Suburbia Transformed Opening at Rose Center

The James Rose Center in Ridgewood, N.J., extends an invitation to the opening of its new exhibition, Suburbia Transformed, One Garden at a Time: Exploring the Aesthetics of Landscape Experience in the Age of Sustainability: Saturday, June 5, at 4:00 p.m. The exhibition, for which LALH provided curatorial consulting, showcases the winners of the Rose Center’s recent residential landscape design competition and runs through August. The winning entries demonstrate how the designers used sustainable technologies to create beautiful landscape experiences on small residential sites. Through the exhibition, its co-sponsors—The James Rose Center for Landscape Architecture Research and Design; Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and Garden Design magazine—aim to inspire others to transform the suburban residential fabric, one garden at a time.

Produced and curated by The James Rose Center, the competition was juried by Shane Coen, Principal, Coen+Partners, Minneapolis, New York; Patrick M. Condon, Professor, James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Livable Environments, University of British Columbia; Gary R. Hilderbrand, FASLA, FAAR, Principal, Reed Hilderbrand Associates Inc., Watertown, Mass.; Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia; and Dean Cardasis, FASLA, Professor of Landscape Architecture, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; Principal, Cave Hill Landscape Architects. Jonathan Lippincott created the graphic design, and Frederick Charles made the cover photograph for the show catalogue.

For questions and more information, contact:

The James Rose Center

506 East Ridgewood Avenue

Ridgewood, NJ  07450

director@jamesrosecenter.org

www.jamesrosecenter.org

201- 446- 6017

New LALH Trustees Come Aboard

Good news arrives in triplicate this spring: LALH President Michael Jefcoat is pleased to announce that Darrel Morrison, Susan L. Klaus, and Shannon Hackett have joined the LALH Board of Trustees.

Darrel Morrison, FASLA, is a long-time advocate of the use of native vegetation and native plant communities as a basis for landscape design, and has been teaching and practicing ecologically based design and management since the 1970s.  He received his MS in Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and taught there from 1969 to 1983.  He then went on to the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia, where he was Dean of the School until 1992. Morrison retired from the University of Georgia in 2004, and moved to Manhattan, where he currently teaches at Columbia University and continues to practice ecologically-based design. He is now working on projects at Storm King Art Center, the New York Botanical Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Susan L. Klaus is an independent historian in Washington, D.C. with master’s degrees from Harvard University Graduate School of Education and the Department of American Studies of the George Washington University.  Over the past twenty years, Susan has published many articles on Olmsted, Jr. and the work of the Olmsted firm and she is the author of the 2002 LALH award-winning book A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens. She has served on the boards of the National Association of Olmsted Parks, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., and is a past chair of the Friends of the Library of Bryn Mawr College.

Shannon Hackett, of Kenilworth, Ill., and New York City, has a B.S. from the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas and was a doctoral candidate in Medieval French literature at Northwestern University. She studied horticulture and landscape design at the Professional School of the Chicago Botanic Garden, where she now serves on the Design Symposium Advisory Committee. She is a landscape designer and president of Fine Gardens LLC.  Her work focuses on ecological residential design and historic garden restoration.  Ms. Hackett is currently working on projects in Chicago, New York City, Santa Fe, Texas, and Wisconsin, including the restoration of the Florsheim Estate, which was designed by Jens Jensen.

VIEW 2010—in the Works

Spring is here, and VIEW is growing! This issue will be bigger and more colorful than ever. Garden writer Hazel White interviews Santa Barbara landscape architect Isabelle Greene. Jane Roy Brown asks Bob Grese about his passion for the native landscape and explores preservation quandaries in Dan Kiley’s garden for J. Irwin Miller (Columbus, Ind.), Fletcher Steele’s for the Mission House (Stockbridge, Mass.), and Lake Willowmere in Graceland Cemetery (Chicago). Historian Reuben Rainey writes about the therapeutic value of the “rural” cemetery in America, and landscape designer Pamela Hartford reveals the genius of early-twentieth-century landscape photographer Arthur G. Eldredge. Robin Karson spotlights Christopher Vernon’s forthcoming book on Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery and a new edition of Fletcher Steele’s Design in the Little Garden.

Don’t miss out! To receive VIEW this summer, make sure your tax-deductible LALH membership is current (click here to renew). Here’s an idea: make your membership contribution in honor of someone who inspires you—or simply loves landscape history as much as you do.

