one can hardly fathom the former grandeur tor can appreciate even today. of this famous ruin. The drowning monument grounds and In American terms, Quarai is an ancient place. Its original tangles of vegetation are clearly as much an embarrassment buildings are eight or nine centuries old. Today they form as a challenge for the local authorities; visitors are forbid- only a grassy mound under the cottonwood trees next to den from taking photos. Some of us did anyway, but of what Zapato Creek. The settlement was populated by perhaps one I couldn’t imagine. After a desultory walk and a scramble hundred or so Tiwa-speaking Pueblo people in its early years, through the bushes in hopes of seeing something other than but expanded slowly over the centuries. When the Spaniards refuse, we gave up and left. under Coronado arrived in the 1540s, several hundred inhab- itants were living on the hills north of the creek in two- or Goethe, while staying in Rome near the end of the year in three-story apartment blocks made of local sandstone and 1788, wrote in his journal: arranged around plazas. The Spaniards noted that the Pueblo people traded with their neighbors, dealing in salt from the The observation that all greatness is transitory should not bed of an evaporating Ice Age lake (Lake Estancia) to the east make us despair; on the contrary. The realization that the and delicious piñon nuts from the surrounding forests. But past was great should stimulate us to create something of the Tiwas were also excellent gardeners. consequence ourselves, which even, when in its turn, it has Tending the small-scale plots they favored took a great fallen in ruins, may continue to inspire our descendants to deal of work. Modern archaeologists such as Kurt Anschuetz a noble activity such as our ancestors never lacked. and Michael Marshall say that in early Southwestern Pueblo Closing my eyes and thinking about the Roman sites of settlements, such as Quarai or its neighbor Abo (some Algeria and their state verging on wildness, I recall a palette fourteen miles to the south), two to three acres of gardens Sketch map of the Tiwa and Tom- women as the masons, who of fresh crisp green, with a foam of white and yellow blossom, per person may have been necessary to support village life. piro country in central New Mexico. created these fine buildings of earthen-colored architectural forms and sharp shadows This means that Quarai, a town of perhaps three to five acres under European coercion to beneath a sky of bright blue and white, occasionally overtaken in size, was surrounded by pocket and check-dam gardens serve a Franciscan missionary plan. The primary material by fast-moving masses of grey cloud and light mist or rain, spread over a thousand or fifteen hundred acres. That’s an was a tight-grained, rust-colored sandstone, quarried from only to return once more to bright sun and color. Always extraordinary picture. outcrops a quarter mile southeast of the town and mortared there are mountains, whether near or far, and birds. A pocket garden is an irregular oval of about ten by fifteen with the sticky red clay of the valley. The stone walls of the Finally, how is one to think about the gods – the gods of feet set in a clearing in the local piñon-juniper woodlands church towered some five stories over the landscape, and the inhabitants of these distant communities who hauled typical of the region; a check-dam garden, also irregular in trimmed ponderosa pine trunks roughly forty or fifty feet masses of stone up mountainsides from the valleys below, width but some fifteen or twenty feet long, is often built on a long supported the roof. These pines grew abundantly in the and of the people who fashioned them into such imposing modest hillside swale, with a line of boulders or stones above forests of the Manzano Range ten miles to the west, where structures, positioning them so superbly? It was their time, and below it to intercept snowmelt or runoff from rains and they were logged with great difficulty and wrestled back to not ours. And they thundered for over a thousand years, these direct it to the cultivated area. The people of Quarai con- the town. gods; they schemed, meddled, and directed the work and structed these gardens by the dozens, and eventually hun- The Tiwas also built an ambulatory, complete with a troubles of men. Occasionally at night in the remote hotels of dreds, in the hills and gullies of their valley. sunken kiva or ceremonial chamber, for the padres, and they Kabylie, I would hear distant thunder and think of the Olym- We speak of the Spaniards having built the town’s remark- set out terrace gardens for the production of European herbs pians, only to remember that they have left the stage and gone able church and rectory in the 1620s, along with the Spanish away now, never to return. – Laurie Olin commissioner’s house and courtyard, at the east end of the pueblo of Quarai. In fact, it was the excellent Pueblo crafts- people, with men as the hod, stone, and timber carriers and 11 Small early Puebloan streamside tools (the stone tips of digging oriented north-south (the Pueblos then as now favor cardinal garden. sticks and hoes or shovels used directions), with a view of its sister settlement, Pueblo Pardo, to work these gardens) are still across the dry valley to the south. It also framed the view of found in the nearby woodlands, and the living descendants the distant, 12,000-foot summit of Sierra Blanca, approxi- of the original native plants grow in and around the old plots mately one hundred miles to the south. These traditional even today. landscape design and gardening practices were interrupted Quarai was an ecclesiastical hacienda from the 1620s at Las Humanas in the 1620s, when the Franciscans began to until about 1674, when a great drought drove Spaniards and build the first of two churches and utilize local residents for Indians alike from the place. The padres and encomenderos labor, just as they had at Quarai. (the Spanish commissioners appointed by the governor in At Abo, too, historic landscaping patterns changed with Santa Fe) used the local Quarai people to tend sheep, horses, the arrival of the Spanish. A Tompiro pueblo only a few miles and cattle; construct buildings; produce trade goods; serve south of Quarai, Abo is a sprawling place, perhaps eleven as church attendants; and labor in orchards, rectory gar- hundred years old, with a permanent water supply (Espinoso dens, and fields. The garden plots north of Zapato Creek Creek) and a large town plaza, oriented north-south like Qua- disappeared, largely replaced by Spanish farm fields and rai’s. Small shrines, petroglyphs, and pictographs are associ- orchards (and perhaps pastures). But this happened only on ated with many of the town’s garden plots, which are not as the north side of the tiny stream; the older, smaller Tiwa neatly defined as their Tiwa counterparts. Here the connec- gardens remained on the south side of the valley, where they tion of ritual life to gardening practices is stronger and more can still be traced. Both modern and earlier Pueblo people apparent than at Quarai. A pocket garden in a woodland are famous for their egalitarian ways, and it is probable that clearing, for example, may lie just above a rocky bluff pecked these landscape-gardening patterns – large numbers of small with a circle of small holes – signs of the gardener’s religious gardens scattered in the woodlands around towns – were the observance. As was the case with Las Humanas (Gran Quivira) result of cooperative social enterprise. The European-scale and Quarai, the Pueblo settlers and kitchen vegetables at the eastern edge of the rectory agricultural production that partially replaced them appears had taken care to place their A pocket garden in the Salinas complex. Beyond the terraces, the Franciscans and Pueblo to have worked for a time, but the tiny garden plots in the town neither too high in the country. people laid out an orchard, likely planted in apple and peach woodlands and along the edges of the stream trees; channeled the water of a good spring into a pond (or suffered from neglect. estanque) to be used for irrigation; and cleared stretches of By the late 1600s, other towns near Quarai ground above the creek for the production of wheat on a scale with similar development patterns and a the Tiwas would have thought quite large. Beginning with Spanish presence were also in decline after Fray Juan Gutiérrez de la Chica in about 1628, the Franciscans centuries of modest prosperity. This was assumed the responsibility of collecting, storing, and dis- true, for example, at Gran Quivira (later tributing most if not all of the agricultural production of the called Las Humanas), a large Tompiro- town for trade and local use. speaking pueblo about forty miles south of It is true that the Spaniards introduced dozens, if not hun- Quarai on Chupadera Mesa. Like Quarai, dreds, of Old World plant species to long-established Pueblo it had pocket, check-dam, and even terrace towns such as Quarai. But by the sixteenth century, before the gardens, built in the distinctive regional Spaniards knew anything about the land that would become pattern, but only shallow wells and cisterns New Mexico, the Pueblos had already brought perhaps 250 for a water supply. The Pueblo gardeners here or more regional plant species into active or passive cultiva- had improved the alkaline soil by planting tion. They liked to string together large quantities of small beans and mixing in dry juniper needles plots, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the berry (duff). As was the case in many Pueblo towns, and fruit gardens of Quarai. There the Tiwas used native the large, rectangular plaza of Las Humanas, fruit- and berry-producing species such as sand plums, cur- laid out early in the settlement’s history, was rants, chokecherries, and roses in their shrub-hollow gardens to surround and fill out their plantings of essential exotic species such as corn, beans, squash, and cotton, all of which had come earlier to the Southwest from Mexico. Their garden

