by Eric Rutkow
Regardless of why it was selected, the Greensward Plan was a landmark of innovative design. Olmsted and Vaux started with the premise that Central Park needed to be completely set apart from the bustling city that would soon engulf it. Their submission explained, “For the purpose of concealing the houses . . . from the park, and to insure an umbrageous horizon line, it is proposed . . . to plant a line of trees all around the outer edge of the park.” Trees would thus create the illusion of infinite wilderness as soon as a visitor stepped inside the park (the arrival of skyscrapers in the twentieth century put an end to this effect). In order to maintain the illusion within the park, the plan called for the four transverse roads to be sunk below the surface, a radical engineering solution that some worried would be impossible to construct. Additionally, the grounds of the park, especially in the southern half, needed to be terraformed: draining the marshes; shaping the high, rocky outcroppings; pulverizing boulders that served no aesthetic purpose; creating several new bodies of water in the valleys. The landscape that resulted, in places pastoral, in others picturesque, would also contain a host of fashionable constructions that the board required: a broad carriage path; ornate brick and stone arches; a majestic avenue; a grand fountain overlooking one of the newly formed lakes.
Olmsted and Vaux also devoted almost one-third of the Greensward Plan’s accompanying description to a proposed American arboretum. While such an artificial feature ran counter to their general design approach, it brought benefits that justified its inclusion. The authors wrote:
The north-east section of the upper park is shown as an arboretum of American trees, so that every one who wishes to do so may become acquainted with the trees and shrubs. . . . [I]t is proposed to limit this particular collection to American trees, because . . . it will afford an opportunity to show the great advantage that America possesses in this respect. No other extra-tropical country could furnish one quarter the material for such a collection.
On paper, the Greensward Plan appeared ambitious but well thought out. In practice, no one knew if it could work with the troublesome plot of land involved. Up to that point, landscape gardening, according to Olmsted, had been “chiefly directed to the improvement of naturally wooded scenery, and that on a small scale.” Olmsted later wrote, “It would have been difficult to find another body of land of six hundred acres upon the island . . . which possessed less of . . . the most desirable characteristics of a park, or upon which more time, labor, and expense would be required to establish them.”
The implementation of the Greensward Plan, consequently, was a colossal, almost absurd undertaking, the single largest and most expensive public-works project ever attempted in an urban area. The board promoted Olmsted to architect in chief, responsible for overseeing the entire operation. Vaux, somewhat insultingly, was deputized as a consulting architect. The demands of the project necessitated that the workforce swell first to 2,000 and then to an average of 3,000, with a peak at 3,800—for years it was the largest employer in a city rocked by the unemployment that followed the Panic of 1857. Costs began to spiral, becoming a constant source of tension between Olmsted and the board. By 1860, the total bill was already estimated at $2.5 million, almost $1 million more than the Greensward Plan had estimated. The number grew with each passing year.
Tree planting—as with drainage and the sunken transverses—constituted a major component of the landscaping. The Greensward Plan devoted more than 25 percent of its operating budget to tree purchase, planting, and soil improvement. Olmsted, recognizing the importance that trees had in his vision, advised the board “to select immediately the finest trees which can be found.” Later, he issued specific instructions that “No tree or shrub is to be planted under any circumstances except in the best manner.” To oversee the planting, Olmsted selected from within the ranks of his staff an Austrian American landscape gardener named Ignaz Pilat, who had trained in Vienna. Pilat proved capable of realizing the most elaborate sylvan effects, even Olmsted’s demand that in one section of the park, known as the Ramble, the foliage be planted so densely as to appear tropical. The plans for the American arboretum, meanwhile, became more cosmopolitan, with new instructions to plant “specimens of every tree and shrub which can be grown upon the site in the open air.”
Construction of the park was not completed until 1873. Olmsted estimated that the amount of earth and stone transported in the park totaled 4,825,000 cubic yards, “or nearly ten millions of ordinary city one-horse cart-loads, which, in single file, would make a procession thirty thousand miles in length.” The amount of imported or redistributed materials, if spread equally throughout the park, would change the elevation by nearly four feet, according to Olmsted. Over 18,500 cubic yards of topsoil alone were imported from New Jersey, as the park’s natural soil was too infertile to sustain extensive tree plantings. And the number of trees planted in this re-formed earth reached more than 400,000. An 1873 catalogue listed 1,447 hardy species and varieties.
Even before the construction was completed, the park that Olmsted and Vaux designed proved an instant success. It drew on average more than one hundred thousand visitors per month throughout the warmer seasons. An 1861 article in the Atlantic Monthly gushed: “[T]he Central Park in New York,—the most striking evidence yet of the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free institutions,—the best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which have frowned on the theory of self-government.” Harper’s described it as “the finest work of art ever executed in this country.” Olmsted, lauding its salubrious effect for society, proclaimed, “No one . . . can doubt that it exercises a distinctly harmonizing and refining influence upon the most unfortunate and lawless classes of the city.”