Graceland Cemetery: “The Admiration of the World”

Graceland is the “most perfect expression” of the “park-like” cemetery in existence, wrote landscape architect and writer Wilhelm Miller in 1903, after Chicago’s famous landmark won a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. Although best known as one of the country’s most fully realized “rural” cemeteries (and most often associated with landscape architect O. C. Simonds), Graceland was actually the product of several designers, each of whom brought different talents to the expansive burial grounds. In a forthcoming book from LALH, University of Western Australia professor Christopher Vernon untangles the strands of design by Swain Nelson, William Saunders, Horace Cleveland, William Le Baron Jenney, as well as Simonds. (Vernon also wrote the introduction to the LALH reprint of Miller’s book The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening.) Graceland Cemetery: A Design History will be illustrated with many beautiful old photographs, supplemented with new images that capture the same scenes today.

Walden Bridge Suffers Vandalism

To the people who enjoy strolling or sitting on the Walden-Bluff’s Edge Bridge, the vandalism of the past year felt personal: Someone had yanked plants from their pots and pried planks out of benches, among other things. “It’s barbaric,” said one neighbor in Lake Forest, Ill., a suburb on Chicago’s North Shore. Resting on massive iron abutments, the bridge spans a leafy ravine that was once part of Cyrus McCormick, Jr. and Harriet Hammond McCormick’s estate, Walden, laid out by Warren H. Manning in the late 1890 and early 1900s. “The unusual supporting structure was designed by Cyrus McCormick II of the McCormick reaper (International Harvester) family, says Arthur Miller, Archivist and Librarian for Special Collections at Lake Forest College, a co-author of books including Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest and a contributing scholar in the LALH Warren Manning Research Project. The ravine and bridge are the only public part of the now-subdivided former estate. After the city condemned the bridge for vehicles in 1990, neighbors rallied to restore it for pedestrians. Why the hostility now? Miller speculates that the poor economy may have left downwardly mobile teenagers out of sorts. Meanwhile, another neighbor has quietly repaired the benches.

Honoring Taro Otsuka at Fabyan Villa

This season the Fabyan Villa Museum & Japanese Garden in Geneva, Ill., is celebrating the work of Taro Otsuka, an early twentieth-century Japanese-American garden designer, in a special exhibit. According to researcher Amber Hare, “The Japanese Garden is one hundred years old this year. Through period images of his work, the exhibit examines Otsuka’s career, his signature style, and his long-term impact.” Preservation Partners of the Fox Valley maintains the museum and garden on 235 acres of the former estate of Colonel George and Nelle Fabyan. Otsuko also created Japanese gardens for other country places of the day, including Stan Hywet, the Seiberling estate in Akron, Ohio (where Warren Manning, who designed the overall landscape, vied unsuccessfully for the privilege). Hare says the garden was totally overgrown before an initial restoration in the 1970s, and ongoing work has revealed many surprises. “We discovered an entire waterfall just last year,” says Hare. The garden is but one of the preserve’s eclectic attractions, which include a Frank Lloyd Wright house and a Dutch-style windmill that the Fabyans used to grind wheat for the fresh bread they fed the bears in their private zoo.

The exhibit runs from May 2 to October 10. For more information visit www.ppfv.org/fabyan.htm.

Bellevue Park in Print

A recent book, Bellevue Park: The First Hundred Years (Xlibris, 2009), tells the tells the story of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s Bellevue Park neighborhood, the state’s first planned community. Commissioned by J. Horace McFarland and Herman P. Miller, Bellevue Park was laid out in 1909­ by Warren H. Manning. “His design took advantage of the neighborhood's hills and provided open spaces and ponds,” says Michael Barton, co-editor of the new book.  Like so many other Manning-designed communities, “this neighborhood is now appreciated for its great and extensive trees,” Barton says. Aside from its local interest, the book documents a remarkably intact example of Manning’s work and illuminates aspects of his extensive influence in shaping American surburbs. Bellevue Park is available through the publisher at Xlibris.com.

HALS to Cover Mountain Brook Estates

Another Manning-planned community has attracted attention from historians: Mountain Brook Estates, an upscale development in Birmingham, Ala., designed in 1929. At a recent meeting of the Birmingham Historical Society (Manning also created a city plan for Birmingham in 1916), historian Marjorie White and Richard Anderson, a geographic documentation specialist, presented their research confirming the integrity of the community’s circulation system and other character defining features. Anderson’s analysis establishes that today’s road alignment and location of bridges and intersections are essentially those that appear on the original plans by developer Jemison & Co. Paul Dolinsky, Chief of the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS), a documentation branch of the National Park Service, is advising the team how to record the features of Mountain Brook for the survey. Manning designed the development with a “reverence for place,” says White, quoting Manning himself: “There is beauty and individuality in everything that grows and it is to the advantage of everyone to discover that beauty and not to replace it with something artificial and expensive.”