12 hills for corn to mature (in a short growing season of about The Nature of Culture: Petra, however, was designated a WHS for its cultural 105 frost-free days), nor too far into the lowlands to lack water In Search of the “Real” Landscape of Petra significance; its cultural remains are protected under for gardening or domestic use. t is all too often written that John Lewis Burckhardt UNESCO rules, but not the landscape context critical to its The Spaniards built a church and a convent at Abo in the “discovered” the ancient city of Petra in 1812. Of course, magnificence. Just as the city is literally carved from the 1620s, developed large fields of winter wheat (possibly the the site’s very existence indicates that the area was well mountains and wadis, this tumble of mountains shapes the first in North America) and Spanish-style mission gardens, known long before that. The ruins of this Nabataean- civilization: in different landscape Petra would be a differ- and used the local Tompiros as a labor force. It was the third Roman metropolis are nestled along a wadi, or seasonal ent city. It is inscribed into the cliffs and gorges, fashioned of ecclesiastical hacienda in the area. But drought ended every- Iwatercourse, deep in the Jibal al-Sharah, the Sharah Moun- that austere desert stone so ingeniously managed as human thing around 1674, as at Las Humanas and Quarai, although tains of southern Jordan. Today, they constitute the Petra habitat by the Nabataeans. the Pueblos’ form of settlement planning had worked well Archaeological Park, which covers 26,171 square hectares Unfortunately, Petra’s natural landscape is under pres- for centuries before the arrival of the Spanish. Subsequently, (roughly one hundred square miles) and is dotted with the sure from every direction: by encroaching unplanned these high-altitude (above 6,000 feet) towns fell into decay remains of Neolithic, Bronze Age, Nabataean, Roman, Byz- development, inappropriate agricultural practices, and the until the 1820s, when late-colonial-era Spanish settlers antine, Mameluke, and Ottoman civilizations – and much in bundled processes of overgrazing, devegetation, topsoil loss, returned to Abo and Quarai. The Lucero brothers, Miguel between and since. In recent decades, the region has hosted and diminishing water resources which together constitute and Juan, set up a hacienda system again in the ruins of the dozens of international archaeological research and conserva- desertification. But UNESCO has taken action in response to church at Quarai, staffed with workers from the Rio Grande tion projects. Since being designated a UNESCO World Heri- these issues only occasionally, instead inclining to protect the valley. But only European-style farming returned with tage Site (WHS) in 1985, Petra has become a popular tourist existing landscape context from “intervention.” In part, this them. The old Tiwa style of small-scale gardening was never destination as well. In 2007 Petra was voted one of the “New is because the theoretical framework in which such actions resumed. Seven Wonders of the World.” are being considered is deeply inappropriate to the site. The towns of Quarai, Abo, and Gran Quivira, all part of This wealth of cultural heritage is nestled into an The Petra Archaeological Park Operating Plan (PAPOP), the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, give a sense unearthly landscape where three continental plates collide, which includes a section on Natural Resource Management, of the complexity and sophistication of landscape develop- elevation drops fifteen hundred meters within five kilome- was developed by the United States Park Service in 2000 ment, site planning, and garden design in early New Mexico. ters, and biotic zones tumble from arid Mediterranean and and adopted as Petra’s regulatory and policy document by Because of the dryness of the climate, which preserves land- Irano-Turanian steppe to Sudanian savannah within a single UNESCO in the Brasilia session of the World Heritage Com- scape constructs so visibly, and because they developed little kilometer. The dreamlike landscape of sandstone geologi- mittee in summer 2010. PAPOP proposes to manage Petra or not at all after 1675, these towns can teach us much today. cal formations, rugged purple granite mountains, and steep, as “wilderness,” in the sense that the word is employed by the But carefully thought-out landscapes are more common in narrow canyons opens out to sweeping views over Wadi ‘Araba U.S. Parks service, to be protected from “intervention.” the Southwest than many people imagine. In the foothills of and the mountains of the Negev beyond. Petra’s landscape The section on natural resource management opens with the Jemez range north of Albuquerque, for instance, the Tewa, has been the object of human preoccupations and projects for the following statement: Keres, and Jemez people created a famous series of grid gar- more than ten millennia: the cliffs are scored and tunneled The natural resource management policies of Petra dens (rock-bordered plots much like chessboards in appear- with prehistoric copper mines, riddled with tomb complexes Archaeological Park are aimed at providing present and ance), as well as terrace gardens. And the Tano people along and god-niches, pocked with cisterns, and runneled with future generations with the opportunity to enjoy and Galisteo Creek south of Santa Fe developed refined reservoir aqueducts. Deforestation began thousands of years ago when benefit from natural environments evolving through systems to catch the rainwater and snowmelt coursing down fuel was needed for copper-smelting and bronze-making. It is biological and physical processes that are minimally their hillsides and direct it to the stony, clay-laden soil of impossible to walk fifty meters without touching some trace influenced by human actions. . . . The primary manage- their garden plots in this long valley. of human lives and passions and ingenuities. ment objective for all natural systems in Petra Archaeo- We might say, then, that a measured look at Quarai can UNESCO employs ten criteria for selection as a World Her- logical Park will be the protection of natural resources help us to understand the importance of careful landscape itage Site. The first six criteria are for cultural significance, and values for appropriate types of public enjoyment while planning and design in the ancient Pueblo world. And at the remaining four for natural significance, including: ensuring their availability to future generations. These Quarai there is a particular bonus, the complex of Spanish (vii) to contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of values include “naturalness.” As used herein, the term colonial buildings at the east end of the town: the residence exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance; “natural” denotes minimal human influence. of an encomendero, or commissioner, with its courtyard; a rectory with planting terraces; a pond with waterworks and (viii) to be outstanding examples representing major stages The same language pertains throughout the document. an orchard; and perhaps the most beautiful ancient sand- of earth’s history, including the record of life, significant The discussion is premised on the notion that Petra is wil- stone church in the region, built by the Indians themselves. on-going geological processes in the development of derness, and thus that a laissez-faire approach, discouraging The contrast of Spanish gardening and landscape constructs landforms, or significant geomorphic or physiographic “intervention,” is desirable. PAPOP proposes to manage Petra next to those of the early Pueblo people – all of them seeming features. as virgin wilderness with intact “natural systems”; and yet to stand still in time – is one of the most wonderful in the this is a landscape which fails nearly every criterion to qualify Southwest. – Baker H. Morrow 13 as the kind of wilderness such a management approach is actually mean in such a context (although, outside the central famous travel writer Charles M. Doughty, whose books were intended to protect. tourism area, Petra is relatively free of pollution). But there is fodder for T. E. Lawrence, wrote in the 1880s of what is today The United States’ National Wilderness Preservation probably no single foothold in Petra Region that has not been northern Petra Region: System (NWPS) defines “wilderness” and ways of assessing its trod again and again by humans and their livestock over the This limestone moorland, of so great altitude, resembles integrity. “Surveying a century of wilderness literature,” write past twelve millennia. Europe, and there are hollow park-like grounds with ever- the authors, At the same time, what will it mean not to intervene in green oak timber. . . . We began to descend over a cragged this fragile and threatened landscape? The web of natural ‘wildness’ is the essence of wilderness, and it is composed lime-rock, beset with juniper. systems is presently spiraling downward, no longer able to of two essential qualities – naturalness and freedom from sustain itself under the pressure of desertification. Ground- Of his 1902 journey from the Jordan Valley foor up human control. . . . The essential attributes that determine water resources are threatened throughout Jordan due to Namala pass through Beidha (sik al-Beda) and on into naturalness are the degree to which the land retains its overextraction. Throughout the Petra Region springs have Hisheh, the Czech geographer Alois Musil wrote, “The butm- primeval composition, the degree to which land remains successively gone dry or receded drastically over the past two trees (Pistacia atlantica), which begin at an elevation of about free of artificial structures, and the degree of its purity or decades. Unplanned development is producing urban sprawl, 400m, diminished by 600m further on and the dark luzzab, lack of pollution. especially around the principal community of Wadi Musa. or `ar`ar, ( Juniperus phoenicia) appeared.” Musil also provided These attributes are further elaborated as “natural compo- In Ma’an District, which includes Petra, 39 percent of the a striking photograph looking up the Namala siq from the sition,” “unaltered structure,” “purity,” “the capacity to pro- population is under the age of fifteen. Fertility rates in Jordan south – the siq is crowded with mature trees. vide opportunities for solitude,” “remoteness,” and “uncon- as a whole average 3.8 children per woman, but in rural and Then the area was significantly deforested between 1904 trolled processes.” lower-income areas, and especially the south, where the Petra and 1908 for the construction of the Hejaz Railway from Admittedly, by many standards Petra is wild: empty, unde- Region is located, the average edges up toward 4.9 per woman. Damascus to Medina. During its construction a giant Otto- veloped, uncrossable by road, mostly inaccessible even on These statistics suggest that before 2030 the demand for man encampment moved slowly south, accompanying the camel- or horseback. There is no settled community within housing in the Petra Region will double and the population extension of the line. As many as 7,500 people inhabited the the park, which has a population of less than half a person will more than double. construction camps, bringing with them a village-sized per square mile. Yet in other ways this is the antithesis of Perhaps most profound is the devastation of vegetation demand for fuelwood. The subsequent demand for firewood virgin wilderness; humans have exerted some kind of control cover throughout the region and, indeed, throughout Jordan. to fuel steam engines was pressing enough that in 1915 a here – forestry, agriculture, grazing, and the construction Clearing for agriculture, grazing, and fuel consumption have thirty-six kilometer spur line was laid from the `Unaizah of buildings – for ten thousand years. Petra Region is home combined to denude much of the region. As noted, the graz- station north of Ma`an into