![]() The parkland features an Olmsted design, albeit an imperfectly realized one. Fresh Pond has been a Native American hunting and fishing ground the site of an eighteenth-century hotel offering bowling, food and wine, and impromptu performances by Harvard men a summer retreat for wealthy Bostonians a training ground for trench warfare a location for picnics and festivals for workers and sporting activities for all. In Fresh Pond, Jill Sinclair tells the story of the pond and its surrounding land through photographs, drawings, maps, plans, and an engaging narrative of the pond’s geological, historical, and political ecology. Hester, Jr.įresh Pond Reservation, at the northwest edge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been described as a “landscape loved to death.” Certainly it is a landscape that has been changed by its various uses over the years and one to which locals have felt an intense attachment. The Meaning of Gardens edited by Mark Francis and Randolph T. But, as I learned in his book, the hollow storage area in a car driver’s door was once a holster, the ‘secure nesting place of a pistol.’ I recommend you stow your copy there.” -The Wall Street Journal Stilgoe does not ask that we take his book outdoors with us he believes that reading and experiencing landscapes are activities that should be kept separate. (“What is that?” “Well, it’s not really a slough, not really, it’s a bayou.”) He offers a highly original, cogent, compact, gracefully written narrative lexicon of landscape as word, concept, and path to discoveries. In What Is Landscape? Stilgoe maps the discovery of landscape by putting words to things, zeroing in on landscape’s essence but also leading sideways expeditions through such sources as children’s picture books, folklore, deeds, antique terminology, out-of-print dictionaries, and conversations with locals. Sixteenth-century Englishmen misheard or mispronounced this as landskep, which became landskip, then landscape, designating the surface of the earth shaped for human habitation. From the old Frisian language (once spoken in coastal parts of the Netherlands and Germany), it meant shoveled land: landschop. Landscape, John Stilgoe tells us, is a noun. “This provocative, important, and original book is required reading for landscape architects and for all who care about plants and design.” -Anne Whiston Spirn, author of The Language of Landscape Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. ![]() Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. Mapping Boston edited by Alex Krieger and David CobbĪs a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. ![]() “The works and influence of Frederick Olmsted were so great that it takes a carefully edited work such as this to bring his mind, social conscience, and artistic gift into focus.” -Arizona Architect At the end of his career, Olmsted could look on 17 large public parks as well as numerous smaller works and comment: “I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession, an art, an art of design.” While Sutton has concentrated on Olmsted’s contributions to the theory and practice of city planning, her anthology reveals a broad and comprehensive cross section of his career. ![]() The selections in this book demonstrate his understanding of urban spaces and how, when politically unobstructed, he was able to manipulate them. In the 1800s, Frederick Law Olmsted recognized the need for extensive planning if American cities were to become civilized environments for humans.
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