Features March 2016
The importance of Frederick Law Olmsted as a writer.
Today Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) enjoys a reputation rivaling some of the greatest landscape designers of the past: André Le Nôtre, Louis XIV’s eminent seventeenth-century gardener, and eighteenth-century England’s Lancelot “Capability” Brown—who, along with his successor, Humphry Repton, altered the appearance of that country’s landscape with the transformation of the estates of Whig aristocrats into pastoral and picturesque pleasure grounds. While Le Nôtre, Brown, and Repton’s names never fell into obscurity, it was not until the 1922 publication of Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architect, 1822–1903, an abbreviated collection of Olmsted’s writings edited by his son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Theodora Kimball, that the reputation of this nineteenth-century man of genius began to be...
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