the Hisheh forest, now within the not only to the famous Nabataean, Roman, and Byzantine ing of small ruminants in Petra dates back eight thousand Petra Region. remains of Petra and its extensive outlying communities, but years: goats – and the tents of their keepers – are an inescap- The blame for the region’s deforestation cannot be also to more than ten thousand years of settlement by pas- able feature of Petra’s landscape. Since the 1970s, however, assigned solely to the Ottomans, however. Within living toralists and agriculturalists. Founded over twelve thousand the construction of new roads has enabled livestock own- memory, there was enough forest to hide in during shoot- years ago, the Neolithic settlement at Beidha, also protected ers to truck water and supplemental feed into ever-remoter outs sparked by Ottoman and tribal feuds. The forest was under the WHS enlistment, is one of the earliest organized areas, increasing grazing pressure regionwide. Along with an important economic resource as well. It was not uncom- communities in the world. Archaeological evidence dates the the increasing settlement of most bedouin, the phenomenon mon for a head of household to cut down a pistachio tree cultivation of grain at Beidha to the earliest Neolithic – as of truck herding facilitates keeping herds on the same range and load it onto two donkeys; cross Wadi ‘Araba to the West much as ten thousand years ago – and the domestication of throughout the year, allowing the vegetation no chance for Bank to sell it in exchange for dry goods such as tea, coffee, goats to Pre-pottery Neolithic B – over eight thousand years recovery. sugar, and soap; work wage labor for some cash; and then before the present. The structures are still visible and coher- An enormous additional strain has been placed on Jordan’s “hunt his way back” to Wadi Musa to provision his family ent today, and Beidha is only one of a string of such early sites rangelands since the Gulf War, with the addition of some for several months. Local timber was used for both firewood within Petra. 1.5 million head of livestock owned by refugee bedouin. It is and construction until the 1960s, when concrete became the In terms of “naturalness” as it is defined by the NWPS now common to see large herds of camels and bedouin tents preferred building medium in the region. scholars, Petra again fails to qualify. What is “primeval” in of eastern tribes camped in the Petra region throughout the The need for firewood for subsistence cooking and heating a land that has been home to humans for more than twelve summer; they only return to their native ranges with the is still a reality for Petra’s fully nomadic bedouin. Winters in millennia? Artificial structures are obviously an important onset of the rainy season. the upper reaches of Petra Region are bitterly cold – it usually element of the landscape: the fabulous city of Petra itself, the The Jibal al-Sharah, like much of Jordan, has been largely snows at least once each winter, and often more. The needs outlying caravan station of Siq al-Barid, Neolithic Beidha, stripped of its forests in little more than a century. The of these tent families must be addressed if devegetation is to Byzantine settlements, Nabataean farms and presses, a couple be halted. In a study of deforestation conducted from 2003 to of Mameluke castle-forts – the inventory continues liter- 2006 in an area of 10.69 hectares (26.4 acres) within the Petra ally for pages. It is difficult to construe what “purity” might Region, it was concluded that there had been a 58 percent decline in forest from 1924 to 2002. Between 2003 and 2006 14 Ironically, in light of Petra’s UNESCO 2006, for example, two-thousand-year-old Juniperus phoenicia designation, the greatest threat to the region were cut down along the Namala Pass. may be the impact of tourism – both local These are not “natural environments evolving through and international. Local weekend recreation biological and physical processes minimally influenced revolves around grill picnicking, called hash by humans,” as the management plan puts it. They are ou nash. Typical hash ou nash involves one or instead environments declining rapidly as a result of human more households loaded into several vehicles, influence. In 2004 the site was estimated to account for as ideally accompanied by several square meters much as 10 percent of Jordan’s GDP; in 2007, inundated with of plastic hasira mats, upholstered foam tourists following the “New Seven Wonders” hype, Petra was pads for lounging, plastic chairs and tables, drawing some 77,000 visitors a month. Accommodating these ten-gallon water jugs, towels, tubs, dish soap, visitors has required constructing new buildings, overex- marinated meats and salads, prepared qah- tracting water from aquifers, camping in riparian habitats wah saadah (Bedouin coffee), tea parapherna- and at the edges of Nabataean reservoirs, and escorting them lia, soft drinks, and often toys, bicycles, balls, through ancient and modern gardens, fields, and terraces. and goalposts for football. Hash ou nash gen- Petra’s existing natural context is profoundly stressed and erally occupies the part of the day between degraded, and to freeze this landscape as it was in 1985 – dhuhur prayer (around noon), when the men much less as it is in 2015 – would be catastrophic. come home from mosque, and sundown. In Cultural-heritage conservation professionals would not its most extreme form it includes livestock dream of advocating such an approach to the built environ- and butchering implements, with trailer rigs ment. Untold millions, advanced technologies, and admirable and buses full of people and equipment, and human resources have been spent researching and conserv- The Neolithic settlement of Ba’aja, alone, the documented decline even tractors dragging water tanks. ing the famous facades of the city, the frescoes of Siq al-Barid, near the northwestern border of was 4.23 percent. Jordanian society outside of Amman is still very rural, and the Neolithic and Byzantine sites of Petra. Are these not Petra Archaeological Park. Without its forests, the land conservative Sunni Muslim, and recreation tends to be interventions in the landscape? There is an imposing edifice grows ever drier. Today the intensely family-focused. Outdoor picnics are inexpensive, of theory and methodology undergirding the conservation sprawling town of Wadi Musa is creeping up the steep slopes, and they offer an opportunity for the women to get out of the of the cultural past, but the scaffolding which supports their precipitous roads snake over stony, treeless hillsides, and kitchen, especially on a hot day, and to socialize with other natural contexts is dismayingly flimsy. Landscape interven- massive retaining walls hold the mountainsides in place. In families and groups from outside their own neighborhoods. tions require the same rigor of thought that archaeological the surrounding country the hills are cleared of shrubs yearly Perhaps most importantly, hash ou nash offers easy, safe conservation entails. for winter firewood, and the denuded soil can no longer bank entertainment for the squadrons of children. It is a common At the same time, non-intervention is a fantasy – a passive rainwater. Climate change has shifted weather patterns. The occurrence to count over one hundred vehicles along a five- construction of an unintentional landscape. In fact, the gentle, widespread rainfall once characteristic of gentler kilometer stretch of road in the most popular areas. Although listing as a World Heritage Site – that very “protection” – has Mediterranean winters has been replaced by more isolated weekends, especially Fridays (the day of congregational prayer changed the landscape dramatically. Tourism has con- and violent storms; now the water runs straight off the bare service at the mosques), are by far the most popular days structed a landscape of hotels, restaurants, and souvenir stone, carrying the topsoil and seedbank with it. Wadi Musa for hash ou nash, groups can be found picnicking any day of shops; widened roads to accommodate tour buses; and built a was traditionally an agricultural village, but crops once rain- the week, throughout the year. Although rain keeps people wastewater treatment plant and subsequent 10-hectare agri- fed are no longer sustainable. Throughout the region dead indoors, a sunny snow day will bring people out in droves. cultural project inside the park’s boundary so that visitors orchards patch the slopes. Shepherds still tend their flocks Part of the fun of hash ou nash is the full-scale production it can be hosted inside the “protected area.” on the diminishing range, but there are many wry jokes, such involves, and part of that project is firewood gathering. The And what of the people who live here? Petra Region, like as “organic, stone-fed lamb.” Each tree hosts a tiny microcli- cumulative devastation is immense. Jordan as a whole, is dotted with bedouin encampments. mate, including its understory vegetation. As trees and shrubs Hash ou nash is also good business: increasingly tourist What defines bedouin in the early twenty-first century is a disappear, soil is impoverished and swept away, rainwater camps, camping excursions, and special events claim quanti- matter of some debate, but I refer to families who occupy runs off into Wadi ‘Araba down the sheer rock faces, livestock ties of locally harvested firewood for international tourism. tents full-time, move seasonally, and live primarily from the graze deeper and deeper into what vegetation remains. Not to These quantities are hard to calculate, because tour operators proceeds of their livestock (goats, sheep and camels). While it intervene in these processes is a decision to lock the ecosys- are understandably not forthcoming about the sources of is inaccurate to romanticize the bedouin as “one with nature” tem into decline. their firewood. Whereas local picnickers typically tear down (if anything they are pitted ruthlessly against the harsh envi- branches and strip trees of their bark, tour operators chain- saw trees accessible to roads. On the first sunny weekend of

