| The thing about landscaping is that you're taking what | | | | "formal gardens." Brown changed all that, encouraging |
| nature has created, and changing and altering it to fit | | | | his clients to make use of a more naturalistic design, |
| your own needs, wants and desires. The ability to | | | | with compositions of grass, clumps of trees, and pools |
| affect nature for the better began in the 1800s. | | | | and lakes. |
| Up until about a hundred years ago, the average | | | | England has Capability Brown, the United States has |
| person didn't have a lawn to worry about. They were | | | | Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted was born in 1822 |
| too busy going to work, putting food on the table, and | | | | and died in 1903. He went to Yale and studied |
| trying to educate their children. It was only when | | | | agricultural science and engineering. |
| people started leaving the farming life for the life of the | | | | In 1853, the New York legislature decided that they'd |
| cities and suburbs that single-family houses sprang up | | | | have to create a park in the middle of the city, for their |
| in droves, and people had the money to spend on | | | | many inhabitants. They held a contest to decide who |
| such luxuries as landscaping. | | | | would design it, and Frederick Olmsted and his partner, |
| Which is not to say that landscaping is a brand new | | | | English architect Calvert Vaux, were awarded the |
| profession. As early as the 1800s, the wealthy of | | | | contract, to create a "greensward," as Olmsted |
| practically any country were able to employ | | | | termed it. " The park was not created on barren land, |
| professional artisans to build gardens and landscape | | | | however - many poor people and free blacks were |
| their homes. Of course, they weren't average people, | | | | evicted from their homes under eminent domain so |
| but nevertheless it's fun to learn about the forerunners | | | | that the park could be placed there. (Not that that was |
| of today's landscape designer. | | | | Olmsted's fault - that's where the legislature wanted |
| The most famous is the British landscape designer, | | | | the park, and that's where they were going to put it |
| "Capability" Brown. His real name was Lancelot Brown, | | | | regardless.) |
| but it was his habit to look at a piece of real estate | | | | Olmsted went on to make a career out of creating |
| and say, "It has capabilities," and t hat is how he got his | | | | city parks - indeed he conceived the system of parks |
| nickname. Brown has been called England's "most | | | | and interconnecting parkways. Two of the best |
| famous gardener." He was born in 1716 and died in | | | | examples are the park system he designed for |
| 1783, and yet over a hundred years later his legacy | | | | Buffalo, New York, and the system for Milwaukee, |
| lives on. Over 44 of his gardens are still in existence | | | | Wisconsin. Olmsted and his partners also designed |
| today (he designed over 170). Of course that's | | | | over 355 school and college campuses. |
| because he designed these gardens for the "landed | | | | So as you walk through your city and see all the |
| families", or nobility, who were not about to sell their | | | | greenspaces and landscaping, spare a thought for the |
| mansion every ten years and move up to a bigger | | | | landscape architects who brought all this beauty to |
| one. | | | | you. Studying the history of landscape architecture is |
| Prior to Capability Brown, the landed families had huge | | | | fun and informative. |