58 LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



and of these much the best known is Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., on 

 account of his work with Calvert Vaux on Central Park, his work on a 

 long succession of parks and estates from 1853 to 1895, and his writings. 



In its treatment of parks and large private estates,* this American 

 style of landscape design traces its origin directly to the English land- 

 scape school, but in the American work the designers sought with 

 much more appreciation the preservation and interpretation of natural 

 character. The English designers had desired to express the magnifi- 

 cence and taste of the owner in a composition of natural ground forms 

 and trees modeled after the beautiful English countryside, rather than 

 to suggest the freedom of little-humanized Nature in which a man might 

 lose his consciousness of self. The choice of indigenous plant material, 

 the study of the arrangement of this material in accordance with its 

 own character and of that in the landscape in which it appeared, is 

 therefore an important consideration in this American style. The 

 landscape characters, however, the "natural" landscape scenes, which 

 this style usually seized upon to enhance and reproduce, are seldom 

 the unhampered work of nature ; more usually they are the scenes of 

 pasture and woodlot, shrub-grown wall, and elm-dotted river bottom, 

 which are partly the results of man's activity in the less intensively- 

 used farm land. This mode of treatment of the landscape on large 

 areas has not only the esthetic advantage which has been pointed out, 

 but also the economic advantage that thus it may make use of much 

 existing beauty of land-form and vegetation, and thus it can be con- 

 sistent with land lying beyond its boundaries and so give a still greater 

 sense of freedom and extent, f (See series of views of Franklin Park, 

 Boston, Plates 31 to 35, and plan, Drawing XXXV, opp. p. 298.) 



In the smaller suburban places, where the buildings are visible 

 if not dominant and where it is quite impossible to produce exactly the 

 effect of a free landscape, this style takes on itself a somewhat different 

 manifestation. Even in the compass of an area of half an acre, there 

 may be an open irregular lawn surrounded by promontories and bays 



* For a detailed discussion of the design of American estates and landscape parks, 

 see Chapter XL 



t As in the English landscape style. "Appropriation" was one of Repton's cardi- 

 nal principles. Cf. footnote on p. 267. 



