A Modern Arcadia is one of the growing list of LALH titles available as Google electronic editions.
Ten LALH Books Go “e” with Google—at Lower Prices
As of December 2010, twelve LALH titles are available in Google Editions, priced 20 percent lower than the lowest-priced print editions (paperback or hardcover) of the same titles. Mission 66 by Ethan Carr, for example, costs $31.96 in hardcover and only $17.26 in its digital format. Buy them through Google’s e-bookstore (enter: author “Library of American Landscape History” in the search field), or through the independent booksellers’ website IndieBound. Thanks to a partnership between Google and the American Booksellers Association, independent bookstore customers no longer need to choose between downloading e-books and supporting their local stores. For readers who still love to hold a real live book, these LALH print editions have not been replaced—they’re just e-incarnated. Click here to browse all LALH titles.
Images courtesy of the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens Blog.
Cummer Museum Hosts A Genius for Place
To launch its fiftieth-anniversary year, the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida, is hosting the LALH exhibition A Genius for Place from January 25 to April 29. The former country estate of Ninah and Arthur Cummer contains grounds and gardens designed by O. C. Simonds, Ellen Shipman, and the Olmsted Brothers firm. Shipman is among the landscape architects whose work is featured in A Genius for Place, which presents a photographic survey of seven influential landscapes of the Country Place era (1895–1940). Click here to read an article about the exhibition at the Cummer in Florida’s On View magazine or click here to see the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens Blog about the exhibit.
The show premiered in 2000 at UBS PaineWebber Art Gallery in New York City and began a seven-year national tour, supported by The Viburnum Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A Genius for Place has been recently refurbished thanks to a generous grant from the New York Community Trust. The next scheduled venue is Reynolda HouseMuseum of American Art, in Winston–Salem, North Carolina, in spring 2012. To inquire about availability, contact Jane Roy Brown. Click here to order the book of the same title.
Fuller Brook Park, Wellesley, Mass. Photo by Carol Betsch.
Fuller Brook Park, Wellesley, Mass. Photo by Matt Medeiros.
Traveling Through Time and Space with Warren Manning
In his unpublished autobiography, pioneering landscape architect and planner Warren Manning envisioned a jet pack that could be strapped to his back, propelling him above the landscape for a better view. Thanks to a national network of local volunteer research associates for the Manning Research Project, LALH has been achieving a similar kind of bird’s-eye view of this remarkable landscape architect and his wide-ranging influence on the American landscape. The project’s innovative research model, which involves dozens of contributors, is having a ripple effect: Manning is a growing presence on the radar screen of landscape architects, city parks and planning departments, and historic preservation professionals. In some cases, new discoveries by them are helping LALH researchers with their contributions to the forthcoming book about Manning.
For example, during the research for creating a master plan for Fuller Brook Park, in Wellesley, Mass.—designed by Manning in 1899—Pressley / Landscape Architecture in Boston discovered a box of his original drawings for the park that had been in the closet of a park building for years. LALH research associate Matt Medeiros has been given access to the new documents, which will help him with his essay on the landscape’s innovative design, one of several entries that Medeiros is contributing to the book. Contemporary photography of Manning’s work continues at several sites, including Fuller Brook Park.
The Iris Walk in Longue Vue's Wild Garden. Photo by Amy Graham, courtesy Longue Vue House and Gardens.
One of the native irises in the Iris Walk. Photo by Flora Williams, courtesy Longue Vue House and Gardens.
Longue Vue’s Louisiana Irises Rebloom
In April 2010, after five years of painstaking restoration, the native irises at Longue Vue House and Gardens produced their most impressive show since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina drowned 60 percent of Louisiana’s premier iris collection in two feet of brackish floodwater that flooded the estate’s wild garden. This spring, more than 2,000 irises will rise for their second dazzling season after a restoration completed last spring. And, for the second consecutive year after the storm, Longue Vue will host Louisiana Iris Day, on April 9.
During the hurricane this National Historic Landmark property, formerly the home of Edith and Edgar Stern, lost hundreds of other plants in the landscape, which was designed between 1939 and 1942 by landscape architect Ellen Shipman (1869–1950) and horticulturist Caroline Dormon (1888–1971). Dorman continued planting the Iris Walk, part of the wild garden, in the 1950s. In 2008, native plant experts Tyrone Foreman and Susan Norris-Davis were hired to help Restore the plantings in this garden. Volunteers from the Greater New Orleans Iris Society, many of whom planted specimens from their own gardens, assisted. A local nursery also donated plants. Last spring, the restored garden burst forth. “Walking along the serpentine iris path of the Wild Garden gives you the sensation of floating along the wetlands in a canoe,” mused Foreman. Fortunately, however, visitors no longer need one. For more information, visit www.longuevue.com.
One of the park’s several meadows, which have grown shaggy over time. All photos by James Blair, courtesy Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy.
Beatrix Farrand’s built features in Dumbarton Oaks Park are overgrown.
