4 The American Flower Garden 



ground of exceeding beauty where millions of people find recreation 

 and delight without even having heard the name of Frederick Law 

 Olmsted. Few indeed suspect that they are indebted to his 

 imagination and trained artistic sense for Central Park. By 

 entering into a working partnership with nature he was enabled to 

 transform a tract of unlovely land, interspersed with swamps, 

 barren rocks and rubbish heaps, the last resort of squatters and 

 goats, into scenes of non-natural but wholly naturalistic beauty; 

 and the belief of the enraptured multitude that nature created 

 them so, should be rightly interpreted as the triumph of Olmsted's 

 creative art. Surely, the man who has wrought out on a vast scale 

 so clear an artistic ideal with living pigments should be as fully 

 entitled to recognition in the ranks of artists as the painter of a 

 landscape on canvas that hangs within the museum walls. There 

 is a small but increasing number of critics who count Olmsted 

 the greatest artist America has yet produced. 



Who remembers that Raphael, Giulio Romano and Michel- 

 angelo, among other great masters of the Renaissance, in the 

 exuberance of their artistic genius, lavished it without stint upon 

 the gardens of Rome and northern Italy? Not content with 

 designing palaces and churches and decorating them with car- 

 vings, paintings, frescoes and statuary within and without, not 

 a few great Italian artists planned and embellished gardens which, 

 after centuries, still remain masterpieces. But as gardeners these 

 artists are well-nigh forgotten. 



Like all creative workers, the gardener of the first rank must 

 be endowed with a great imagination that can see clearly the ideal, 

 which at first exists only in his brain. In planning the modest 

 home grounds, as well as a vast estate or public park, he must 

 peer far into the future, anticipate many years of toil and growth, 



