Robin Karson
A Genius for Place: American Landscapes of the Country Place Era

University of Massachusetts Press, 2007

In this definitive and well illustrated volume on a formative period in the history of American landscape design, Robin Karson analyzes seven country places created by some of the nation's most talented landscape practitioners.

From the 1890s until the advent of the second World War, new industrial fortunes made it possible for wealthy Americans to commission mansions and grounds emulating Italian villas and French châteaux. The landscapes of this Gilded Age, or "Country Place Era," as it is also called, reveal the diverse influences of continental stylistic traditions, the English Arts-and-Crafts movement, and the lingering design precepts of Frederick Law Olmsted.

In the book’s chapters, the author traces a chronological progression from the naturalistic wild gardens of Warren Manning to the mysterious “Prairie-style” landscapes of Jens Jensen to the protomodernist gardens of Fletcher Steele. Other practitioners covered are Charles Platt, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Beatrix Farrand, Marian Coffin, and Lockwood de Forest Jr. The projects profiled follow a broad geographic arc from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to Santa Barbara, California. All seven landscapes are now open to visitors.

Analyzing these designs in context with one another and against the backdrop of professional and cultural currents that shaped larger projects – parks, campuses, and planned communities – Karson creates a rich and comprehensive picture of the artistic achievements of the period. Striking black-and-white images by landscape photographer Carol Betsch capture the considerable beauty these country places retain, while hundreds of drawings, plans, and historical photographs enrich our understanding of the original designs and the lives of the initial owners.

Robin Karson is the founder and executive director of Library of American Landscape History. She holds a B.G.S. and an M.A. in the history of art and museum practice from the University of Michigan. Following an internship at the Mount Holyoke Museum of Art, she became a columnist for the Springfield Sunday Republican. She subsequently served as contributing editor to Garden Design and Landscape Architecture, writing frequently for those magazines on a wide range of topics. Her previous books are Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect (author), The Muses of Gwinn (author), and Pioneers of American Landscape Design (coeditor).

Lucy Lawliss, Caroline Loughlin, and Lauren Meier
The Master List of Design Projects of the Olmsted Firm, 1857-1979

National Association for Olmsted Parks, 2008

This richly illustrated color edition of the Master List incorporates new research conducted over the past twenty years. Searchable by project type and geographic location, it is an inspiring and invaluable tool for landscape history scholars and landscape preservationists. Expanded from an earlier version to include over 6,000 projects, the Master List is the only publication to categorize all of the Olmsted firm’s design projects so that the scale, type, and geographic diversity of the work can be quickly and easily understood.

Lucy Lawliss, ASLA, is a cultural resources manager for the National Park Service and has written several award-winning historical landscape publications, including Olmsted in Georgia: The Residential Work of the Olmsted Firm 1895–1937. A board member of the National Association for Olmsted Parks, Lawliss served as the organization's co-chair from 2002–2005. She holds undergraduate and master's degrees in landscape architecture with a certificate in historic preservation from the University of Georgia and is a registered landscape architect.

Caroline Loughlin, a founding board member and previous president of Forest Park Forever, is the coauthor of Forest Park, a history of St. Louis’s premier park. She is a board member of the National Association for Olmsted Parks (NAOP), serves on the steering committee of the NAOP-sponsored Olmsted Research Guide Online, and is the treasurer of the Friends of Fairsted, the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts. She is a volunteer at Mount Auburn Cemetery and a member of the steering committee for the cemetery’s Preservation Initiative.

Lauren Meier, ASLA, is a historic preservationist with Pressley Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she oversees a wide variety of historic landscape preservation projects. She was the founding coordinator of the National Park Service’s Historic Landscape Initiative in Washington, DC, and historical landscape architect for the agency’s Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in botany from Pomona College and a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Among her professional projects is the restoration of the landscape at Fairsted, Frederick Law Olmsted’s home and office in Brookline, Massachusetts, now a National Historic Site operated by the National Park Service. She is the author of numerous articles devoted to the preservation of historic plant material. She is a board member of the National Association for Olmsted Parks and a former chair of the research committee.