New Hope for Dumbarton Oaks Park
“I couldn’t bear to let Dumbarton Oaks Park drift into oblivion,” says Jane MacLeish, a garden designer based in Washington, D.C. “So I met with Rebecca Trafton and Lou Slade, and we formed the Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy.” Trafton (formerly Rebecca Frischkorn) is a landscape designer and host of Garden Story, a 2008 PBS series. Slade is a retired civil engineer. All three regularly enjoy walks through the 27-acre Dumbarton Oaks Park, which once composed nearly half of the Dumbarton Oaks estate designed by Beatrix Farrand in the 1920s for Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. The Blisses donated the park—a naturalistic woodland with a winding stream, waterfalls, bridges, paths, and meadows—to the National Park Service, which opened it to the public in 1941. For decades, however, the ravages of erosion, invasive plants, and disease have outstripped the agency’s ability to maintain the park, leaving it in dire condition. An earlier friends group, in partnership with the park service and Dumbarton Oaks, produced a cultural landscape report, paving the way for the current restoration.
The conservancy’s co-founders draw inspiration from LALH trustee Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, who started the pioneering Central Park Conservancy in the 1980s, and others who have followed suit. “I think of all the things that people have accomplished, and they’ve just gone ahead and done them, step by step,” says MacLeish. The Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy officially launches on April 12, 2011, the seventieth anniversary of the park’s opening, with a rededication of the park. For more information and updates, visit www.dopark.org.
Sanguinaria canadensis, or bloodroot, will be transplanted to NYBG's new Native Plant Garden. Photo by Jody Payne, courtesy New York Botanical Garden.
A portion of the NYBG's Native Plant Garden plan by Oehme, van Sweden. Courtesy NYBG.
Native Plant Garden Under Construction at New York Botanical Garden
The New York Botanical Garden has had a native plants garden since the 1930s and in 2009, announced plans for a new design that “will showcase the beauty and diversity of native plants and the best in contemporary garden design,” said Todd Forrest, vice president for horticulture and living collections. Last year landscape architects from the firm of Oehme, van Sweden and NYBG’s horticulture staff forged ahead, moving more than 2,600 specimens—including rare trilliums, orchids, and ferns—out of the construction site. “The first new plants went in last fall, and construction has now begun on the woodland portion of the garden,” reports Travis Beck, ASLA, landscape and gardens project manager at NYBG. “We have thousands of nursery-grown trillium overwintering in cold frames, and we will begin planting those this spring.” When the new garden opens in spring 2013, signs and educational materials will emphasize how native plants contribute to a healthy environment. Check for updates at www.nybg.org
Meanwhile, those who want to explore America’s longstanding interest in environmental design can order The Native Landscape Reader, forthcoming this fall from LALH. In this anthology, Robert E. Grese compiles writings on nature-based landscape design and conservation by some of the country’s most significant practitioners, horticulturists, botanists, and conservationists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Purposely avoiding literature that is widely available, Grese also shares his experience of discovery. His introduction provides perspective on the context of these writings and the principles they espouse, and his conclusion illuminates their relevance to the current emphasis on sustainable design. This will be the first volume in a new LALH series, Critical Studies in the History of Environmental Design.
Burial marker for Confederate General Stonewall Jackson's arm in Ellwood Cemetery near the Wilderness Battlefield. The limb was amputated as the result of wounds he received during the Battle of Chancellorsville. Photo courtesy Civil War Trust.
Wal-Mart Surrenders on Wilderness Battlefield
In January, after a 26-month skirmish with preservationists, Wal-Mart abandoned its plans to build a superstore within view of the Wilderness Battlefield, near Fredericksburg, Virginia. In May 1864 an estimated 145,000 troops faced off under Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who engaged directly for the first time here. The two-day Battle of the Wilderness left an estimated 18,400 Union and 11,400 Confederate troops dead and marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War.
Although Wal-Mart representatives insisted that the store would not have been visible from the battlefield’s 2,700 protected acres, foes of the retail development—who included David McCullough and two hundred fifty-three other historians, filmmaker Ken Burns, actor Robert Duvall, Virginia’s governor, and congressmen from Vermont and Texas—did not buy the argument. “Do you believe a Wal-Mart Supercenter belongs within sight of both the Wilderness and Chancellorsville battlefields?” wrote Jim Lighthizer, president of the Civil War Trust, in an e-mail alert. Lighthizer also pointed out the larger, long-term consequences of the mammoth construction project: “more pavement, more traffic and more development in its wake.”
The Fort Worth Water Gardens, designed in 1973 by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, with the Sheraton Fort Worth Hotel and Spa in background. Courtesy AHLP.
Landscape Preservation Advocates Cowboy Up
The Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation holds its 2011 annual meeting, "From Country to City: Advocating for Historic Landscapes," in Fort Worth, Texas, April 6–9. Attendees will have the opportunity to explore historic landscapes in the city and surrounds, among them Heritage Park at the Trinity River bluffs, designed by Lawrence Halprin (who favored string ties); Hare and Hare’s municipal rose garden at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden; and historic sites along the Paluxy River in Hood and Somervell counties, including the town of Glen Rose and Dinosaur Valley State Park. The meeting headquarters, the Sheraton Fort Worth Hotel and Spa, is adjacent to the Fort Worth Water Gardens and the city’s convention center, near the central business district and Sundance Square. Click here to download the schedule and registration form, or visit www.ahlp.org for more information.
