Dear Friends,

This has been a remarkable year at the Library of American Landscape History--thanks to you, our friends and supporters. Here are a few highlights. . . .

Most exciting--in 2011, LALH published three noteworthy books: a new edition of Fletcher Steele’s Design in the Little Garden, Bob Grese’s The Native Landscape Reader, and Christopher Vernon’s Graceland: A Design History. Each of these volumes explores a different aspect of landscape studies—from garden design to environmental design to consideration of the cemetery as a reflection of American cultural history.

In a significant expansion of our media presence, LALH and Hott Productions of Florentine Films (the Ken Burns company) wrapped production on two inaugural documentary films in our highly anticipated North America by Design series. Fletcher Steele’s Naumkeag and Designing in the Prairie Spirit convey the core scholarship in books recently published by LALH. Both films are set to launch in conjunction with our re-designed website in March.

Forthcoming books from LALH cover topics ranging from the Buffalo park system (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux), to a biography of Arthur Shurcliff (who designed the plan and many of the gardens of Colonial Williamsburg), to a study of Brookline, Massachusetts (where the Olmsted firm executed more than 150 commissions). Also in the works is a biography of John Nolen, one of the founders of American city planning.

In other news, the LALH photography exhibition A Genius for Place (a stunning companion piece to the LALH book) was hosted by the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, earlier this year. The exhibition will travel to Reynolda House Museum of Art (Winston-Salem, N.C.) from February through August 2012.

In June 2011, we mailed VIEW, our annual newsletter, to 6,000 supporters and subscribers, adding two new sections—Practice and Transformation—to showcase the work of contemporary landscape architects. This year’s featured practitioners, Darrel Morrison and Cornelia Oberlander, wrote eloquently of their work in Madison, Wisconsin, and Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, respectively.

We are forging ahead on our landmark Warren H. Manning Research Project; entries on Manning’s work from Ithaca to Birmingham are now in hand, and the book is on the horizon. New discoveries abound!

In recent months, LALH welcomed two new members to the board of directors. Mary Carter McConnell, who earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Virginia, breeds field-trial setters and maintains a conservation breeding program for Native American horses on her Virginia estate. An avid gardener, McConnell served as the national chairman and vice-chairman of the Garden Club of America Garden History & Design Committee. Cynthia Hewitt, based in the Brandywine River valley, is also a gardener as well as a member of the steering committee of the Winterthur Landscape and Garden Society and a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch, named one of the Top 100 Women Financial Advisors of 2010 by Barron’s.

Two of our founding directors, Nancy R. Turner and John Franklin Miller, have become emeritus members of the board. We owe each an enormous debt of gratitude for their twenty years of generous service to this organization, and we will continue to look to both for guidance and inspiration.

We are very grateful for the generous gifts and grants that LALH received from many quarters this year, including the Viburnum Trilobum Fund of the New York Community Trust, Graham Foundation, Friends of Fairsted, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and the Hubbard Educational Trust, along with many family foundations, trusts, and individual supporters. Thank you all for your bountiful support.

On the occasion of the winter solstice, it is especially gratifying to share word of a campaign to renew a historic garden in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led by Polly Chatfield and inspired by an LALH book. (Please read more below.)

With thanks to all our friends and best wishes for the holidays,

Robin Karson
Executive Director

A Cemetery's Design History, Unraveled

In the early twentieth century, Graceland Cemetery in Chicago was considered one of the most perfect expressions of the so-called Prairie style of landscape design, hailed by critics as “the admiration of the world.” In Graceland Cemetery: A Design History, just out from LALH, Christopher Vernon, a historian of architecture and landscape architecture, tugs at the reigning perception that O. C. Simonds was the cemetery’s chief designer, and casts a bright light on the earlier layers of design. Although Simonds had the most influence on the Graceland landscape of today, he had notable predecessors including H. W. S. Cleveland and William Le Baron Jenney, who, Vernon reports, played more prominent roles than they are usually credited for. In this richly illustrated book, Vernon unravels the history of this important place, illuminating the work of the many practitioners who helped shape Graceland’s influential layout.

