Landscape Architecture: As Applied to the Wants of the West (ASLA Centennial Reprint Series)

Arts & Photography

Cleveland, H. W. S.

Architecture

Library Of American Landscape History

Winner, American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award 
Named one of the 75 Best Garden Books by the American Horticultural Society 
For sixty years, Fletcher Steele practiced landscape architecture as a fine art, designing nearly seven hundred gardens, from Boston to Detroit, from North Carolina to Canada. Often brilliant, always original, Steele's work is considered by many to constitute the essential link between nineteenth-century Beaux-Arts formalism and modern landscape design.\n“A book to give for Christmas, or as the grandest of house presents; it's a book to keep as well. . . . [Karson] has written a wonderful read and, in doing so, has revived an entire era in all its detail. Intelligent, theatrical, infuriating, amusing―and loveable―Steele struts off the page, giving life to his own work.” ―Garden Design\n“Karson has done a magnificent job in integrating carefully chosen archival drawings and pictures with contemporary photographs of many gardens. Planting plans and plant lists are offered as additional information for many of the gardens with a comprehensive list of clients. We are given simultaneously a revealing account of one of America's greatest modern garden designers as well as an inspiring reference of garden-making as a fine art.” ―Public Garden\n“This is a book to be savored, to be read and re-read for enjoyment and consulted repeatedly for inspiration. The text is uncommonly readable, the descriptions of the gardens and their maker consistently perceptive and insightful. . . . [An] exceptional volume.” ―Pacific Horticulture\n“Makes available to students and teachers of landscape design a wealth of material: plans, drawings, photographs, and correspondence, as well as interviews with Steele's family, his clients and their family members, office staff and associates, and collaborators in architecture, gardening, art, and sculpture. Moreover, the text places Steele's gardens in the context of major threads of American socioeconomic history and of the development of the young profession of landscape architecture.” ―Landscape Journal

Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect: An Account of the Gardenmaker's Life, 1885–1971

Biographies & Memoirs

Karson, Robin

Arts & Literature

Before becoming a landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) visited southern England and Wales during a month-long walking tour, recording his impressions in this richly detailed volume. Charles C. McLaughlin's introduction clarifies the links between Olmsted's developing picturesque aesthetic, social conscience, and reformer's passion for change, and persuasively argues that Olmsted came to adapt many of the features of the cultivated English countryside in designed landscapes such as New York's Central Park.

Walks And Talks Of An American Farmer In England

Olmsted, Frederick Law

Review\n“In this book we get not only a young American's vivid impressions of mid-nineteenth-century England, but also the first glimmers of Frederick Law Olmsted the observant journalist and future landscape designer.” -- Witold Rybczynski\n“Olmsted's first, and most engaging, book . . . Walks and Talks is a charming chronicle of a Connecticut Yankee's discovery of old scenes and new ideas in the land of his ancestors. The LALH reprint edition of this remarkable journal benefits greatly from the annotation that accompanies Olmsted's text, while the editor's gracefully phrased introduction provides a most useful setting for the narrative.” -- Charles E. Beveridge, Series Editor, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted\nIt is fascinating to see Olmsted here absorbing and recording firsthand impressions of England’s rapidly changing countryside and growing industrial cities. 
-- Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Author of Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History\nThe essential annotated edition of Frederick Law Olmsted's first book 
Before he ever dreamed of becoming a landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted visited southern England and Wales during a month-long walking tour. A gifted writer, he recorded his impressions of the trip in a richly detailed volume, first published in 1852. “In Walks and Talks,” writes Charles C. McLaughlin in his introduction, “Olmsted is reporter, social analyst, narrator, dramatist, scene-painter, and humorist, employing a wide range of modes and styles to give us the sights, sounds, and mental impressions of rural England in 1850.” 
Olmsted's narrative―at turns poetic, funny, critical, and meticulous―is a delight to read. It is also an important historical document, revealing the extent to which England permeated Olmsted's emerging worldview, soon to find expression in his various careers as scientific farmer, author and publisher, social critic, reformer, administrator, and landscape architect of major parks and park systems throughout the United States. 
The introduction, illustrated with plans and photographs of the sites he visited, clarifies the links between Olmsted's developing picturesque aesthetic, social conscience, and reformer's passion for change. McLaughlin argues persuasively that Olmsted would come to adapt many features of the cultivated England countryside―first seen on this trip―in designed landscapes such as New York's Central Park. 
Extensive annotations to the original text furnish background and context to the people and places Olmsted encountered during his journey. The LALH edition also features an index of both Olmsted's text and the new introduction. A specially commissioned map of the region traces his walking route across the English countryside.

