Frederick Law Olmsted

By F. L. O.
Honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects and of the Boston Society of Architects; Author of a Journey in Texas, etc.

PREFACE

Something accrues from special attention continuously directed for many years to a particular field of observation and reflection, giving a value to counsel about it that would not be allowed on the ground of native talent or learning on the part of the counsel-giver.

Partly for this reason I propose, by way of introduction, to give at this point some account of my life.

But partly also I propose to do so from regard to a disposition generally prevalent to underrate the value of professional or bookish counsel on the subject of this book. This disposition grows largely out of an impression that the courses by which men come to set themselves up as professional advisers on this subject or to write books upon it are, like those of students in a school, of a kind to withdraw them in a great degree from nature and from the ordinary life of men, consequently from a ready, sympathetic understanding of their wants; that these courses tend to pervert their natures, lessen freedom of mind, restrain healthy impulses and make them creatures of rules and conventions. This impression is the deeper because of the influence unconsciously acting from an old idea associated with the word garden, the essence of gardening having been withdrawal from nature and restriction to artificial conditions. (Garden, girdle and girth are from the same root—signifying constraint.) A Gardener is thought of as a man working in accommodation to artificial restrictions.

Many times something expressive of this idea has been plainly said to me or possibly said of me and of my advice and work. Hundreds of times a prejudice of mind of this nature has been apparent in those seeking my counsel.

I hope the slight account I propose to give of myself may cause what is to follow after it to be read with less prejudice of this kind than it might otherwise be.

I can see that my pleasure began to be affected by conditions of scenery at an early age,—long before it could have been suspected by others from anything that I said and before I began to mentally connect the cause and effect of enjoyment in it. It occurred too, while I was but a half-grown lad, that my parents thought well to let me wander as few parents are willing their children should.

Within thirty miles of where they lived there were a score of houses of their kindred and friends at which I was always welcome. They were mostly farm houses and had near them interesting rivers, brooks, meadows, rocks, woods or mountains, those less rural had pleasant old gardens. Of the people two only shall be referred to particularly. One a poor scholar who, after a deep affliction, lived in seclusion with no occupation but that of reading good old books to which he had formed an attachment in happier days. One of his favorite authors was Virgil, and he took pleasure in reading and translating him to me. He was quaintly mild, courteous and ceremonious, of musing, contemplative habits, and in these and other respects so different from most men whom I knew that, as he commanded my respect and affectionate regard, I recognize him to have had a notable influence in my education.

The other had inherited a moderate competence and been brought up to no regular calling. He lived in an unusually fine old village house with an old garden, was given to natural science, had a cabinet, a few works of art and a notable small library. He was shy and absorbed and I took little from him directly, but he was kind and not so careful of his treasures that I could not cautiously use them as playthings and picture books. He introduced me to Isaac Walton. He had no man servant,—indeed no servants, his handmaids being of the order then called help, and he was on precisely the terms with them, as it now seems to me, that he might have been with helpful sisters, though they did not sit at table with him.

A man came from without the household for the heavier work of the place, giving but a small part of his time to it, and there was a boy to do the light chores who received no wages but worked for his board, books and schooling. One of the boys who thus became my playfellow afterwards made his way through college, studied law, and came to be a member of Congress and Governor of a State.

For the rest my kinsmen and friends were plain, busy, thrifty people, mostly farmers and good citizens.

If in my rambling habits I did not come home at night, it was supposed that I had strayed to some of these other homes where I would be well taken care of, and little concern was felt at my absence; but it several times occurred before I was twelve years old that I had been lost in woods and finding my way out after sunset had passed the night with strangers and had been encouraged by my father rather than checked in the adventurousness that led me to do so.

It was my good fortune also at this period to be taken on numerous journeys in company with people neither literary, scientific nor artistic, but more than ordinarily susceptible to beauty of scenery and who with little talking about it, and none for my instruction, plainly shaped their courses and their customs with reference to the enjoyment of it. As a small boy I made four such journeys, each of a thousand miles or more, two behind my father’s horses, and two mostly by stage coach and canal boat. Besides these many shorter ones. When fourteen I was laid up by an extremely virulent sumach poisoning, making me for some time partially blind, after which, and possibly as a result, I was troubled for several years with a disorder of the eyes, and the oculists advised that I should be kept from study.