Is "Snowtober" Storm the New Norm?

In the wake of the Hallowe’en nor’easter, the shattered crowns of trees still dominate views of wooded landscapes from West Virginia to Maine, from acres of wild forests to urban parks, campuses, streetscapes, and backyards. New York City’s Central Park lost about a thousand trees—more than any single weather event has claimed to date there. In Summit, New Jersey, the Reeves-Reed Arboretum was one of a dozen coping with what area arboretum directors called one of the most damaging storms in decades.

Why was this storm so shattering? Northeast experts note that areas experiencing the most damage were at lower elevations and on the region’s southern edge, where trees had not yet shed their leaves for winter, vastly expanding the amount of surface area on which snow could accumulate. Not only did the storm pelt the trees with a great quantity of snow—up to two feet fell in some places—but the snow was wet and heavy. Finally, the trees’ woody tissue was still bloated with water, starches, and sugars, making branches more liable to snap. Add wind, and the effect was akin to hurling masses of soggy snow at myriad tiny sails on weak masts.

“With climate change, the frequency of such storms will only increase,” says Thomas Wessels, a terrestrial ecologist at Antioch University New England. “In Vermont”—which logged record high temperatures for the period between June and November this year, according to the National Climatic Data Center—“we had three record-breaking weather events, two floods and an unprecedented October snow, all in the same year.” The nation as a whole reached near-record highs for the same months.

In Memoriam, with Gratitude: Frank Cabot (1925-2011)

Frank Cabot founded the Garden Conservancy in 1989, moved to save exceptional private gardens that were likely to expire with their creators. The organization he established with the help of its current president, Antonia Adezio, provides expertise and technical services for the projects it undertakes, guiding their transition to public access by assisting on legal strategies and conservation easements; developing master plans for a variety of purposes; and helping to establish fiscal and organizational foundations. When Cabot died, in November, he left a legacy of unique places and plants conserved for the public. “We are very much in his debt for his inspiration to found the Garden Conservancy in 1989, and for the vision and leadership he brought to our organization,” Adezio says. “He remained at the heart of it until the end.”

By profession, Cabot was a venture capitalist; by inclination, a philanthropist. With his wife Anne, he also created Stonecrop Gardens, a public garden in Cold Spring, New York; founded the Aberglasney Restoration Trust to rescue and restore a sixteenth-century garden in Carmarthenshire, Wales; and enlarged his parents’ garden, Quatre Vents (Four Winds) in La Malbaie, Québéc. But by his own description, Cabot was a “horticultural enthusiast,” a fact that his friends and family plan to honor when they commemorate him in Québéc “at the peak primula moment” of spring.

Will Garden of Revelations Meet Watery Apocalypse?

And [the city of New Jerusalem] had a wall great and high. . . . And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.—from the Book of Revelation, 21, New Testament

When a band of German religious dissenters arrived in east central Ohio in 1817, they chose a fertile plain in a bend of the Tuscarawas River on which to build a communal society. They laid out a village, called Zoar—after a biblical town near the Dead Sea—in a rectangular grid. In the central block they designed a garden symbolizing the city of New Jerusalem as described in the Book of Revelation. In the center a tall conifer (currently a Norway spruce) represented Jesus, encircled by twelve juniper trees—the apostles. Straight paths divided the garden into beds planted with vegetables and flowers. Although the communal society disbanded in the late nineteenth century, many villagers remained, periodically reviving the garden.