The park’s popularity propelled Olmsted onto the national stage, and he eventually grew weary of the day-to-day budget fights and petty squabbles with the board. Looking for a new challenge and swept up in the bellicose atmosphere of the Civil War, he decided to join the Union army as executive secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission, an agency tasked with improving military sanitary conditions. Olmsted’s new priority became sanitary reform. Using the administrative skills he had honed in Central Park, he attacked “slovenliness [as] a national vice,” in the estimation of one historian of the period. Following his service in the war, Olmsted accepted a position as superintendent of the Mariposa Mining estates in California, where he encountered the legendary big trees. He joined the cause of sequoia preservation, which he considered, like Central Park, a matter of basic democracy: equal opportunity for all to enjoy the trees. In 1865, the governor of California appointed him commissioner of the new state park comprising Yosemite and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove.
But Olmsted’s greatest passion was landscape gardening, and soon he returned to it. In the 1860s, he formed a business partnership with Vaux, and the two men ushered in a new era of public-park creation throughout America. One of their first commissions was in the borough of Brooklyn, where they designed the 585-acre Prospect Park, a triumph of landscape design that Olmsted considered superior in many ways to Central Park. Their subsequent projects, far too numerous to recount in full, ranged from giant citywide initiatives (such as the “Emerald Necklace” system in Boston, which included Harvard’s famous Arnold Arboretum) to national landmarks (such as the Niagara Falls State Park). Olmsted’s firm also handled private commissions, from Stanford University in California to the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey to his final major project, George Washington Vanderbilt’s estate in North Carolina, known as Biltmore.
While Olmsted’s style developed over time, it largely stayed true to the sylvan aesthetics that Downing had first set forth. Over the course of a forty-year career in landscape gardening, he had turned the American metropolis green. Sadly, his most famous commission, Central Park, began to decline almost as soon as it was completed, the victim of municipal corruption that endured into the twentieth century.
Man and Nature
THE BULK OF Central Park’s construction took place against the backdrop of the Civil War, and the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history turned trees, like nearly everything, into a matter of tactics and strategy. Forests provided cover for troop transport and made large-scale infantry engagements impractical. Both sides set fire to the woods, sometimes as an aggressive maneuver to destroy the enemy’s property and sometimes as a defensive ploy to impede hostile forces with a wall of fire. Trees also provided the raw materials for innumerable war supplies. According to one contemporary source, “In the first two years of the present civil war in the United States, twenty-eight thousand walnut trees were felled to supply a single European manufactory of gunstocks for the American market.”
The year 1864 was perhaps the most violent of the war. In the wake of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address, Union and Confederate forces were fighting with renewed intensity, locked in a winner-take-all struggle for the future of the country. Each passing month produced tens of thousands of casualties.
The height of war was not a likely moment for a shift in attitudes about trees, but in May of that year appeared a book, Man and Nature, that historian Lewis Mumford would later label “the fountainhead of the conservation movement.” It argued that the nation’s forests were much more than zones on a military map or mines for timber and fuel. Trees, the book explained, were essential to the very habitability of the nation.
George Perkins Marsh, the author of Man and Nature, was one of the nineteenth century’s most capacious thinkers. His personal library included more than twelve thousand volumes, and he reportedly spoke twenty languages comfortably. He belonged to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. His writings prior to Man and Nature included a treatise on Icelandic grammar, a history of the English language, and a monograph on the camel. According to one contemporary, “it was the general opinion of his friends that he possessed one of the broadest minds and a most absorptive memory.” Man and Nature was his crowning achievement, the synthesis of several lifetimes’ worth of study and experience.
The ideas that developed into his book traced back to his boyhood observations. He was born in 1801 in Woodstock, Vermont, and, like Susan Fenimore Cooper and Thoreau, grew up watching the surrounding forests fall in the name of progress. “[I] spent my early life almost literally in the woods,” he once commented. “I have had occasion both to observe and to feel the effects resulting from an injudicious system of managing woodlands and the products of the forests.” Most of his contemporaries thought that the effect of such “injudicious” land management was simply the hastening of man’s dominion over nature—the forests were savage places meant to be dominated. But Marsh, despite this mantra that cleared land was superior, saw consequences for the surrounding environment in the disappearance of trees. He wrote to a friend:
For instance my father had a piece of thick woodland where the ground was always damp. Wild turnips grew there and ginseng, and wild pepper sometimes. Well, sir, he cleared up that lot, and drained and cultivated it, and it became a good deal drier. . . . Now I am going to state this as a fact and I defy all you speculators about cause and effect to deny it.
