Of Gardens: Selected Essays

Introduction

0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 12 8/10/10 1:44:42 PM xiii I Facing page: Eugène Atget, Versailles, coin de parc, 1902. in 1625, the British philosopher and empiricist Francis Bacon wrote in his seminal essay “Of Gardens” that without gardens “buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks,” and that even “when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.” As I reread this passage recently, my mind harkened back to the experience that jolted me into understanding landscape architecture , not just as a stepsister to architecture, as Bacon partially implies, but as the means by which man redeems the natural environment through design. The occasion was a lecture by the landscape architect and ecologist Ian L. McHarg at Rockefeller University in New York City. He had just published his book Design with Nature, and that evening, along with his clarion call for environmental responsibility, he coined the concept of “the reassuring landscape,” defined as cherished scenes from childhood that we continually seek out or recreate later in life. This lecture struck a chord in me and eventually became the taproot of this book. McHarg was a founder of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, and therefore it is a singular privilege for me that John Dixon Hunt, Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture in that department, selected this collection for the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture , of which he is the inaugural series editor. Three years after McHarg’s lecture, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented the exhibition “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York.” At the entrance to this show was a map of the United States with Olmsted’s landscape designs pinpointed across it. Standing there I realized that my entire young life, with the exception of my college junior year abroad in Geneva, Switzerland , had been circumscribed by Olmsted’s pastoral landscapes. I was raised 0715_FINAL_384pp.indd 13 8/10/10 1:44:42 PM i n t r o d u c t i o n xiv in Trenton, New Jersey, where Cadwalader Park, with its bucolic hills and dales, was the focus of recreational and cultural events (sledding the best of all), followed by Smith College, where Olmsted designed the entire campus as a botanic garden and arboretum, with every tree and plant labeled. And finally, I settled in New York City, where I live two blocks from Central Park and walk its paths regularly. The American landscape, as I knew it, was derived from the eighteenth-century picturesque parks and gardens Olmsted had visited in England and recreated on native soil. During the six weeks that the Smith College Geneva group spent in Paris my year, before the term began at the University of Geneva, Versailles topped the list of our orientation activities. I still have the class photograph documenting the unforgettable visit that gave us our first view of André Le Nôtre’s gardens . Until then, nothing in my life had prepared me for the classical grandeur and geometric precision of those seemingly endless parterres, bosquets, fountains , and statuary set among topiary and clipped trees. Like Ian McHarg in his book, I was enthralled with the snow-capped Alpine scenery of Switzerland during the subsequent year as well as with the local farm villages, wildflower fields in spring, and vineyards cascading down mountains. But the rigorous beauty of Le Nôtre’s designs became the lasting touchstone for me, linking gardens with history as well as nature. What had prepared me to understand this linkage was a lecture in European intellectual history at Smith presented during the preceding year by Elisabeth Koffka. She gave an account of the bridge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which has stayed with me ever since when thinking and writing about Western gardens, where, reflecting the evolution of literary and artistic movements, the earlier classicism of gardens evolved into the Romantic landscape park. Madame Koffka, as she was always called, was also our faculty adviser during the Geneva year, which gave us the constant benefit of her insights and perceptions. Many years later, when I married Frederick Morgan, I began to spend my summers at his house on the coast of Maine. During my first week there, the local postmistress took me under her wing and gave me a...