D. Fairchild Ruggles
Islamic Gardens and Landscapes

Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, 2007

“In the course of my research,” writes D. Fairchild Ruggles, author of Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, “I devoured Arabic agricultural manuals from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. I love gardening, and in these texts I was able to enter the minds of agriculturalists and botanists of a thousand years ago who likewise believed it was important and interesting to record all the known ways of propagating olive trees, the various uses of rosemary, and how best to fertilize a garden bed.”

Ruggles uses poetry, court documents, agronomy manuals, and early garden representations to immerse the reader in the world of the architects of the great gardens of the Islamic world, from medieval Morocco to contemporary India. Western admirers have long seen the Islamic garden as an earthly reflection of the paradise said to await the faithful. Such simplification, Ruggles contends, denies the sophistication and diversity of the art form. Just as Islamic culture is historically dense, sophisticated, and complex, so too is the history of its built landscapes. She follows the evolution of early Islamic agricultural efforts to their aristocratic apex in the formal gardens of the Alhambra in Spain and the Taj Mahal in Agra. This richly illustrated volume is a work of impressive scope sure to interest scholars and enthusiasts alike.

D. Fairchild Ruggles is a professor of landscape history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author of Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain. In her work, she examines landscape as a complex system in which agricultural practice, water management, and sites where local and exotic agricultural produce are traded are important aspects of culture. Ruggles holds a B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to UIUC in 2001 as a Faculty Excellence hire, she taught at Cornell, Harvard, and Binghamton Universities.

Anne Whiston Spirn
Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field

University of Chicago Press, 2008

Near the end of her career, Dorothea Lange lamented, “No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually. . . . I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.” Lange did look, unflinchingly turning her lens on the despair, degradation, and greed unleashed by the Great Depression. Her photographs for the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration have become the defining images of that time, capturing a country and a people on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Lange viewed her photographs as part of sequenced narratives, contextualized and enriched by her descriptive captions – without which, she wrote, “half the value of fieldwork is lost.” Daring to Look presents never-before-published photos and captions from Lange’s fieldwork in California, the Pacific Northwest, and North Carolina during 1939. Lange’s images of squatter camps, benighted farmers, and stark landscapes are stunning, and her captions – ranging from simple explanations of settings to historical notes and biographical sketches—add unexpected depth, bringing her subjects and their struggles unforgettably to life, often in their own words.

When Lange was dismissed from the Farm Security Administration at the end of 1939, these photos and field notes were consigned to archives where they languished, rarely seen. With Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn not only returns them to the public eye, but sets them in the context of Langeâs life, work, and struggle for critical recognition, firmly placing her in her rightful position at the forefront of American photography.

Anne Whiston Spirn, professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Department of Architecture at MIT, is an author, photographer, landscape architect, and planner. Her previous books include the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984) and The Language of Landscape (1998). Currently she is finishing The Eye Is a Door, a book on photography and the art of seeing. "Knowing Where to Stand," an exhibition of her photographs, was on view at the MIT Museum in 2003–2004 and traveled to Vassar College in 2004. Since 1984 Spirn has worked on ecological planning and community design and development in inner-city neighborhoods. She directs the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, an internationally recognized program that has integrated teaching, research, and community service since 1987. Her next book project has grown out of this experience: Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Rebuilding the Landscape of Community.