15 ronment), they are dependent on environmental balance for that biomass, biodiversity, and livestock productivity can be The Landscape as Ruin: The Resiliency of Design water and pasture. A century ago, before southwest Asia was enhanced through community-based rangeland initiatives. The meaning of the word “ruin” has its origins in the idea of fallen carved into nations with borders, the bedouin moved through Such programs are, undeniably, interventions; steppe veg- stones. When we frame an object as a ruin, we reclaim it from a fall pasturing circuits contingent on pasture and water, spending etation must be re-seeded and trees must be planted. More- into decay and oblivion and often for a form of cultural attention the winters in regions with perennial water supplies and sea- over, it would be neither practical nor desirable to attempt and care that elevates the value of that object. – Michael S. Roth sonal pasture, and moving toward the cultivated, wetter high- to restore the landscape to the way it looked when Petra was lands in the summers, grazing harvest stubble and taking inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1985. Some “historic s an archaeologist of landscape architecture, I am advantage of cooler altitudes. National borders have compli- species,” such as Juniperus phoenicia, may no longer be able to drawn to the ways in which acts of design – mak- cated these circuits, for example cutting Jordanian bedouin survive the changed hydrological regime. Climate change has ing one’s sign or mark on the land – endure or are off from the perennial watering grounds of Wadi Sirhan, resulted in different rainfall patterns – so the forest will also erased over time. Although we think of gardens now in Saudi Arabia. The advent of motorized transportation look different than it did in the deeper past. Petra has been and parks as ephemeral, due to the lifespan of their has allowed water and supplemental feed to be trucked into changing for thousands of years, and changing exponentially Avegetation, the underlying designs can endure with surpris- remote areas, meaning that herds stay too long in one place, in the past century. It is impossible to freeze its life in the ing resiliency. Might we expand our understanding of ruins overgrazing already sparse vegetation. An environment out of year it was recognized as “world heritage.” The challenge is from architectural ruins in a landscape to the landscape balance has unbalanced an ancient set of lifeways. Petra and whether to decide to manage change or just to let it happen. itself as a ruin? This essay explores the decay and persistence Wadi ‘Araba were in some ways a classic context for seasonal What of intervention, then – how do we implement inten- of landscape architecture, from small courtyard gardens to migration – the farmed, watered highlands offering cooler tional design interventions in such a momentous historical urban parks, field systems, and planned cities. While the pasture in the summer, Wadi ‘Araba a warmer and ephemeral landscape? The ideal, even romantic, conception of pristine original materiality of the design is lost, sometimes the winter home. The deforestation and urbanization of Petra has wilderness that undergirds NWPS and PAPOP does not design endures – no longer expressing its original purpose had a massive impact on the bedouin. provide a charter for managing a landscape such as Petra’s. but nonetheless recording the original conceptual plans of In 2005 UNESCO designated the “cultural space” of Whereas cultural heritage management almost universally the designer. Can these lines in the landscape prompt the three bedouin tribes of the Petra Region – the Sa‘idiyyin, ascribes to the 1964 Venice Charter for the Conservation and kind of contemplation of imagined pasts and future trajecto- the Bidoul, and the ‘Amaariin – as treasures of Intangible Restoration of Monuments and Sites, what is the landscape ries that ruins inspire? Cultural Heritage. But what of their tangible natural space? architect’s Venice Charter for the conservation and resto- To the viewer on the ground, the vigorous nature of vegeta- The inscription recognizes that “the bedu of Petra . . . have ration of historic natural landscapes? As soon as we call a tion tends to disguise the subtle remains of past designed preserved specific knowledge related to the flora and fauna of landscape historic, we place it within cultural memory and landscapes. So while we readily appreciate the drama of a the area, traditional medicine, camel husbandry, tent-making narrative. How we think about the landscape – how we ideal- ruined abbey or temple, the bounds of former gardens, parks, craftsmanship, and tracking and climbing skills.” All of this ize and imagine it – designs and constructs it. The Petra even and fields leave little to contemplate. The advent of aerial knowledge is ineluctably contingent on the natural landscape. of 1985 has vanished. The landscape has changed continually photography, however, particularly after the First World Additionally, bedouin culture is defined by pastoralism, so it over millennia. If we are to intervene, to design, which Petra War, revealed ruined landscape features that had hitherto would seem that at least one branch of UNESCO by implica- will we imagine, construct? remained undetected. John Bradfield, in his book Ancient tion expects grazing and habitation (prohibited by PAPOP) Perhaps our Petra problem can be located in the initial Landscapes (1957), gathered these images and introduced the of the Petra Archaeological Park. Nonintervention, allowing distinction between cultural and natural heritage. The notion landscape as a relict, a palimpsest of prior designs visible the natural systems to decline further, damages the habitat of that the natural is by definition “minimally influenced from a height. In Britain, for example, one might see the cir- the human treasure they have moved to protect. Defining the by human actions” immediately establishes a kind of sub- cular huts of Iron Age villages expressed as crop marks – the wilderness of Petra in terms of human absence has not made ject/object, human/environment dichotomy that may simply field’s plants growing at different rates due to the structures sense for several thousand years and still doesn’t. be inappropriate to any place on the planet these days and ditches buried below. The Roman practice of centuria- And yet this recognition of the importance of bedou heri- and certainly to most of the Old World. In the Petra Region, a tion – redrawing boundaries for the purpose of colonizing tage points the way to a broader conception of management methodology that recognizes a continuum of human presence new territories – is also clearly visible in Europe, the Near intervention in Petra. Conservation of habitat for the bed- as part of the ecosystem could, if properly implemented and East, and North Africa. ouin would by implication entail conservation of the natural assertively managed, ensure both the enhancement of biodi- Christopher Taylor went on to refine the analysis of these resources that their traditional way of life depends on. For versity and the sustainability of traditional human lifeways. landscapes, particularly in Britain, by bringing the viewer example, working to restore the biomass that underpins Petra would remain magnificent, stark – even bizarre. But back to the ground and explaining how to interpret the pastoralism and the species diversity that supports tradi- the humans who live here, grappling with the austerity of the details of fields, boundaries, and woodlands: how to “read” tional medicine would require range management, habitat high desert, might hang on. – Erin Addison the landscape. In his book The Archaeology of Gardens (1983), he restoration, and afforestation “interventions.” Successful demonstrates the way in which the buried terraces and geom- projects implemented in other parts of Jordan demonstrate etries of seventeenth-century formal gardens, turfed over when what became known as the “landscape garden” emerged in the eighteenth century, sometimes reveal themselves when 16 viewed from elevated positions in the raking light of the late soil and water conditions in Knot Garden at Stirling Castle, afternoon (the most famous instance being the Knot Gar- the area that would be best Stirling, Scotland. Courtesy of den visible from Stirling Castle). Taylor’s method of reading suited to the barley, wheat, Google Maps. the British landscape, documented with aerial photographs, flax, and other crops the has been a model for geographers, planners, and designers Romans had grown there. and many other names internationally for decades. Today, satellite imagery allows Charcoal fragments pro- referred to ancient burial archaeologists to view designed landscapes on a vast range of vided evidence that wood, grounds, landmarks of prior scales. Even details hidden beneath the densest tree canopies probably available on the cultures, or the agricultural can be studied, thanks to the remarkable new technique of estate, had been burned properties of the land itself. laser scanning (LIDAR) from the air. Aerial equipment is no for fuel. Slowly, then, the I learned what it meant to longer required, however. With Google Maps, everyone can fragmentary remains of this “perambulate” the boundar- explore the ruins of landscape (see box). villa in its landscape took ies, to recognize “assarting” During my doctoral studies in Roman landscape archaeol- shape as a ruin to be con- (the expansion of fields into ogy at Oxford University, I had the opportunity to work on templated from the many the properties of towns or the Roman villa at Castle Copse, in Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire. perspectives of the archae- royal forests), and myriad A large American and British team was excavating the main ologist. But what other clues other practices of making residential building in the clearing of a private wood called could be found in the villa’s landscape. In this process, Bedwyn Brail (Google Maps: 51.365230, -1.593549). The build- landscape? I could see how lines that ing was hardly a ruin by any romantic standard: all of its Investigating a theory began as a thought – a plan walls had been long since plundered, and our team carefully current at the time that modern parish boundaries preserved for a Roman road or camp, royal forest, or medieval infield/ dug and recorded the meager remains of the surfaces on ancient Roman villa property lines, I learned to “field walk”: outfield system – were then surveyed on the ground, made which people had lived. My role was to understand the larger plodding through the heavy clays of the fields, recording legal, perambulated, and built. Over centuries, a boundary landscape by examining the remains of plants and animals the location of Roman artifacts; documenting the relative line became a path, a hedgerow, a road, and then a bikeway: left behind on these floors, hearths, and other surfaces. age of field boundaries by counting the number of species of the materiality changed but the line endured. Landscape Sampling each layer of earth removed by the archaeologists, shrubs in the hedgerows; mapping the location of earthworks architecture was less ephemeral than I had thought. I carefully washed the bucketfuls of dirt in a large oil drum, and indicator species such as bluebells in thick woodlands The urban version of this phenomenon is no less impres- breaking up the clods of heavy clay and dissolving chalk in that had once been carefully managed and coppiced. In the sive, and my introduction to it was in Rome. A fellowship at the cold springwater of the site, encouraging carbonized process, I discovered the value of a well-waxed Barbour coat as the American Academy gave me two years to study the Forma bits of plant remains to break away and float to the top of the I shredded my American outerwear on the spiny hawthorns Urbis, a plan inscribed on fine marble slabs