It followed that, at the time my schoolmates were entering college, I was nominally the pupil of a topographical engineer[4] but really for the most part given over to a decently restrained vagabond life, generally pursued under the guise of an angler, a fowler or a dabbler on the shallowest shores of the deep sea of the natural sciences.

A hardly conscious exercise of reason in choosing where I should rest and which way I should be going in these vagrancies, a little musing upon the question what made for or against my pleasure in them, led me along to a point at which when by good chance the books fell in my way I was sufficiently interested to get some understanding of what such men as Price, Gilpin, Shenstone and Marshall thought upon the subject.

Rural tastes at length led me to make myself a farmer. I had several years of training on widely separated farms, then bought a small farm for myself which I afterwards sold in order to buy a larger, and upon this I lived ten years. I was a good farmer and a good neighbor, served on the school committee, improved the highways, was secretary of a local farmer’s club and of the County Agricultural Society, took prizes for the best crops of wheat and turnips and the best assortment of fruits, imported an English machine, and in partnership with a friend established the first cylindrical drainage tile works in America.

But during this period also I managed to make several long and numerous short journeys, generally paying my expenses by writing on rural topics for newspapers. As it would have been an extravagance otherwise, however, I first crossed the Atlantic in the steerage of a sailing vessel, and nearly always traveled frugally. In all these tours I took more interest than most travelers do in the arrangement and aspect of homesteads and generally in what may be called the sceneric character of what came before me.

The word sceneric flows from my pen unbidden and I venture to let it stand. Some writers of late are using scenic for the purpose it serves, but this is confusing, scenic having been so long used with regard exclusively to affairs of the drama.

All this time interest in certain modest practical applications of what I was learning of the principles of landscape architecture was growing with me,—applications, I mean, for example, to the choice of a neighborhood, of the position and aspect of a homestead, the placing, grouping and relationships with the dwelling of barns, stables and minor outbuildings, the planning of a laundry yard and of conveniences for bringing in kitchen supplies and carrying away kitchen wastes, for I had found that even in frontier log cabins a good deal was lost or gained of pleasure according to the ingenuity and judgment used in such matters; applications also to the seemly position of a kitchen garden, of a working garden for flowers to be cut for the indoor enjoyment of them, to fixed outer floral and foliage decorations, to the determination of lines of outlook and of in-look and the removal or planting accordingly of trees, screens, hedges, windbreaks and so on, with some consideration of unity of foreground, middle ground and background, some consideration for sceneric effect from without as well as from within the field of actual operations. I planted several thousand trees on my own land and thinned out and trimmed with my own hand with reference to future pleasing effects a small body of old woodland and another of well-grown copse wood.

Never the slightest thought till I was more than thirty years old had entered my mind of practicing landscape gardening except as any fairly well-to-do, working farmer may, and in flower gardening or of any kind of decorative or simply ornamental gardening—any gardening other than such as I have indicated—I was far from being an adept.

But I gradually came to be known among my neighbors and friends as a man of some special knowledge, inventiveness and judgment in such affairs as I have mentioned, and to be called on for advice about them. At length, growing out of such little repute, I was unexpectedly invited to take a modest public duty and from this by promotions and successive unpremeditated steps was later led to make Landscape Architecture my calling in life....

I have since, partly on professional and partly on other occasions, continued to travel a great deal.... But a small part of my journeyings either in the old or the new world have been made by railways. I have traveled several thousand miles on foot and several thousand in the saddle and I have had rare opportunities for seeing people of all sorts in all parts of our land in their homes.

All the time interest in scenery, landscape, landscape architecture, has been strong with me.

Through these causes and because of the interest I have thus explained I have been much led into pointed conversations with men and women under a great variety of circumstances, while looking about their abodes or while following their chosen paths, roads and waters, with regard to the pleasure to be had in doing so and with direct reference to means of enhancing it or getting the better of circumstances restricting it.