In 1913 severe flooding in Ohio prompted the federal government to begin planning a system of flood-control structures. These included a levee, completed in the mid-1930s, which protected Zoar from the floodwaters of the Tuscarawas River. During the past decade, however, the levee has started to leak, and the Army Corps of Engineers has declared it a danger to human life. This requires the agency to evaluate the situation and make recommendations guided by a federal process that includes public comment and review. And the Water Resource Development Act of 2007 has added a new mandate: the Corps must now also consider alternatives to repairing the levee and to weigh the economic costs and benefits of any proposed solution. “Since the levee was built in 1936 to preserve an historical village, the mandating of economics now makes the process problematic and threatening,” says Jon Elsasser, president of the Zoar Community Association, which is leading an effort to preserve the town and its unusual garden. That includes soliciting public comments about Zoar’s historic significance and building an economic argument, based largely on tourism dollars, to submit during the process

The process will unfold during the next two years, and recommendations have yet to be drafted, says Rodney Cremeans, the Army Corps project manager for the district. The community association, however, anticipates that the options will include moving the village—and the garden--in lieu of costly repairs to the levee. Cremeans cautions against foregone conclusions: “The National Historic Preservation Act will ensure we consider the effects of all alternatives on historic resources, and Zoar is a state and national historic site,” he says.

Elsasser articulates the reasons for that—and identifies some of the factors that explain why any given place is more complex than an assemblage of buildings and landscape features, such as gardens, that can be relocated: “The village is laid out the way it is because of the beliefs and cultural approaches of the Separatists. The church and school sit on a hill, there is a flower and shrub garden in the middle of the town, and the town was laid out as a European agricultural village—everyone lived in town and went out to the fields and industries to work. It would be impossible to replicate this.”

Cynthia Hewitt Joins LALH Board

“Having spent my youth in rural Tennessee and my adult life in the Brandywine River Valley, I have been fortunate to have lived within a couple of lovely American landscapes,” says Cynthia Hewitt, who recently joined the LALH Board of Directors. “I am passionate about celebrating and preserving such wonderful places.” Hewitt, managing director, investments, with Merrill Lynch, brings not only a high regard for landscape to her new position, but also nationally recognized financial expertise. Among her many honors: For the past six years, she was named as one of the top 100 Women Advisors in the country by Barron’s. In both 2010 and 2011, Barron’s listed Hewitt as one of the top 1,000 advisors in the country and number one in the state of Delaware.

Hewitt is a past member of the Merrill Lynch National Advisory Council to Management and a founder of the Fund for Women in Delaware. She serves on the investment committees of the Tatnall School in Wilmington, Delaware, where she was honored as a Distinguished Alumna; the Delaware Community Foundation; and Ulster Project Delaware. Among other volunteer commitments, Hewitt has been a member of the steering committee of the Winterthur Landscape and Garden Society since its inception. “My interest in plants and gardens has grown over the years,” she says, “and nurturing my own garden—with the help of my husband, Dan—has become an important part of my downtime.”

UMass Campus Pond in Peril, Horse Barn Saved

In 1893, Massachusetts Agricultural College, acting on a plan commissioned from Frederick Law Olmsted nearly three decades earlier, created a placid pond at the heart of the campus by damming a brook that flowed through an adjacent ravine. The pond reflected a classic Olmstedian use of topography to spatially define the campus and retain its local, pastoral character—despite the fact that campus officials of the 1860s had shelved most of the Olmsted plan.

Although today the most admired aspects of the college campus—now the University of Massachusetts, Amherst—are its “natural” and historic features, the placement of many new buildings has effectively diminished both the sense of nature that students crave and the sense of history that once gave the campus its character. A new proposal for a 150,000-square-foot classroom building has members of the Preserve U Mass Steering Committee particularly worried. The building’s site at one end of the campus pond would drastically alter the spatial configurations of the pond edge. Both LALH and The Cultural Landscape Foundation have written to support a review of alternative sites for the new building.  

The disruption of spatial integrity on campuses is endemic, writes Frank Edgerton Martin, a contemporary landscape historian, campus preservation planner, and design journalist: “Simply put, the most direct and irreversible way to harm the character of a campus is to remove buildings or to add over-scaled ones that alter the inherited spatial patterns of courtyards, the rhythms of buildings along streets, and the long views.”