about 210 CE tank, and rinsing fine silts from the rest so that bits of bone, of the “haws” around the Brail – the boundaries, banks, and displayed to the public in the Templum Pacis, one of the mollusk shells, and other environmental remains became and ditches that were the progenitors of the “ha-ha” wall. city’s imperial forums. Eight complexes on the plan featured visible. From this evidence, we were able to glean traces of the The lines of former boundaries of the Brail’s woods can be enigmatic linear features that were thought to be gardens or cultivation practices at the villa, matching our findings with observed in the aerial photographs. groves; one of these, the porticus (portico) of the Theater of Despite the beautifully expressed presence of a straight, Pompey, is now widely considered to be the first public park well-built, Roman road, I found no sign that the Romans had of Rome (Google Maps: 41.895292, 12.475121). This elegantly Instructions for viewing sites made their most distinctive mark on this landscape: “centu- adorned public space, which was largely forgotten until the with Google Maps coordinates riation,” the resurveying of the land into a gridded system twentieth century, lies between the Campo dei Fiori and In this essay, you are invited to investigate the ruins to resettle veterans of the Roman army. Nor could I find Largo Argentina beneath centuries of medieval and later of landscape design using this tool. Longitude and lati- any proof of the villa’s estate continuing as a parish bound- construction. According to ancient sources, the park featured tude coordinates are provided throughout the discus- ary (in fact, later landscape archaeologists would refute this a long avenue for strolling between two groves of plane trees, sion, which can simply be entered into the search box theory). Nonetheless, I learned to read the shape of the land with fountains and displays of sculpture. As I laid the Roman of Google Maps. Use the satellite feature to find the site and the beautiful ways in which the English language once plan over those of the medieval buildings, it became clear under discussion. To warm up, try finding the Knot precisely described the topography and characteristics of this that the postclassical structures followed the lines of the Garden at Stirling Castle at 56.120125, -3.949496. The place. “Comb“ was a short, rounded valley; “vale” was a broad, garden’s walks and colonnades. The medieval neighborhood Roman centuriation that John Bradford documented open one; places with names ending in “hamme” were well preserves the orthogonal layout of the park and its walks with northwest of Cesena, in the Po Valley of Italy, is still watered; those ending in “ham” were near a Roman camp; only slight deviations. Today, strolling from Campo dei Fiori clearly visible at 44.153859, 12.294142. The many small to Largo Argentina, the tourist walks part of the way along fields are organized within larger, square blocks – these the central axis of the ancient public garden, from the great are the boundaries surveyed by the Romans. 17 Theater of Pompey at one end to the Senate Hall at the other, in accordance with regime changes during the Crusades. along the beach and the upper area of the promontory. To where Julius Caesar was assassinated; the back wall of the Ultimately the Roman substructures collapsed beneath their our surprise, an upper wing of the palace emerged. An Israeli latter building is still partially visible in the sunken archaeo- weight and the area was left to supply building materials for archaeologist working nearby found a large stadium running logical park at Largo Argentina (Google Maps: 41.895258, Cairo and Akko. From the temple area, it is still possible to along the coastline. The aerial photographs that display 12.476588). Everyone has a favorite place in Rome where one travel the course of the Roman decumanus out of Caesarea, but so much of the ancient city offered no hint of these two mon- building has been incorporated into another, but to discover the modern street is meters above the ancient one. Today you umental complexes, and yet excavation revealed sufficient how a plan of a designed landscape evolved into a special part drive right over the old city wall, and banana groves rather architectural remains of both buildings to enable clear of this ancient city was a particular thrill. than shops and houses flank the way (Google Maps: 32.501422, reconstructions. While the villa design at Castle Copse was difficult to 34.90017). Yet how did the lower palace survive, remaining visible discern, a city’s design can be well preserved in a rural land- The late Roman hippodrome west of the harbor was long in the surf for two millennia? Why didn’t the whole lower scape. For a time, Caesarea Maritima, north of Tel Aviv on the approached from the road through an orchard of mangoes, complex erode into the sea, built, as it was, on soft, calcare- eastern coast of the Mediterranean, rivaled Jerusalem as the from which the visitor would break out into a vast field as ous, local stone? Initially we believed that it was due to the most important city of Roman Judea and Palestine. The neat if springing from the starting gates onto the track (Google waterproof cement made of pozzolana, imported from the grid plan laid out by Herod the Great in 30 BCE and con- Maps: 32.498582, 34.898569). Today the spectators are a thick area of Pompeii. Recently, however, I began to explore the flat, structed by 12 BCE is still clearly visible in its ancient streets hedgerow of eucalyptus trees. A monumental granite obelisk rocky apron around the lower palace ruins, whose surface has and city blocks. The outer harbor, which sunk in an earth- once lay collapsed in the center, forcing the farmers to plow been covered by a green marine plant. This apron turned out quake in the second century CE, can be made out from the around it like old chariots around the spina. Recently, the to be a living reef, quite visible on the Google Earth views, air as a dark shadow in the azure Mediterranean Sea. Despite obelisk was re-erected, creating an oddly specific focal point created when vermetid snails colonized a sandstone platform decades of excavation, only a small percentage of the city has in the middle of the wheat field. The nearby amphitheater, leveled by the surf. These small creatures build up a protec- been exposed archaeologically, and yet traces of the Herodian remaining as an earthwork, is invisible unless farmers choose tive rim as they die and calcify into the reef. Marine zoologist metropolis and its later Byzantine expansion can be found to plow its interior; the arena then beckons us to enter. Uriel Safriel believes that the Romans may have known of the everywhere – as hedgerows, modern roads, and tracks, and in Palimpsests both reveal and withhold the past. Nowhere is value of these naturally formed structures in breaking the the cultivation patterns of agricultural land at the Kibbutz this more evident than in the siting of Herod’s seaside palace force of the waves. Because the momentum of the water was Sdot Yam. to the south of the harbor. Working on behalf of the Hebrew broken by the reef rather than the building, the palace could Caesarea is the rural equivalent of Rome; its modern life University of Jerusalem and the University of Pennsylvania be constructed at surf level. The reef accounts for the remark- is intertwined with the ancient remains, if not the actual Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, I co-directed the able preservation not only of the architectural ruin of the fabric, of Herod the Great’s city and the Byzantine, Muslim, excavations of this building, which had been systematically building but also of the pool, with its rock-cut planters. Sadly Crusader, Bosnian, and Israeli layers that quarried for fine marbles the reef itself is in danger of ruination, as changing sea levels overlaid it in the successive centuries. Today and building materials after and water temperatures in the Mediterranean are killing the recreational divers explore the sunken Hero- the fifth century CE. Part vermetids. Once-green reefs have become increasingly grey, dian harbor, occasionally finding treasure. of the palace, constructed and the erosion of the promontory threatens to send the lower Muslim couples pose for wedding photo- around a pool cut into the wing of this ancient palace to the sea floor, where it will be graphs in front of an abandoned minaret, promontory at sea level, has visible only as a shadow from the air. built for Bosnian refugees in the nineteenth been pounded by the sea If the garden pool and planters of Herod’s palace were pre- century. The lush lawn beneath their feet for thousands of years, and served by the sea, those of his palace at Jericho were preserved covers the ruins of early Islamic Caesarea, its surviving ruins, known by the desert. Ancient gardens have rarely been explored by which in turn was built on the silted remains locally as “Cleopatra’s Pool,” classical archaeologists because it is almost unimaginable of the Roman inner harbor. Tourists enjoy have long been a landmark that anything could be left of a garden after two millennia. Of restaurants and ice cream tucked into the along the coast (Google course, it is true that no living plants can endure for two mil- ruins of Byzantine shops. Maps: 32.497124, 34.889227). lennia. Still, as we have seen, cultivation leaves behind signs Christian pilgrims visit the archaeologi- My co-director, the late of boundaries, water management and display, fertilization, cal remains of an octagonal church built over architect and archaeologist infrastructure, art, architecture, and the idea of ordering the pagan Temple to Augustus and Rome Ehud Netzer, had identified nature within bounds. The original lines of the design can be (Google Maps: 32.501316, 34.892134). The the locale as Herod’s palace preserved over long periods of time simply through the prac- church was destroyed so that a mosque could in the 1970s, and we planned tices that created and sustained the garden. Herod the Great’s be built; then ever-larger buildings were a small project to excavate erected, churches and mosques alternating the little remaining earth

