In an entry on parks written for The New American Cyclopaedia in 1861, Olmsted explains that early examples were willows enclosing English nobles with fences to create deer enclosures. Trees were cut down to create more free space, and deer served as lawnmowers to keep the vast fields clean. Olmsted goes on to discuss all the entertainment venues known to man at the time, from Nebuchadnezzar`s Babylonian Hanging Gardens to Paris` Tuileries Gardens, Florence`s Cascine Park, and St. Petersburg`s pristine Summer Gardens, which were said to be watched by a policeman to watch every leaf to catch it when it fell before it reached the ground. The gardens of St. Petersburg were the apotheosis of a sensibility that Olmsted dates back to the 15th century in another essay, “whose main characteristics were delicacy, order, frame, finesse of surface.” It was understandable, the compulsion to tame and sterilize nature. Since the dawn of civilization, people had looked at the natural world with suspicion, if not terror. In the Bible, the word desert means fear, danger, confusion, chaos. For Olmsted, the question of class was linked to a fundamental question of the nature of place. Olmsted saw uprooting, stillness and turmoil everywhere.
The American dream was a dream of mobility. The creative destruction of capitalism has also destabilized society. Even the oldest municipalities weren`t really populated, Olmsted concluded, because the dynamics of cities meant that the urban landscape was constantly changing. Olmsted brilliantly expressed the ephemeral nature of commercial civilization after his first visit to Chicago. “It seems unnecessary to describe Chicago,” he wrote to a friend. “What it was when I saw it, it won`t be when it`s read.” What could counteract the troubling flow of the modern world? Olmsted argued that parks could provide a sense of permanence in cities. In fact, a well-designed park can seem eternal. Olmsted also hoped that cultural institutions would keep people together. What else could put down roots in a community? This question still needs good answers. www.olmstedparks.org/about/frederick-law-olmsted/ Olmsted recognized the contradiction and struggled with it. If natural beauty were the goal of landscape architecture, then would not be “the best result of all human labor.
just being a poor fake”? So why not just leave nature as it was? Why intervene in organic processes, add shrubs here, fine trees there? The two writers who most influenced his thinking on the subject were the eighteenth-century Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann and the prominent Congregational theologian of the Olmsted period, Horace Bushnell. In his book On Loneliness in Relation to its Influence on Mind and Heart, Zimmermann recounts how he reluctantly left his mountain canton of Bern to serve the ailing Frederick the Great. Separated from his home and family, he sinks into a deep melancholy, tempered only by daily walks in a garden “à la anglais” of a friend near Hanover. Awakening his curiosity, Zimmermann began after explaining nature`s ability to heal disturbances of the mind. He came to the conclusion that the landscape deployed its powerful effect through imagination. 5 Olmsted read Zimmermann`s book as a child, rediscovered it at the age of twenty-two, and enjoyed it afterwards. To the theories of the Swiss physician, he added the teachings on the importance of the “unconscious influence” of Horace Bushnell, who was pastor of his family in Hartford for many years. In addition to designing parks, Olmsted has worked in many other ways to protect and enhance the environment.
For several years in his 20s, he tried to become an exemplary “scientific” farmer. He was convinced that the waste of resources could endanger society, and his writings on the South argued that slavery encouraged the abuse of land. His 1865 report on the future of Yosemite made a strong and innovative case for preserving natural landscapes.