But another new development on campus circles back to the university’s agricultural roots, prompted by the current revival of interest in food, farming, and landscape. The university and its Center for Agriculture are raising funds to restore and relocate “Mass Aggie’s” nineteenth-century horse barn on fifty acres of farmland to create a new educational farm for use by students and the general public.

Campaign Aims to Restore Steele Monastery Garden

A year ago Polly Chatfield of Cambridge, Massachusetts, contacted LALH to ask about the potential significance of a  courtyard garden designed by Fletcher Steele. The enclosed garden adjoins the guest house at a monastery occupied by the Brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal order, for seventy-five years. The information from LALH confirmed Chatfield’s sense that the garden deserved a historic landscape preservation approach as the order set out to refurbish it, along with a larger garden at the stately stone monastery designed by Ralph Adams Cram.  

Recently, the Brothers  launched a campaign to fund their renewal. While the larger garden, an open expanse in front of the monks’ cloister, will be redesigned in a naturalistic style, the renewal of the Steele garden will follow suggestions to be outlined in a cultural landscape report.  “Your book was a revelation to me,” wrote Chatfield to Robin Karson about her book on Steele. “There are two quotations from Steele that seem to me mantras or guiding principles for what I hope from this little restoration. One is the quotation about a garden furnishing ‘the best available background for the clients' daydreams.’ If one substitutes ‘prayers’ or ‘meditations’ for ‘daydreams’ that is exactly what the Guesthouse garden is about. The other quotation is the endpiece - about discovering ‘the genius of the place.’  For the Monastery, the genius of the place resides partly in location and partly in the prayer and spiritual life that has gone on in that location.”

For more information about the Society’s fundraising campaign, contact Phillip Petree (617-876-3037 x 58; 980 Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA 02138)

LALH Seasonal Recipe: Mushroom, Spinach, and Roasted Garlic Lasagne

This vegetarian lasagna contains layers of ricotta and spinach balanced with mushrooms and tomato sauce.

Ingredients*:

2 packages of ready-to-bake lasagna noodles
44 oz.  marinara sauce
10 oz. frozen chopped spinach, defrosted
24 oz. of baby bella mushrooms, sliced
4 cloves unpeeled garlic
1 lb. ricotta
1 lb. mozzarella, grated
1 c. grated Asiago cheese
2 tbsp. olive oil, plus enough to oil the pan
¼ tsp. dried thyme
¼ tsp. dried oregano
½ tsp. salt
pepper to taste

Directions:
Set oven to broil. Place the unpeeled garlic cloves on a cookie sheet and set them in the oven for 10 minutes or until they start to brown on the bottom. Remove and cool. Turn down oven to 375 F.

Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat and add the olive oil. Sautée the mushrooms until they are tender (about 6 minutes), adding the thyme, oregano, and a couple of twists of fresh-ground pepper about halfway through. Set aside to cool.

When the garlic is cool, peel the cloves and trim off the ends. Put the ricotta, spinach, roasted garlic, and salt into a food processor and blend well. Set aside. Separately, put the mushrooms and Asiago cheese into the processor and pulse until they are coarsely chopped and loosely mixed.

Grease a 9 X 13-inch lasagna dish with olive oil. Add enough tomato sauce to coat the bottom of the dish. Add a layer of noodles. Use the noodles to separate layers of the ricotta mixture, the mushroom mixture, and tomato sauce with grated mozzarella. Reserve enough tomato sauce and mozzarella to form the top layer. Cover with foil and bake for 50–60 minutes. Remove the foil and continue baking 10-15 minutes or until the mozzarella is bubbling and starting to brown. Remove the lasagna from the oven, to cool 15 minutes before serving.

*This is a very flexible recipe with room for additions such as  artichoke hearts or Kalamata olives (to the spinach and ricotta mixture). Ground sausage goes well with the mushroom and Asiago.

Recipe by Jessica Dawson.

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