Herod the Great’s palace at 18 Caesarea Maritima. palace at Jericho on the West Bank is a well-preserved – albeit Place Maker: seriously endangered – example (Google Maps: 31.852022, 35.435885). It was here that Herod, according to the ancient historian Josephus, drowned his young brother-in-law in one of the swimming pools of this desert oasis. John Fairey of Peckerwood Garden and the United States into a With water brought by aqueducts and channels from the n the early 1970s John Fairey established relaxed, 39-acre landscape distant hills, Herod and his predecessors, the Hasmoneans, Peckerwood Garden on property he owned composition. From the outset constructed a paradeisos – well-watered groves of palms in Hempstead, Texas, about fifty miles he was committed not only and balsam, elegant pavilions, pools, and outdoor dining from downtown Houston. Open to the to making a beautiful garden areas. American teams in the 1950s, directed by James Kelso, public since 1998 under the auspices of the full of rare specimens but also Dimitri Baramki, and James Pritchard, and an Israeli team IPeckerwood Garden Conservation Founda- to sharing seeds, plants, and directed by Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University of Jeru- tion, this is no ordinary garden. Here Fairey knowledge with nurseries and salem, revealed a series of garden areas. The largest was so has combined his experience as a plant research institutions. Harvard monumental that the excavators assumed they were unearth- hunter, former nurseryman, and artist to University’s Arnold Arbore- ing part of a town, not a palace. create a place that is unique in its ability to tum; the University of Califor- Excavations in the gardens revealed rows of flowerpots instruct and inspire visitors. Few can make nia, Berkeley; the University buried in the ground, delineating paths for strolling beside a similar claim, for only a small number of of California, Santa Cruz; the the great swimming pool. Larger plants were brought in from other gardens, such as Dan Hinckley’s Wind- Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew; nurseries and planted in pits filled with soil more fertile than cliff on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, North Carolina State Uni- what was available locally, enabling its later identification can be said to rival Peckerwood as a plant versity; and Chollipo Arbo- by archaeologists. These clues to the layout of the plantings, hunter’s self-created paradise. retum Foundation in Korea along with water channels, the compacted earth of the walks, When I asked Fairey to tell me how are among those that have and other details, bring the intentions of the designer to he discovered his destiny as a plant hunter- benefited through collabora- life, despite the fact that we have yet to securely identify any cum-nurseryman-cum-garden designer, tion with Peckerwood. of the plants of these gardens. he replied that in 1988 he had accompanied In addition, because of its Our opportunity to reflect on the ruins of our ancient Lynn Lowrey, a legendary Texas plants- location in southeast Texas, designed landscapes is emerging at a time when they are in man, on a trip to the Sierra Madre Mountains in northern Peckerwood Garden forms a botanical bridge between Mexico danger of being destroyed by development and the chaos of Mexico – an adventure that proved to have a profound impact and the United States, raising awareness on both sides of the war. The tools for observing these extraordinary features on him. As the two men collected seeds and cuttings from border about the importance of biodiversity and threat of from the air and for sharing them through social media are rare and endangered plants, Fairey became obsessed with plant losses due to overgrazing, overdevelopment, and climate the same tools ISIL uses, seeking to shock and erase. And plant hunting. In the years that followed, he made almost change. Moreover, by serving as both a plant showcase and a where designed landscapes do not include readily visible a hundred more collecting expeditions. The experience of tour de force of landscape design that is open to the public, it objects for terrorists to target, this very absence creates the discovering plants in the wild and then cultivating them has influenced gardeners and horticulturists from across the impression that the open space is available for construction. domestically helped shape his approach to garden design. His country and around the world. The area of the famed balsam and palm groves of the winter imaginative style can best be characterized as one based on It is for his botanical passion, intrepidity in gathering palace complex at Jericho is facing this kind of obliteration, as contrasts of light and shade, foliage and bark, rock and water, exotic plants from remote corners of the world, horticultural is the site’s far more architecturally defined sunken garden. and innovative combinations of floral color, leaf shape, and skill in propagating and bringing them into cultivation, and This extraordinary complex of integrated landscape and surface texture. generosity in converting the landscape around his Hemp- architecture is endangered by lack of funding and interna- Because Peckerwood is located at the convergence of three stead home into a garden of learning and delight that the tional antipathy toward the preservation of ancient sites in climatic zones, Fairey has been able to integrate more than Foundation for Landscape Studies will honor John Fairey at disputed territories. Development pressures everywhere are three thousand rare specimen plants from Mexico, Asia, its annual Place Maker / Place Keeper Luncheon on May 11, making the ancient landscapes seen from the air a phenom- 2016. For information on purchasing tickets for this event, enon of the past, just as we gain the tools to better explore please visit: www.foundationforlandscapestudies.org/news. them. With the ready availability of rich aerial imagery, – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers designers must begin to defend this legacy, finding creative ways to preserve and integrate these old site lines into new landscape design, adding a new layer to the palimpsest. – Kathryn Gleason

19 Book Review by American history profes- of landscape architecture taken on numerous journeys friends included a small sor Charles C. McLaughin, in America, Olmsted was in company with people coterie of his brother John’s the even grander task equally eminent as an active neither literary, scientific, classmates at Yale, serious of publishing them was force in driving public nor artistic, but more than young men such as Charles Olmsted: Writings man of genius began to be launched with funding from policy with humanitarian ordinarily susceptible to Loring Brace, whose let- on Landscape, Culture, recognized. the Andrew Mellon Founda- zeal before, during, and beauty of scenery and who ter confiding his struggle and Society In the mid-1960s, a tion in 1972. The next year after the Civil War. Perusing with little talking about it, to square his own deeply ed. Charles E. Beveridge nascent interest in historic McLaughin asked Charles the book’s eight hundred and none for my instruc- religious quest for salva- Olmsted Papers Project/ preservation provided a Beveridge, a social history pages, it is hard to imagine tion, plainly shaped their tion with Calvin’s stern Library of Congress counterweight to doctri- professor at the University of how he had time to keep up courses and their customs doctrine of predestination naire architectural modern- Maryland, and independent such a vigorous personal with reference to the enjoy- is answered by Olmsted Today Frederick ism, and Olm- scholar Victoria Post Ranney correspondence on a broad ment of it.” thus: “What in the world Law Olmsted sted’s standing to join the staff of what was range of subjects while also At the age of fourteen do you want? Pure Religion, enjoys a repu- rose further now officially known as the writing lengthy and cogent Olmsted suffered an acute don’t you – to save you – and tation akin to as landscape Olmsted Papers Project. topical essays and newspa- case of sumac poisoning, that is ‘to visit & relieve the that of André began to claim Volume 1, The Formative per dispatches that are dis- resulting in an eye disorder widows and fatherless.’ It ‘is Le Nôtre, Louis its rightful Years, for which Beveridge tinguished for their resolute that caused doctors to advise before God.’ Now can you not XIV’s eminent place alongside served as associate edi- candor, moral perspective, him against pursuing for- do that without believing seventeenth- buildings as a tor, was published in 1977. and narrative detail. mal study. For this reason, in – ‘what you do not under- century gardener, component of He served as co-editor for The scion of an old New he tells us, “It followed that stand,’ as your ridiculous and eighteenth- the urban fabric volume 2, Slavery and the England family and son at the time my schoolmates conscience tells you you century Eng- to be saved. South, which appeared in of a successful Hartford were entering college I was ought to, and makes you half land’s Lancelot Campaigns 1981, and became lead editor merchant, Olmsted enjoyed nominally the pupil of a miserable for not doing.” “Capability” were launched of the project with volume 3, a happy and secure middle- topographical engineer Today Brace is remem- Brown – who, to restore New Creating Central Park, edited class childhood. Unwit- but really for the most part bered for his efforts to along with his successor York’s Central Park and in collaboration with David tingly, his appreciation of given over to a decently ameliorate the lives of Humphry Repton, altered Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Schuyler. Only now has this nature and scenery helped restrained vagabond life, orphans and newsboys with the appearance of that Olmsted’s badly deteriorated massive endeavor neared prepare him for his later generally pursued under the the formation of the Chil- country’s landscape with the masterpieces of Romantic conclusion with the publica- career. In the first selection guise of an angler, a fowler dren’s Aid Society and other transformation of the estates design. But as yet only a few tion of volume 9, The Last of Beveridge’s anthology, an or a dabbler on the shallow- charities serving New York’s of Whig aristocrats into antebellum and Civil War Great Projects. autobiographical fragment, est shores of the deep sea of impoverished, mid-nine- pastoral and picturesque historians were familiar It was a foregone con- Olmsted recounts that as a the natural sciences.” He did teenth-century immigrants. pleasure grounds. However, with the fact that he was an clusion that the Library boy he loved to ramble in the manage to read on his own, Olmsted’s own contribution while Le Nôtre, Brown, and author who had published of America would invite woods and fields surround- however, and the books that in this regard was noth- Repton’s names never fell important books on the Beveridge to cement his ing his Connecticut home most interested him were, ing less than the creation into obscurity, it was not institution of slavery. reputation as doyen of Olm- and that it was of no concern significantly in light of later of America’s first purpose- until the 1922 publication of Fortunately, at approxi- stediana by enlisting him to to him or his family when, events, those of Uvedale built people’s park. Frederick Law Olmsted: Land- mately the same that time edit Frederick Law Olmsted: still in the woods after sun- Price, William Gilpin, and As we turn the pages of scape Architect, 1822–1903, that landscape preservation Writings on Landscape, Cul- set, he would seek overnight other eighteenth-century Frederick Law Olmsted: Writ- an abbreviated collection of proponents had started to ture, and Society. shelter in the homes of English theorists of the ings on Landscape, Culture, Olmsted’s writings edited reverse Central Park’s near The title is an apt one. friends. Recalling the youth- Picturesque as applied to and Society, we see Olmsted by his son Frederick Law destruction, Olmsted’s As great as he was as the ful carriage rides on which landscape scenery. growing toward his destiny Olmsted Jr. and Theodora voluminous papers were founder of the profession he accompanied his father As he approached both as a landscape designer Kimball, that the reputation discovered and deposited and step-mother, he later manhood, Olmsted’s best and a social commentator. of this nineteenth-century in the Library of Congress. wrote, “It was my fortune Before this could transpire, To catalogue them was an also at this period to be based on his random self- immense challenge. Headed education in landscape mat- ters, he decided to become

