The Olmsted Parks of Louisville: A Botanical Field Guide

Foreword

ix Stories fill our landscapes—from the densest urban core to the wilds of Montana— but finding and reading those stories requires time and some acquaintance with the special places of a site and its inhabitants. In this regard, a park is no different from Paris: to know it, you must spend time there. And the magic of Louisville’s Olmsted Parks is that they are gateways to some remarkable places, located just a few minutes down the road from every neighborhood in the city. A glance at a Louisville map shows immediately the genius of the design: from Shawnee and Chickasaw Parks in the floodplain of the Ohio River, to Iroquois in the knobs south of town, to Seneca and Cherokee in the eastern limestone uplands, the system reflects the geographic and natural diversity of Louisville. To unravel the stories hidden in these landscapes requires knowledge, and this is where Pat Haragan’s The Olmsted Parks of Louisville: A Botanical Field Guide becomes your essential companion. Reading a place, as reading a book, demands a vocabulary, and a good field guide is like a good dictionary: learn the plants and you will learn to read the place, as each species occupies a niche shaped by geology, soils, past disturbance, and interrelations with other species. If you carry this guide with you and slowly master the language, new perspectives open. The uniqueness of the temperate deciduous forest of eastern North America with its oaks, migrating songbirds, and spring wildflowers contrasts sharply with the prairies to our west, the boreal forests to our north, and the subtropics to our south. As you learn the lexicon of plants, dialects emerge: the chestnut oaks of the Iroquois hills are distinct from the chinkapin oaks of Cherokee Park or the cottonwoods of the Shawnee floodplain, and there are reasons for this rooted in the soils, rocks, hydrology, and human history. New conversations become possible: the past uses of plants by Native Americans, a plant’s Foreword Reading a Place x Foreword edible characteristics, their relations with distant cousins in the tropics or the arctic. This is how we come to know place, and how we give identity to that distinctive Kentucky landscape that is essential to our city, and to ourselves. Our rolling limestone hills, their amazing fossils, spring colors, and the diverse wildlife that in turn feeds on those plants, encompass our natural history. While a field guide begins as a dictionary, it becomes a tour book, introducing a world of stories that is limited only by your willingness to spend time unraveling them. Somewhere in that journey, the deeper magic of our parks will reveal itself. Without such a guide, city dwellers will never come to know nature or develop a deeper understanding of place, and that is a loss. Build them and love them, and suddenly you connect to the ancient world and rhythms that linger behind our buildings and beneath our pavements. The twenty-first century will be an urban century, and the ability to make those connections is no small thing, and books like this will guide those urban billions back to nature. Daniel H. Jones Chairman and CEO, 21st Century Parks, Inc. The OLMSTED PARKS of Louisville ...