The City Natural: Garden and Forest Magazine and the Rise of American Environmentalism

5. Design with Nature

127 5 G arden and Forest magazine was deeply engaged in curing the problems that came with the transition from a rural to an urban society. Those problems seemed to follow the loss of nature and green spaces in American life. Sitting in his Manhattan editorial office, William Stiles witnessed that loss occurring in one of the most populated spots in the world and recorded the changes generated by urbanization, but the value of the magazine went beyond recording loss. Its more inspiring contribution was to suggest how the future relationship between nature and cities might develop and bring back what was being lost and more. Many of the magazine’s contributors, as we have seen, were rising professionals living in East Coast cities. They were urbanites who nonetheless cared about green vistas, and their careers were closely related to both the city and nature. For many of them, especially landscape architects inspired by Frederick Law Olmsted, the United States in the late nineteenth century was not overcivilized but undercivilized, because in the evolution of its urban phase, nature had been neglected or at least not given enough attention. Civilization , in other words, should mean not only industrial development, material prosperity, scientific progress, advancing democracy, and improvements in design with nature 128 DESIGN WITH NATURE art, literature, and morality but also the conservation of natural resources, the preservation of natural beauty (in cities and in more remote places), and the coexistence of nature and humanity. Cities, representing the essence of modern civilization, should become well-planned, integrated wholes in which humans and nature coexisted side by side. This criticism of so-called American civilization was not unique in the era the magazine was published; Garden and Forest was following in a well-worn path. Its implicit goal of combining the merits of the cultural and the natural suggested a mind-set that had long been apparent in the Western and American intellectual tradition. In the antebellum years, for example, men and women had also dreamed of a landscape that exemplified physical and moral harmony. Then Olmsted appeared on the scene and actually turned this dream into reality. Compared to some of his contemporaries, he emphasized the power of the natural environment to enhance social morality. As Olmsted ’s intellectual child, Garden and Forest carried on this idea and gave it a strong collective voice. For those antebellum critics, the danger of urban decay had been looming on the horizon; for these late-nineteenth-century reformers, the crisis had already arrived and the problems needed to be solved. Like their fellow progressives, the magazine editors and contributors intended to approach those problems in a pragmatic and concrete way.1 What made the Garden and Forest circle distinct from the other progressive social reformers, such as resettlement workers or antipoverty crusaders, was their view that nature should be considered a necessary element of urban life. Nature had no place in many reformers’ social designs, in which human beings were the only concern and the central fact. For the editors and contributors of Garden and Forest, without nature, the social environment would be barren and the human soul would be bleak. As one editorial indicated, “Public pleasure-grounds are possessions of rare value when treated with the full knowledge that they are to meet the elementary wants of the human soul by men who have a reverent love for nature, and whose primary aim is to develop the latent possibilities of the scenery on its poetic side and make these kindly influences accessible to all. They are more to be prized, shall we say, than great cathedrals or libraries or museums of science or art.” This understanding was shaped by their admiration, however qualified, of the beauty of nature, their respect for the power of nature, and their belief in a universal DESIGN WITH NATURE 129 and intuitive thirst for nature in all citizens, surviving even the uprooting process of urbanization.2 The magazine’s contributors were aware of the prevalent nostalgia for rusticity , “the growing taste for rural life” in America, but such nostalgia was no solution in their mind. Garden and Forest may at times have echoed the popular back-to-nature mood, but it tried to lead this mood in the direction the writers believed more realistic for a new era. The simple life, old-fashioned virtue, direct contact with soil, indeed all those aspects that supposedly characterized...