Cover: A black-and-white photograph shows an expanse of rolling meadow surrounded by mature trees, in the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The Simonds Family: A single paddler sits in a canoe on the creek at Pier Cove, Michigan in this black-and-white historical photograph. Two people sit on a foot bridge in the background.
A bicyclist pedals along a vanishing pathway lined with mature trees at Graceland Cemetery, in Chicago, Illinois.

Landscape-Gardening
O. C. Simonds

Reprint of 1920 edition, with a new introduction
by Robert E. Grese
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

“With the increasing interest in ecological restoration, sustainable design, and the use of native plants for landscape and gardens alike, it is particularly timely to have a new edition of this seminal volume by O. C. Simonds.”—Robert Cook, Arnold Arboretum

“Bob Grese’s thoughtful introduction does precisely what such a piece should do—and more. . . . Grese situates Simonds’s philosophies within appropriate streams of ideology and practice.”—Cecilia Jaswa Rusnak, Journal of the New England Garden History Society

 

OSSIAN COLE SIMONDS (1855–1931), the progenitor of the “middle-western movement” of landscape architecture, designed sections of Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, the Nichols Arboretum at the University of Michigan, and many other naturalistic landscapes. The influential teacher and founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects based his designs on respect for natural systems. Many of Simonds’s ideas were remarkably prescient, including the critical need to conserve America’s open space, under siege even in 1920.

Simonds’s book Landscape-Gardening presents an approach to landscape in which nature is both partner and model in design. His text urges his readers to study nature as a means to develop a more refined aesthetic sensibility, which Simonds believed would foster better design and stewardship of parks, roadways, farms, schools, cemeteries, and suburban residences. Today’s homeowners will find his book an inspiring presentation of gardening principles, equally applicable in the backyard and in the community.

A new introduction by Robert E. Grese places Simonds’s graceful text in historical perspective and provides details of the author’s personal and professional life. It also elucidates many of the broad themes of landscape architecture’s early years.

 

Click here to read about a preservation case study of a landscape designed by Simonds.