Crossroads (an occasional department for finders and seekers)

Researcher Anita Bracalente is seeking information on Frits Loonsten, ASLA, (born Netherlands, 1909; died Indianapolis, 1989). Based in Indianapolis, his practice, Frits Loonsten and Associates, specialized in college and university campuses as well as residential, commercial, and municipal design. He was also a bulb purveyor. 

James H. Edwards, AICP, would like information about, or actual copies of, Charles Wellford Leavitt's city plan for Lakeland, Fla. (1924­–1928). Leavitt, who died c. 1928, was an American landscape designer active in a Hartsdale, N.Y., firm called Landscape Engineers. In Florida, he designed the Lake Mirror Promenade (a. k. a. the Civic Center) in Lakeland, and he reputedly also developed a city plan for Lakeland. He also created plans for Gar­den City, Long Is­land; West Palm Beach, Fla.; Mt. Ver­non, N.Y.; and other cen­ters. Among other projects, Leavitt also designed several university campuses and the racetracks at Sa­ra­toga, Sheep­s­head Bay, Bel­mont, To­ronto, and Em­pire City.

For a chapter on “Master Planning the Future, 1970–2000” in a forthcoming book, Keepers of Trees: A Cultural History of North American Arboreta and Arborphilia, 1700­–2000, Thomas J. Schlereth invites colleagues to suggest examples of innovation in recent Canadian and U.S. arboreta design, particularly master planning  (e.g., Universities of California, Davis and Irvine; Southern Mississippi; and North Carolina), circulation patterns, architecture (e.g., visitor, education, research, library, and herbarium centers), entrance/gateway designs, specialty gardens (e.g., women’s, children’s, medicinal, and ecological gardens), manipulation of natural features (water, terrain), and tree-canopy walks. See author’s research site for a detailed project summary and a published chapter. Schlereth is Professor Emeritus, Departments of American Studies & History, University of Notre Dame.

Old House Gardens. Founded by landscape historian Scott Kunst, OHG is America’s only mail-order source devoted entirely to heirloom bulbs and an international leader in the preservation of “these fabulous relics.” To subscribe, email newsletter@oldhousegardens.com with “subscribe” as the subject. Please also add this email address (or our domain of oldhousegardens.com) to your approved senders list. OHG never shares email addresses.

Spring Recipe from LALH: Braised Artichoke and Arugula Salad

Celebrate the return of spring with a new salad that combines the nutty taste of artichokes with peppery Eruca sativa, the leafy annual known as arugula. The freshest artichokes are available in most grocery stores from March to May. Use baby artichokes and choose those with tight, green leaves.

Ingredients (makes two generous salads):
5 baby artichokes
4 oz baby arugula
4 oz crumbled goat cheese
1/4 c pine nuts
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1/2 c water
1/2 tsp honey
1 tsp fresh-chopped parsley plus sprigs for garnish
Sugar in the raw, Kosher salt, and fresh-ground pepper to taste

Directions:
Strip off the outer leaves of the artichokes to the inner, pale-green layer. With a vegetable peeler, peel the rough skin off stems. Trim the tops of the artichokes about 1/4 inch. Slice artichokes in half, top to bottom. Cut a lemon in half and rub one half on the cut sides to prevent discoloring. Heat a 12-inch skillet on medium-high heat and add 2 tbsp. of the olive oil. When oil is hot, sprinkle sugar on the cut side of each artichoke and place in pan, sugar-side-down. Cook until browned, about 4¬–5 minutes. Flip and brown the other side, another 3–4 minutes. Leave the browned halves in the pan, add the minced garlic, and stir for one minute. Add the water and 1 tbsp lemon juice. Reduce heat to medium low, stir, and cover until water is nearly evaporated and the artichokes are tender.

While waiting, heat another skillet at medium-high heat and toast the pine nuts (dry) until they start to brown. Remove from pan. Squeeze the remaining lemon half. Mix the remaining olive oil, lemon juice, and honey for the salad dressing, adding salt and pepper to taste. Toss the arugula in just enough dressing to coat the leaves. Divide between two plates. Sprinkle the pine nuts and goat cheese over the arugula.

When the artichokes are nearly done, add the chopped parsley, season with salt and pepper to taste, and stir until all water is gone. Place the artichokes on top of the arugula. Garnish with parsley sprigs and fresh pepper. Serve while artichokes are hot.

Recipe by Jessica Dawson.

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