cover: A black-and-white photograph shows Minnehaha Falls tumbling into a river basin, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In this black-and-white photograph, an elderly W.H.S. Cleveland is reading.
A historical view of Minnehaha Falls, showing the dreamy, somewhat misty atmosphere.

Landscape Architecture, as Applied to the Wants of the West; with an Essay on Forest Planting on the Great Plains
H. W. S. Cleveland

Reprint of 1873 edition, with a new introduction
by Daniel J. Nadenicek and Lance M. Neckar
ASLA Centennial Reprint Series

Published by University of Massachusetts Press in association with LALH

$29.95

To order: University of Massachusetts Press,
tel. 800-537-5487; fax 410-516-6998

“The new introduction illuminates Cleveland’s links with Emerson and Longfellow and demonstrates how the landscape architect’s ‘organic’ approach shaped Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the Minneapolis park system, and other masterpieces of nineteenth-century America. Historians will find the book indispensable.”—Charles C. McLaughlin, Founding Editor, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted

“The reprint and its perceptive introduction should help landscape historians give Cleveland the recognition he rightly deserves as one of America’s foremost pioneering landscape architects.”—William H. Tishler, Journal of the New England Garden History Society

 

ALTHOUGH FEW KNOW HIS NAME TODAY, Horace William Shaler Cleveland (1814–1900) was an important force in nineteenth-century American landscape architecture. Cleveland pioneered an organic approach to landscape design inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and other influential figures. Landscape Architecture, as Applied to the Wants of the West, published in 1873, summarizes Cleveland’s application of this approach at all scales of design and planning—from the backyard to entire regions of the country.

Cleveland’s text represents the first attempt to define a comprehensive scope for the new profession of landscape architecture. The book grew from his concern that ill-conceived layouts for communities along the rapidly developing rail lines through the Midwest and Great Plains would negatively affect what he saw as the future of American civilization. Daniel J. Nadenicek and Lance M. Neckar provide an overview of Cleveland’s entire career, from Concord to Chicago and Minneapolis, analyzing Cleveland’s innovative ideas and their influence on the emerging profession. Their discussion also sheds new light on the rarely studied Essay on Forest Planting on the Great Plains.