Ethan Carr
Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma

Library of American Landscape History with the University of Massachusetts Press, 2007

In the years following World War II, Americans visited the national parks in unprecedented numbers, yet Congress held funding at prewar levels and park conditions steadily declined. Elimination of the Civilian Conservation Corps and other New Deal programs further reduced the ability of the federal government to keep pace with the wear and tear on park facilities. To address the problem, in 1956 a ten-year, billion-dollar initiative titled "Mission 66" was launched, timed to be completed in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of the National Park Service. The program covered more than one hundred visitor centers (a building type invented by Mission 66 planners), expanded campgrounds, innumerable comfort stations and other public facilities, new and wider roads, parking lots, maintenance buildings, and hundreds of employee residences. During this transformation, the park system also acquired new seashores, recreation areas, and historical parks; agency uniforms were modernized; and the arrowhead logo became a ubiquitous symbol. To a significant degree, the national park system and the National Park Service as we know them today are products of the Mission 66 era. Ethan Carr's book examines the significance of the Mission 66 program and explores the influence of mid-century modernism on landscape design and park planning. Environmental and park historians, architectural and landscape historians, and all who care about our national parks will enjoy this copiously illustrated history of a critical period in the development of the national park system.

Julie Czerniak and George Hargreaves
Large Parks

Princeton Architectural Press, 2007

The discipline of landscape architecture encompasses many typologies, from domestic gardens and neighborhood playgrounds to urban designs and state parks. Most critical studies of the discipline tend to approach it from a historical or contemporary perspective organized around criteria such as built versus unbuilt, urban versus peripheral, or competition-sponsored versus commission-based. Very few analyses have been undertaken from the seemingly obvious jumping-off point of size. In the eight essays that make up Large Parks, leading scholars and practitioners engage in depth the topic of large urban parks as complex cultural spaces, where issues of landscape discourse, ecological challenges, social history, urban relations, and place-making are writ large. From historic parks such as New York’s Central Park and Paris’s Bois de Boulogne to contemporary projects such as Toronto’s Downsview Park, Staten Island’s Fresh Kills, and California’s Orange County Great Park, Large Parks highlights the complexities and special considerations that go into designing these massive and culturally significant works.

Ada Segre
The Gardens at San Lorenzo in Piacenza, 1656-1665

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2006

This two-volume set includes a photographic reproduction of an anonymous seventeenth-century Italian gardener’s notebook and a scholarly study, transcription, and translation of this valuable historical record. The notebook, which belongs to Dumbarton Oaks’s Rare Books Collection, is a record of the planting of three flower gardens at San Lorenzo. Three computer-generated re-creations of the garden’s planting beds are included with the reproduction. It is now believed that the gardens were created for Margherita de’ Medici Farnese, duchess of Parma and Piacenza. The notebook provides insight into the creation of a seventeenth-century garden, from identifying flowers to planning flowerbeds. The sketches reveal the gardener’s own intentions and reflections on the designs. Ada Segre’s accompanying study of the notebook is a groundbreaking example of garden archaeology. She considers its provenance and connection to the world of the duchess and her gardens. Segre also evaluates the importance of the manuscript as an object and as a source of information on garden design and practice in Italy during the mid-seventeenth century.

Jack Williams
East 40 Degrees: An Interpretive Atlas

University of Virginia Press, 2006

The Appalachian mountain chain once contained the highest and most dramatic mountains on earth. Worn down over time, these mountains still hold some of the most diverse climactic zones and singular geological formations in existence. In East 40 Degrees: An Interpretive Atlas, Jack Williams examines a succession of beautiful but little-known towns along this cordillera (a term descended from the Latin chorda, meaning “braided rope”), excavating layers of history and geography to reveal how diverse cultural and social circumstances and geological histories came together to form each town’s distinctive character.

Referring to the spatial orientation of the Appalachian mountain chain, the “east 40 degrees” longitude line of the title runs from Alabama through fifteen states to the coast of Maine. Each town Williams examines sits within the folds of these mountains or beside a river nourished in their moist uplands. Beginning his record with the continental collisions that shaped each town’s history more than 300 million years ago, Williams allows us to “see the tenuous web of connections between ourselves and the natural processes that shape this earth.” 