Marsh was not only an observer, but also a busy participant in the rough-and-tumble world of early nineteenth-century America. His list of jobs and business ventures made the peripatetic early careers of Thoreau and Olmsted look focused by comparison. After earning a college degree from Dartmouth at nineteen, Marsh entered the profession of law, but the first twenty years of his career also included stints as a gentleman farmer, lumber dealer, manufacturer, mill operator, newspaper editor, road builder, speculator, and state bureaucrat. Through these manifold activities, Marsh coped with the twin tragedies he suffered in 1833, when he lost his wife and son: “It was well for me [that business] drove me into a constant succession of severe labors of a very engrossing character.” Unfortunately, none of these enterprises proved especially fruitful. Partly it was bad luck, and partly it was that Marsh’s mind was often lost in intellectual pursuits. By the 1840s, with little to show for his efforts as a businessman, he turned to politics. His father had been a U.S. senator, and in 1842 Marsh was able to win a congressional seat as a Whig representative from Vermont.
The first public record of Marsh’s interest in man’s effect on the natural environment appeared during his tenure as congressman. In 1847, he delivered an address to an agricultural society in his native Vermont that touched on the subject. The speech was, for the most part, a valedictory to the harmonizing influences that modern life had on the natural world. “The arts of the savage are the arts of destruction,” he said. “Civilization, on the contrary, is at once the mother and the fruit of peace.” This was standard rhetoric at the time. However, in the middle of the talk, Marsh detoured from this accepted narrative:
[T]rees are no longer what they were in our fathers’ time, an incumbrance. . . . The functions of the forest, besides supplying timber and fuel, are various. . . . [T]he annual deposit of the foliage of deciduous trees, and the decomposition of their decaying trunks, form an accumulation of vegetable mould, which gives the greatest fertility to the often originally barren soils on which they grow, and enriches lower grounds by the wash from rains and the melting of snows. . . . [W]here too large a proportion of the surface is bared of wood, the action of the summer sun and wind scorches the hills which are no longer shaded or sheltered by trees, [and] the springs and rivulets that found their supply in the bibulous soil of the forest disappear.
The thrust of Marsh’s argument was twofold. First, deforestation meant not only the elimination of trees, but the alteration of entire ecosystems: drier soils; less regulated temperatures; erosion; uneven water flows. Second, to remove trees risked permanently degrading the land, such that nature alone could not ameliorate the problem. Marsh went so far as to use the word “evil” to describe the “injudicious destruction of the woods.” His language drew on the rhetoric of morality, of religious obligation. Traditionally, however, the forests themselves were associated with evil forces. And while backwoods settlement, Hudson River School paintings, and transcendentalism had mitigated this somewhat, the connotation persisted. Marsh was flipping popular sentiment on its head. But at this early stage he still sublimated these concerns to the larger argument that humanity was superior to nature.
In 1849, Marsh’s tenure as congressman ended, and for the next dozen years he bounced between public and private life, a period crucial to the intellectual development that led to his writing Man and Nature. Of particular importance were two diplomatic turns he made in Europe, first as minister to Turkey in 1849, then as special envoy to Greece in 1852. Marsh used the opportunities to travel through some of the world’s most long-settled regions, providing him a valuable counterpoint to the young nation that was his home. The ancient treeless European landscapes and lifeless deserts of Egypt and Arabia struck Marsh as the end result of thousands of years of unchecked deforestation, a glimpse of his own country’s future. After completing his diplomatic service in 1855, he returned once more to America, but then headed back to Europe in 1861 when President Lincoln appointed him ambassador to Italy.
By this point, Marsh, who was already sixty years old, felt equipped to begin the most ambitious scholarly project of his life. His intention, according to one of his letters, was to demonstrate “that whereas [many] think that the earth made man, man in fact made the earth.” The proposed “little volume” was going to show precisely how the so-called civilizing effects of mankind—the same ones he had praised in 1847—had transformed all the inhabited regions of the earth, more often than not by destroying and compromising a natural world that was otherwise in balance. To prove this assertion, Marsh planned to rely on his own experiences—as a boy in Vermont, as a businessman in diverse affairs, and as a diplomat in Europe—as well as on an enormous array of sources, from different regions and historical epochs, which were onl
y accessible to a man with Marsh’s breadth as a scholar and facility as a linguist. What would make Man and Nature groundbreaking, therefore, was not simply the boldness of its claims—some of these issues had been floating around since the time of the Romans—but the comprehensiveness of the research. Marsh intended to overwhelm readers with examples until they submitted to the humbling conclusions.
In particular, Marsh hoped that his final product served as a cautionary tale to his countrymen. He wrote to Secretary of State William Seward during the editing phase that he wanted “to show the evils resulting from too much clearing and cultivation, and often so-called improvements in new countries like the United States.” For much of Europe, the lessons contained in Man and Nature would arrive too late, though some countries had already begun managing their forests out of necessity.
The final text of Man and Nature showed almost no patience for the status quo American attitude that the forests existed to be exploited in the name of progress. “Man alone,” Marsh wrote, “is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power. . . . The destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilization.” This assertion cast aside the very premise upon which the country was based: that man stood above nature, permitted by divine right to exert his domain across all the land. Marsh stated: “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.” Here was the root of the idea that human development came coupled with a responsibility to the natural environment.