20 a farmer. With financial aid tion of these “Letters on the Melville, and Thoreau, the tion of its components in the if Union troops were to friend Edwin L. Godkin, from his father, he pur- Productions, Industry and uncertainty forced on the commissioners’ 1858 report succeed in winning the war. the magazine’s first editor. chased a seventy-acre farm Resources of the Southern publishing industry as well allows the reader to tour the Appalled at the ineptitude Rather, seeking a surer way at Sachem’s Head in Guil- States” bear witness to Olm- as the economy at large by park section by section. In of the Union military, he to support his wife Mary, ford, Connecticut, on the sted’s growing realization the financial panic of 1857 doing so it becomes obvi- wrote a critical “Report on the widow of his brother rocky edge of Long Island that slavery was not only did not bode well for his ous that the park’s design is the Demoralization of the John, and their children and Sound. When it proved unprofitable but abhor- future. Opportunely, a com- holistic rather than simply Volunteers” as he himself stepchildren, Olmsted – unprofitable, he sold it and rent. As a proponent of the mission had been recently a “to-do” list of unrelated teetered on the brink of ner- who, based on previous bought another on Staten short-lived Free Soil politi- formed to oversee a huge projects: a brilliant, Roman- vous exhaustion, which was experience constructing Island, where he could cal party, he extolled the civic enterprise: the con- tic symphony in which thus described by diarist Central Park and directing pursue new agricultural prosperous rural commu- struction of a large public the visitor moves through George Templeton Strong: the Sanitary Commission, methods with greater suc- nities formed in the Texas park in New York City. The passages of turf, woods, “[Olmsted] works like a dog considered himself cess. However, restlessness Hill Country by German commissioners were seek- and water by means of all day and sits up nearly to be first and foremost and curiosity got the better immigrants who arrived in ing a man to work under curvilinear carriage drives, all night, doesn’t go home an able administrator – of him, and he persuaded the wake of the 1848 revolu- the direction of the chief pedestrian paths, and bridle to his family . . . for five accepted an offer to take his father to allow him to tions in Europe. There he engineer as superintendent trails. As a bonus, Writings days and nights altogether, charge of a gold-mining accompany his brother interviewed a well-educated of the preliminary clear- on Landscape, Culture, and works with a steady, fever- operation on the Mariposa John on an extended trip to farmer and was happy to ing operations; Olmsted Society contains a beauti- ish intensity till four in the Estate in California. England for the professed report that this man, with said that he was interested ful set of illustrations of morning, sleeps on a sofa in But even in the process of purpose of improving his his two sons and no hired in applying for the job. this scenic and engineering his clothes, and breakfasts transplanting himself and education in what was then labor, had cultivated 2,500 Although some did not con- vision. Other images show on strong coffee and pickles!!!” his family to the opposite called scientific agriculture, bushels of corn plus some sider him a “practical man” the park under construction Remarkably, as the war side of the continent, his meaning innovative farming wheat, cotton, and tobacco since he refused to engage and its appearance when was drawing to a close in energetic mind was filled methods using such tech- on sixty acres of land during in patronage politics, and first opened to the public. 1863, Olmsted was engaged with visions for the comple- nologies as subsurface clay the previous year. others saw him as nothing Another welcome selec- in drafting a prospectus for tion of Central Park. In an tiles to drain standing water. With the publication but a gentleman, inexperi- tion in the volume, “Parks: a new periodical, The Nation. animated letter written en Publication upon his return of his Yeoman articles in enced in this line of work, An Encyclopedic View: He envisioned what is today route to California, describ- of his first book, Walks and three volumes – Journey in he nevertheless obtained the 1861,” shows Olmsted as the oldest continuously ing to Ignatz Anton Pilát, Talks of an American Farmer the Seaboard Slave States, position. Soon he was trans- a well-informed student published weekly magazine foreman of the gardeners in England (1852), a diaris- Journey Through Texas, and forming an army of ward of landscape history. But in the United States as a in the park, the tropical tic account of customs and Journey in the Back Country – heelers into an efficient even as he was writing this liberal journal in which vegetation he had seen while scenery, led to a commission he abandoned farming and workforce. essay, with its descriptions “there would be time for crossing the isthmus of Pan- from the New-York Daily began to pursue a career in It was at this juncture of pleasure grounds from the deliberate preparation ama, his aesthetic sensibility Times to travel in the South publishing. After affiliating that, in response to the remote antiquity to the pres- of . . . articles” and which and adherence to the design to gather firsthand impres- himself with the firm of commissioners’ decision to ent, war had erupted. Like would offer “the matured principles underlying the sions and data showing the Dix, Edwards, & Company hold a competition in order many other Union patri- views of competent authori- Picturesque came to the comparative diseconomy of and becoming managing to select a design for the new ots, Olmsted was ready to ties, instead of the first fore: “The scenery excited the Southern slave system editor of Putnam’s Monthly park, architect Calvert Vaux answer the call. He accepted impression of writers not a wholly different emo- over agriculture employing Magazine, he enjoyed a new approached Olmsted with the charge of managing the always possessing special tion from that produced by free labor. identity as a man of letters the suggestion of collaborat- Sanitary Commission, fore- qualifications for their task.” any of our temperate-zone Written under the and member of the “liter- ing on what turned out to runner of the American Red Ultimately, however, scenery, or rather it excited appropriately chosen nom ary republic of New York.” be the winning entry, a plan Cross. Once established in he did not return to New an emotion of a kind which de plume “Yeoman,” a selec- Although pleased with the they labeled “Greensward.” Washington D.C., the newly York to work with his our scenery sometimes opportunity this gave him Olmsted’s detailed descrip- appointed director struggled produces as a quiet sugges- to solicit books and articles with insufficient medical tion to reflection, excited it from the likes of Emerson, staff and supplies and the Irving, Longfellow, Stowe, realization that reinforce- ments were badly needed

21 instantly, instinctively, and through it, embraced by the found themselves facing fully planned garden order to achieve a “tropical A lengthy essay titled directly.” He then went on towering granite cliffs of bankruptcy. Providentially suburb. Olmsted urged its effect” near the Lake in Cen- “Landscape Gardening,” at length discussing how, the Sierras, is as vivid as a for both Olmsted and the developers tral Park, he now instructed written in 1877, expounds on although it was impossible painting by Thomas Hill or nation, he received a letter Robert Demcker, Pilát’s the theme of eschewing hor- to obtain possession, to plant palm trees and a photograph by Carleton at this time in which Calvert successor as chief landscape ticultural embellishment if possible, of a strip of other tropical vegetation in Watkins: Vaux attempted to persuade gardener, to trim and prune and small effects in favor of ground from two hun- Central Park, something of him to return to New York mutilated trees and thin broader naturalistic views Banks of heartsease and dred to six hundred feet the same impression could and pursue what Vaux stands in such a way that and vistas. beds of cowslips and wide, extending from be achieved by substitut- perceived to be his former desired scenic impressions In 1872 Olmsted’s asso- daisies are frequent, and the city to the nearest ing species of comparable colleague’s true destiny as could be reestablished. In a ciation with Central Park thickets of alder, dog- border of your property, appearance. He suggested, a landscape architect. The memorandum containing came to an end with the wood and willow often to secure its thorough for instance, “the Ailanthus two men reestablished their instructions to the park’s abolition of the original fringe the shores. At drainage, to plant it that at no great distance (as association in 1865 with the gardeners, he tried to coun- board of commissioners several points streams with trees, and to carry a landscape painter would formation of Olmsted, Vaux ter the trend toward mani- and the installation of the of water flow into the through it a series of depict them) you would not & Co. in order to collaborate cured horticultural displays Department of Public Parks chasm, descending at one separate, but adjoining know them apart, at least an on the design of Brooklyn’s by reminding them of the as an agency of municipal leap from five hundred ways, especially adapted average observer would not.” Prospect Park. In the 1868 purpose of the financial government. At the same to fourteen hundred feet. in construction first for Not surprisingly, once “Report of the Landscape outlay for the park: time for reasons of mutual One small stream falls, in walking, second for rid- in California, in addition Architects and Superinten- convenience, he and Vaux three closely consecutive ing, third for pleasure- It is not simply to give to managing the Mariposa dents,” in which the concept dissolved their partnership. pitches, a distance of two driving, and fourth to the