Anita Berrizbeitia
Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956-1961

Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture,University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

Anita Berrizbeitia's interest in Roberto Burle Marx extends beyond his justified reputation as a master of regional modernism. She argues that "Burle Marx's Parque del Este is nothing less than a series of significant material and ideological transformations of the modern public park." Through an original examination of the Parque del Este's extensive social, geographic, and artistic context, the author traces the dramatic transformation of Venezuela's capital as the nation shifted from its rural, agricultural roots into a globally significant, stable democracy with an oil-based economy. The park was freighted with nationalistic ideologies that have remained powerful to the present day. The rich documentary materials, including an extensive plant list, are welcome features of this outstanding monograph. Berrizbeitia's exemplary research and analysis address multiple outstanding gaps in our appreciation and understanding of the design of public landscapes in the mid-twentieth century.

Anita Berrizbeitia joined the Landscape Architecture faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. She was assistant professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1993 to 1998 where she received her M.L.A. in 1987. As an associate with Child Associates, Inc., Berrizbeitia focused on the design and building of landscapes ranging from urban-scaled projects to a wide array of private commissions. Her work has received several ASLA and BSLA awards. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary landscape architecture, with essays included in Daniel Urban Kiley, the Early Gardens; Recovering Landscape; Roberto Burle Marx: Landscapes Reflected; and CASE: DOWNVIEW. She is co-author, with Linda Pollack, of Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (1999).

Kenneth I. Helphand
Defiant Gardens, Making Gardens in Wartime

Trinity University Press, 2006

Kenneth Helphand addresses an important yet infrequently explored topic in landscape studies with insightful analysis and meticulous documentation. By focusing on "defiant gardens," defined as those created in extraordinarily difficult situations by oppressed, threatened individuals, Helphand presents a moving narrative of the ways garden making has empowered human beings to survive the most horrendous tribulations with dignity. His probing case studies, which form the heart of this inquiry, focus on a wide range of gardens created in the most unlikely circumstances: World War I battlefields, the ghettos of Nazi-occupied Poland, World War II internment camps for Japanese-American citizens, and prisoner-of-war camps in both world wars. His compelling analysis reveals in vivid detail how the act of gardening in these conditions subverts and defies dehumanizing treatment while nurturing hope, endurance, and identity. The result is a truly outstanding contribution to landscape studies in the tradition of J. B. Jackson.

Kenneth I. Helphand is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon where he has taught landscape history, theory, and design since 1974. He graduated from Brandeis University and Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Helphand has lectured internationally and is a regular visiting professor at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology. His works include the ASLA award-winning books: Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape; Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (with Cynthia Girling); and Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel. Helphand was editor of Landscape Journal from 1994 to 2002. He is a fellow of the ASLA, winner of the Bradford Williams Medal, and honorary member of the Israel Association of Landscape Architects.

Finola O'Kane
Landscape Design in Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Cork University Press, 2004

This study of four eighteenth-century estates outside Dublin offers a nuanced and rich examination of the role of garden aesthetics and design in the physical and intellectual environment of Georgian Ireland. O'Kane's exemplary scholarship grows out of her careful reading of a broad range of documentary materials that include estate maps, correspondence, and landscape painting. She describes and interprets the making and experience of these elite landscape gardens as they evolved over time from the point of view of social class, gender roles, and the paradoxical moralizing discourse on "improvement," as well as horticulture and design history. This beautifully produced volume is a welcome and important contribution to eighteenth-century studies, illuminating the way in which the history of the British empire is reflected in the intertwined landscape histories of the center and its periphery.

Finola O'Kane Crimmins completed a graduate diploma at the Architectural Association in London and a Ph.D. at the National University of Ireland. She worked in the practice of de Blacam & Meagher Architects, where she was a project architect for the award-winning conservation design for Maynooth Castle, Co. Kildare. In 2004 she was appointed lecturer in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, University College, Dublin. She is particularly interested in the cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic dimensions of the landscape history of Ireland and is currently completing her second book, entitled Ireland and the Picturesque, and a study of life in the Irish convent.