History & Criticism

Winner, Center for Historic Preservation Book Prize 
Winner, New York City Book Award for Landscape History\nConceived as an experiment that would apply the new “science” of city planning to a suburban setting, Forest Hills Gardens was created by the Russell Sage Foundation to provide housing for middle-class commuters as an alternative to cramped flats in New York City. Although it has long been recognized as one of the most influential planned communities in the United States, this is the first time Forest Hills Gardens has been the subject of a book. 
Susan L. Klaus's fully illustrated history chronicles the creation of the 142-acre development from its inception in 1909 through its first two decades, offering critical insights into American planning history, landscape architecture, and the social and economic forces that shaped housing in the Progressive Era. Klaus focuses particularly on the creative genius of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., who served as planner and landscape architect for the project.\nDrawing on his father's visionary ideas but developing his own perspective, the younger Olmsted redefined planning for the modern era and became one of the founders of the profession of city planning in the United States.\n“The scholarship in this work is exceptionally thorough. . . . A Modern Arcadia will make a significant contribution to the fields of landscape and planning history.” 
―Cynthia Zaitzevsky, author of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System\n“A Modern Arcadia illuminates the fascinating intersection of social and aesthetic reform movements in the Progressive Era, as well as the early career of a prolific and influential planner and landscape architect.” 
―David Glassberg, author of Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life

A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Garden

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Klaus, Susan L.

Gardening & Landscape Design

Carol Grove chronicles Englishman Henry Shaw's remarkable story, from his early love of plants to his rising social conscience and his determined quest to create a place of unsurpassed beauty and distinction that would educate and thereby improve Americans. Beautifully illustrated with contemporary and historical photographs, this volume offers an insightful cultural history of Shaw's landscapes at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park, among the most important examples of the gardenesque in America.

Henry Shaw's Victorian Landscapes: The Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park

Grove, Carol

Only a few years after marrying tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds, young Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880–1924) began to plan a new home for her family. Not many young women of the day found themselves with almost unlimited wealth to construct their dream home, but Katharine's sense of purpose for her vast resources was even more unusual. She envisioned the founding of a model community that would emphasize health, modern technology, mixed-crop scientific farming, education, and rural beauty. 
In 1904, when Katharine embarked on her estate project in Winston (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina, the South was still feeling the effects of the Civil War and a century of single-crop farming. After conducting exhaustive research, which included wide-ranging reading in agricultural journals and trips to other American estates and model farms, she began to lay out her property, Reynolda. Her plan was inspired, in part, by the rural landscapes of England that had captured the imagination of Frederick Law Olmsted. 
Beginning in 1915, Katharine was aided by Thomas W. Sears, a highly regarded Philadelphia-based landscape architect. The estate eventually expanded to cover more than 1,000 acres. The process of planning Reynolda paralleled similar efforts in other parts of the United States, as new towns, parks, campuses, and country estates were laid out during the century's first decades. 
Catherine Howett's study analyzes the singular convergence of influences that occurred in the imagination of a highly unusual woman. The book provides welcome insight into the culture of the New South and into a richly inventive period in the history of American landscape architecture.\n“Brilliantly written―uplifting and riveting―this books brings out of obscurity a ‘new woman' of the South, who dedicated her brief life to the creation of a place called Reynolda. . . . Readers, especially women, will find inspiration in its pages.” 
―Barbara B. Millhouse, author of American Originals and president, Reynolda House Museum of American Art

A World Of Her Own Making: Katharine Smith Reynolds and the Landscape of Reynolda

Howett, Catherine

This award-winning book offers an insightful inquiry into the intellectual and cultural origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first landscape in the United States to be designed in the picturesque style. Inspired by developments in England and France, Mount Auburn, founded in 1831, became the prototype for the "rural cemetery" movement and was an important precursor of many of America's public parks, beginning with New York City's Central Park.

Silent City On A Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery

Linden, Blanche M. G.

Robert Morris Copeland (1830-1874) was one of a small number of American landscape practitioners whose written and built work helped establish the foundations for city planning and integrated park systems. As did his colleagues Frederick Law Olmsted and Horace Cleveland, Copeland merged many of the principles of scientific farming with landscape design. Copeland organized Country Life (1859) into an agricultural year, providing practical and aesthetic advice on a month-by-month basis according to region.

Country Life: A Handbook of Agriculture, Horticulture, and Landscape Gardening (ASLA Centennial Reprint Series)

Copeland, Robert Morris

History

Garrett Eckbo (1910-1996) was one of the most highly respected and influential American modernist landscape architects. Rejecting the centrality of nature as inspiration, he argued instead for a new approach free of preconceptions. Published in 1950, Landscape for Living presents his ideas for achieving the "total landscape." Illustrations feature his designs for gardens, parks, and institutional projects, work for the Farm Security Administration, and projects by the firm of Eckbo, Royston & Williams.

Landscape For Living (ASLA Centennial Reprint Series)

Eckbo, Garrett

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Books by Library Of American Landscape History

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Library Of American Landscape History publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Landscape Architecture: As Applied to the Wants of the West (ASLA Centennial Reprint Series)

Fletcher Steele, Landscape Architect: An Account of the Gardenmaker's Life, 1885–1971

Walks And Talks Of An American Farmer In England

Walks And Talks Of An American Farmer In England

A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Garden

Henry Shaw's Victorian Landscapes: The Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park

A World Of Her Own Making: Katharine Smith Reynolds and the Landscape of Reynolda

Silent City On A Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston's Mount Auburn Cemetery

Country Life: A Handbook of Agriculture, Horticulture, and Landscape Gardening (ASLA Centennial Reprint Series)

Landscape For Living (ASLA Centennial Reprint Series)