people of the city an mining operations, Olmsted of the “parkway” and the Vaux continued his career thousand six hundred give convenient access to opportunity for getting wrote discerning descrip- term itself is proposed, we as an architect and Olmsted feet, which is more than houses to be built on the fresh air and exercise . . . tions of the novel-to-him have a glimpse of Olm- continued to accept land- fifteen times the height route and accommodate It is not simply to make scenery of the arid West, sted’s visionary creativity at scape-design commissions, of the falls of Niagara. In heavy freighting, with- a place of amusement or which if not Picturesque in work. Drawing on examples including the design of the the spray of these falls out inconvenience to the for the gratification of familiar terms, nevertheless in Paris and Berlin, he grounds of the United States superb rainbows are seen. through pleasure travel. curiosity or for gaining in some places partook of describes in word and plan Capitol; a design for a park knowledge. The main the sublime. His reputation Olmsted went on at a scheme in which “a central He also proposed the at Mount Royal in Mon- object and justification as a park maker had fol- length to champion the act mall is divided into two construction of a parkway treal; recommendations for is simply to produce a lowed him, and he was soon of Congress that guaran- parts to make room for a between the new devel- the alignment of Riverside certain influence on the asked to write reports with teed “that this scenery shall central road-way, prepared opment and downtown Drive and the development minds of people and guidelines for proposed never be private property with express reference to Chicago. of Riverside Park in Man- through this to make landscape developments. but that like certain defen- pleasure-riding and driv- Now as much urban hattan; a new street plan for life in the city healthier These included Mountain sive points upon our coast it ing, the ordinary paved, planners as park designers, the Riverdale section of the and happier. The char- View Cemetery in Oakland, shall be held solely for pub- traffic road-ways, with their Olmsted and Vaux accepted Bronx, which would follow acter of this influence is pleasure grounds for the city lic purposes.” Envisioning flagged sidewalks remaining commissions to design the “highly picturesque” a poetic one and it is to of San Francisco, and the the popularity of Yosemite still on the outside of the parks in Hartford, Buffalo, local topography rather than be produced by means of University of California’s as a tourist destination, he public mall for pedestrians.” Tarrytown, and elsewhere. a grid plat; and a plan for scenes through observa- Berkeley campus. His most argued for “the prevention By now the joint reputa- In 1872 they began a heroic Boston’s Emerald Necklace, tion of which the mind important contribution of all constructions mark- tion of Olmsted and Vaux attempt to reverse political a perimeter circuit of parks may be more or less lifted during this period was his edly inharmonious with as the country’s preeminent depredations and disastrous linked by parkways. out of moods and habits 1865 “Preliminary Report the scenery or which would park designers brought horticultural policies imple- In 1883, with the “Emer- into which it is, under upon the Yosemite and Big unnecessarily obscure, them planning commis- mented in Central Park dur- ald Necklace” park system the ordinary conditions Tree Grove.” The descrip- distort, or detract from the sions in other cities. Thus ing the reign of Boss Tweed. under way, Olmsted decided of life in the city, likely tion of Yosemite Valley and dignity of the scenery.” Riverside, outside of In the same Picturesque to take up residence in the to fall. the Merced River that flows During the period Chicago, became an art- terms in which Olmsted Boston suburb of Brookline. when he was writing these had instructed Pilát to plant There he built Fairstead, words, the owners of the certain botanical species in a combination home and Mariposa mining operation office in which he began 22 a landscape-architectural Awards Contributors practice in association with his sons John and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. With their participation, he continued 2015 John Brinckerhoff R. Bruce Stephenson Erin Addison, an historian Laurie Olin is a professor of Antiquity in Eighteenth-Cen- a demanding career until Jackson Book Prize Winners John Nolen: Landscape and landscape architect, has landscape architecture at the tury Rome (2012). He is the nearly the end of his life. Architect and City Planner lived and worked in Jordan University of Pennsylvania co-curator of the Morgan Continually crisscrossing Anthony Acciavatti University of Massachusetts since 1994. Currently she and founding partner of Library and Museum exhi- the country by train, he Ganges Water Machine: Press, 2015 focuses on contemporary OLIN, a landscape architec- bition City of the Soul: Rome designed park systems, col- Designing New India’s water concerns and sustain- tural frm in Philadelphia. and the Romantics (June 17 lege campuses, the grounds Ancient River Ron Williams able development in arid He is the author of Across through September 11, 2016). of the 1893 World’s Colum- Applied Research + Design Landscape Architecture landscapes and on economic the Open Field: Essays Drawn bian Exposition in Chicago, Publishing, 2015 in Canada development in communi- from English Landscapes (1999) Baker H. Morrow, FASLA, is a and private estates, includ- McGill-Queen’s University ties that host signifcant and coauthor of La Foce: practicing landscape archi- ing Biltmore, George Charles E. Beveridge, Lau- Press, 2014 archaeological sites. The A Garden and Landscape in tect and Professor of Prac- Washington Vanderbilt’s ren Meier, and Irene Mills holder of a M.L.A. from the Tuscany (2001) and Vizcaya: tice of Landscape Architec- 8,000-acre Gilded Age Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans 2015 David R. Coffin University of Arizona and An American Villa and its ture at the University of New demesne in Ashville, North and Views of Public Parks Publication Grant Winners a Ph.D. in religious studies Makers (2006). The designer Mexico. He is the co-editor Carolina, with its French Johns Hopkins University from the University of Cali- for the transformation of of Canyon Gardens: The château-style mansion by Press, 2015 John Dixon Hunt fornia, Santa Barbara, she is Bryant Park and Columbus Ancient Pueblo Landscapes of Richard Morris Hunt. John Evelyn: A Life of the author of Documenting Circle in New York City, the the American Southwest and Thanks to the Library Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo Domesticity Deforestation at Sadd grounds of the Washington the translator of A Harvest of of America’s publication of Paradise Transplanted: Reaktion Books al-Ahmar, Petra Region, Monument in Washington, Reluctant Souls: Fray Alonso Frederick Law Olmsted: Writ- Migration and the Making of Jordan: 1924-2011 (2011). D.C., and the new Getty de Benavides’s History of New ings on Landscape, Culture, California Gardens Elizabeth Kryder-Reid Center in Los Angeles, he Mexico, 1630. and Society, the reader who University of California California Mission Landscapes: Kathryn Gleason is a profes- received the American Soci- does not have space to shelve Press, 2014 Race, Memory, and the Politics sor of landscape architecture ety of Landscape Architects Frederic C. Rich, former or time to read the nine- of Heritage at Cornell University, where Medal for Lifetime Achieve- partner and now of counsel volume series of Olmsted’s Mark Laird University of Minnesota she is also a member of ment in 2011. to the law frm Sullivan & complete papers can grasp A Natural History of English CIAMS, the Cornell Insti- Cromwell in New York City, the range of his work. Here Gardening Dean Cardasis tute for Archaeology and John A. Pinto is the Howard is the author of Christian he appears in the round, Yale University Press, 2015 James Rose Material Studies. Known for Crosby Butler Memorial Nation (2013), a dystopian not just as an unparalleled Library of American her explorations of the ori- Professor of the History of novel about the theocratic exponent of nineteenth- Finola O’Kane Landscape History gins of landscape architec- Architecture, Emeritus, in ambitions of Christian century Romanticism in Ireland and the Picturesque: ture in western culture, she the Department of Art and fundamentalist politics landscape design but also as Design, Landscape Painting, Mohammad Gharipour has conducted archaeologi- Archaeology at Princeton (W. W. Norton, 2013). His a chronicler of the tumul- and Tourism, 1700-1840 Gardens of Renaissance Europe cal excavations of ancient University and a Fellow of latest book, Getting to Green: tuous historic events to Yale University Press, 2013 and the Islamic Empires: gardens and designed land- the American Academy in Saving Nature: A Bipartisan which he was an eyewitness Encounters and Connections scapes around the Roman Rome. His research inter- Solution (W. W. Norton, and an articulate voice for Robert Riley Pennsylvania State Empire, most recently at ests center on architecture, forthcoming April, 2016) the moral salvation of the The Camaro in the Pasture: University Press ancient Stabiae (near Pom- urbanism, and landscape in is about environmental nation, at a time as critical Speculations on the Cultural peii, Italy), Petra (Jordan), Rome, especially in the eigh- politics. He discovered the to its future well-being as Landscape of America Caesarea (Israel), and later teenth century. Among his Neander Valley while that of the present. University of Virginia Press, period sites at Nagaur, publications are The Trevi doing research for a second – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers 2015 Rajasthan (India), and Zuni, Fountain (1986), Hadrian’s novel, in which Homo New Mexico (USA). Villa and its Legacy (coau- neanderthalensis plays an This review is also published in the March 2016 issue of thored with William L. Mac- important role. The New Criterion. Donald, 1995), and Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and 23 Volume xi, Number ii Spring 2016

Publishers: Editor: Vincent Buonanno Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Richard Gilder and Lois Chiles Associate Editor: John A. Pinto Alice Truax Reuben M. Rainey Frederic C. Rich Assistant Editor: Theodore C. Rogers Margaret Sullivan Margaret Sullivan Copy Editor: Margaret Oppenheimer Board of Directors: Frederic C. Rich, Designer: Chairman Skeggs Design Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Contributors: President Erin Addison Antonia Adezio Kathryn Gleason Vincent Buonanno Baker H. Morrow Kenneth I. Helphand Laurie Olin Robin Karson John A. Pinto Nancy Newcomb Frederic C. Rich Laurie Olin Elizabeth Barlow Rogers Therese O’Malley John A. Pinto Reuben M. Rainey Margaret Sullivan udies t dscape S an L tion r fo

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