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 ......
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 ......
John Nolen (1869-1937) was a pioneer in the development of professional town and city planning in the United States. Nolen's comprehensive approach merged the social, economic, and physical aspects of planning while emphasizing, in the author's words, "versatility, special knowledge, and cooperation." Between 1905 and 1937, Nolen's firm, based in ......
Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the Laurel Hill Association
The Laurel Hill Association, founded by Mary Hopkins Goodrich in 1853, transformed the Berkshires' village of Stockbridge into a model American town.Improving the Village traces the evolution of the influential volunteer group that inspired like-minded citizens to establish hundreds of village improvement associations throughout the nation. ......