The eminent preservationist, author, and landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers is also a committed New Yorker. Writing the City reveals the many facets of her passion as a citizen of the great metropolis and her lifelong efforts to protect and improve it. These include, most importantly, the creation of the Central Park Conservancy, the ......
Martha Brookes Hutcheson (1871-1959) was one of the first American women landscape architects to receive professional training. Hutcheson considered fine landscape design an instrument of social change and was inspired to write The Spirit of the Garden (1923) by a Progressive Era zeal. Hutcheson's designs include Maudslay State Park in ......
In 1915, Wilhelm Miller (1869-1938) published The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening, a profusely illustrated book that championed the "prairie style" of landscape design, ecologically based using hardy native plants. The first book to address the question of a truly American style of landscape design, it remains one of the most significant ......
In this volume Robert E. Grese gathers together writings on nature-based landscape design and conservation by some of the country's most significant practitioners, horticulturists, botanists, and conservationists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Written with a strong conservation ethic, these essays often originally appeared ......
Winner, J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies This award-winning book is the definitive account of the creation and development of the country's first urban park system. Beginning in 1868, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux created a series of parks and parkways for Buffalo, New York, that drew national and ......
As superintendent of planting in Central Park and landscape architect to New York City for nearly thirty years, Samuel Parsons Jr. (1844-1923) was a last direct link to Vaux and Olmsted. His widely read 1915 book summed up the theories and work that had inspired America's first generation of landscape architects. Francis R. Kowsky's introduction ......
Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery
This award-winning book offers an insightful inquiry into the intellectual and cultural origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first landscape in the United States to be designed in the picturesque style. Inspired by developments in England and France, Mount Auburn, founded in 1831, became the prototype for the "rural cemetery" movement and was an ......
By the late 1980s, the New York Botanical Garden was in serious trouble. The staff were poorly paid and balkanized, endowments were depleted, fundraising was inadequate, and visitation had dwindled to an embarrassing level. The grounds were seedy, many of the historic buildings decrepit, and the great conservatory in need of total rehabilitation. ......
Community Days and Civic Horticulture in Warren H. Manning's Modern Planning Practice
The Boston-based landscape architect Warren H. Manning (1860-1938) forged an innovative approach to city, regional, and national planning that paired modern planning techniques with nineteenth-century ideals of rural life. Designing landscapes at every scale, Manning's visionary goal was to make "our whole country a park." In designs throughout ......