VIEW 2010. Cover depicts Lake Willomere, Graceland Cemetery, Chicago, Ill. Photo by Carol Betsch.
VIEW Tagged for Libraries
Earlier this year LALH was contacted by EBSCO, one of the world’s largest online publishers of databases for e-journals and e-books, EBSCO contacted LALH to include the LALH annual magazine, VIEW, in one of its online journal databases. This service will make VIEW articles available to libraries through a database called Associates Programs Source. Each VIEW article will be tagged individually by topic, making it easier for researchers to find the exact article they are looking for. This in turn will allow VIEW to reach a much wider audience.
Crossroads (an occasional department for finders and seekers)
A researcher studying the history of the campus of Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana has located a ten-page handwritten letter signed “O. Benson” (undated, but probably c. 1885) in the university archives. This is likely Olaf Benson, a Chicago-based landscape architect who practiced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It would be helpful to locate more of Benson’s correspondence. If anyone knows where any of Benson’s papers are housed, please contact Anita Bracalente: abracale@indiana.edu.
During research on a house designed by Stanford White near the campus of Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., blueprints were found for a garden designed between 1929 and 1931 by landscape architect William Moeller. His office was located at 47 West 42nd Street in New York City. Researcher Connie Walsh would be grateful for any information about Moeller: cswalsh@comcast.net.
Potato field. Photo by Elza Fiuza/ABr, via Wikimedia Commons.
The raw ingredients. Photo by Jessica Dawson.
The finished soup garnished with crisped shallots. Photo by R. Joshua Mobley.
LALH Seasonal Recipe: Dutch Cheese and Potato Soup
On cold winter nights this robust soup warms body and soul.
Soup ingredients:
3 lbs Yukon Gold potatoes
2 med. yellow onions
1 large leek, rinsed thoroughly
2 shallots
3 c. whole milk
8 oz. grated Gouda cheese
4 tbsp. butter
3 tbsp. flour
¾ tsp. of lightly crushed caraway seeds
1 tbsp. olive oil
salt and pepper
Shallot Garnish ingredients (optional):
3 large shallots
¼ c. olive oil
Directions
For the soup:
Peel and cube the potatoes and add to a 4-qt pot. Fill with water until the potatoes are just covered. Lightly salt the water and then cook on high heat until potatoes are soft. Turn off heat but do not drain. Meanwhile, thinly slice the onions, shallots, and the bottom (trimmed) half of the leek. In a heavy-bottomed 6-qt. pot, melt 1 tbsp. of the butter and add the olive oil. Add the onions, shallots, and leek and sauté, stirring frequently, until golden brown. Add about 1/4 c. of the potato water to the onion and leek pot and deglaze the bottom before adding all of the potatoes and the rest of their water.
In a small saucepan, heat the milk and the caraway seeds on low. Meanwhile, melt the remaining 3 tbsp. of butter in a heavy-bottomed skillet. Add the flour and cook to form a roux, whisking constantly, until the mixture begins to darken (2–3 minutes). Slowly add the caraway seed-infused milk and whisk until the mixture is smooth and thickens into a white sauce. Stir this into the soup in the 6-qt. pot, and reduce heat to medium-low. While gently stirring, slowly add the grated cheese a little at a time and cook for an additional 5–10 min. Add salt and pepper to taste. Blend the soup with a hand blender or in small batches with a countertop blender. Garnish with crispy shallots (directions below) and serve hot.
For the garnish:
Thinly slice shallots into small rings. Place a heavy skillet over high heat and pour in half of the olive oil. Add the shallots and sauté until they begin to brown. Turn the heat down to medium-low and continue to cook, adding the remaining olive oil as needed and stirring often until the shallots are completely browned and crispy. Move the finished shallots to a paper towel to soak up residual oil. Leftover shallots will keep well in an air-tight container and can be used to jazz up salads or sandwiches.
LALH Trustees in Charlottesville, Va.Photo by Robin Karson.
Trustee John Notz, Jr., with LALH President Michael Jefcoat and Evelyn Jefcoat at Storm King. Photo by Neil Brigham.
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The national financial crisis has cast new light on the importance of land use and its economic consequences. Oversize houses on cramped suburban lots are being abandoned in droves. Supermalls are bankrupt. Industry is leaving behind brownfields of terrifying proportions.
Enlightened landscape design, guided by an awareness of the intrinsic needs of human beings and the responsibility we bear toward the planet, is the theme that runs through all LALH books.
LALH was recently recognized by an Arthur Ross award for “artfully fostering the heritage of American landscape design and influencing the landscape profession through scholarship and publications.” We are very proud of this recognition and, even more so, of our award-winning books and exhibitions. Our mission is to educate and thereby promote thoughtful stewardship of the land.
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