A Landscape Style for the Semiarid American West

Olmsted’s San Francisco Bay projects in the mid-1860s also marked another important step in his design career: they were his first attempt to work out the principles of a regional style of landscape design appropriate to the semiarid American West. He recognized that an approach which sought to re-create English landscape effects—particularly rich expanses of greensward—would be costly and inappropriate. Few parts of the United States west of Missouri or south of Pennsylvania, he felt, could sustain such areas of turf except at a prohibitive cost for watering. For a solution, Olmsted turned to the practices of the Mediterranean world. In part, he drew from dim memories of Italian villas he had visited in 1856, at a time, he said, when he had “no more thought of being a landscape architect than of being a Cardinal.” In 1886, as he anticipated laying out the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco, he said that before beginning design work in California—or indeed “in the larger part of our country”—he would want to spend a summer in Italy and Spain. In that spirit he dispatched his protégés Charles Eliot and Henry Sargent Codman to those countries to find useful examples of landscape treatment suited to their climate. Yet Olmsted and his colleagues found little to emulate in the Mediterranean gardening practices of their time. As late as 1892 he reported to Codman—now his partner and working in Colorado—that he had recently looked through a fine collection of photographs of Spain but found “nothing helpful to us in studying our Western problems. There was no landscape work; no agreeable foreground (domestic) landscape, and the decorative gardening work seemed to me either forlorn or puerile & frittering.” Nevertheless, Olmsted held to his belief that new and different solutions must be found for the West, reiterating that “the absurdity of seeking for good pastoral beauty in the far West is more & more manifest.”

Stanford University was Olmsted’s last commission in California, but work in Colorado in the early 1890s provided one further series of [452]opportunities. There his two principal projects were a summer community in Perry Park, thirty-five miles south of Denver, and a resort hotel on Lookout Mountain in Golden, ten miles west of the city. His final statement of landscape design principles of the semiarid American West emerged from the latter commission:

In all the dryer regions of the world in which men have been living in a condition approaching that of civilization, it has, from time immemorial, been customary to plan buildings and grounds with a view to pleasure, in a manner looking to four classes of results. These are:

first, to leave little naked ground, such as would be covered with turf in regions of humid climate, fully exposed to view near the eye;

second, to have objects in the foreground of dwellings and of frequented places and ways, arranged in such a manner that it is comparatively easy to so apply water to them that they may be kept clean, fresh and in nice order;

third, to have these foreground objects so arranged that other objects coming in view beyond them will be at such a distance that effects of drought and dust upon them will not be disagreeably evident;

fourth, that a picturesquely intimate association of natural and artificial objects may be secured, as, for example, by the mantling of walls, fences, gateways, verandas, balconies and pavilions with a foliage of vines, and by growing upon them plants that need little moisture, such as Agaves, Yuccas, Cacti, Sedums and Houseleeks. These, sometimes growing with obvious art, as decorations, in vases and pots; sometimes naturally, in crannies and cavities of rocks and stone work.

Olmsted echoed this concept in his last letter on the subject, in August 1894: the main element, he asserted, was “the contrivance of materials for foregrounds, strong and fresh, and harmonious and melodic, and all this consistently with convenience, economy and suitability to nice domestic life.” If the foregrounds could be made intense and lush, and yet be small enough in area to permit easy care and economical watering, and if they were sited so as to hide the dreary and dry middle distance while providing “perspective effect” for distant views, then the problem might be solved.

That both the nature of the problem and its solution became clear to Olmsted during his work in California in the 1860s is evident in many parts of the reports published in this volume.

Mountain View Cemetery

Olmsted’s first design in California was Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, which he began in early 1864 and for which he completed his report before the dedicatory ceremonies of May 1865. He and Calvert Vaux completed the plan in New York City in July 1866. The project is interesting in several ways. First, it clearly demonstrates how [453]Olmsted transferred to landscape design the social ideas he had been pondering during his time on the Mariposa Estate. He intended the cemetery to serve as an example of aesthetic taste that would help civilize the raw young society of the San Francisco area. Moreover, the cemetery was to be a physical model of community—that element so important in moving society toward a civilized state. Mountain View Cemetery was to embrace all elements of the social fabric of the region. The site adjoined a Catholic cemetery, the approach to which in Olmsted’s plan was by way of the main gate of Mountain View. The drives would then diverge— to the left for the Catholic cemetery, straight ahead for the small Jewish section of Mountain View, and to the right for the Protestant section. Close to the entrance was the site of the “Chinese receiving tomb,” where embalmed bodies would be held prior to their return to China, the nearly universal custom of the Chinese in California at that time. Having observed the prevalence of fraternal associations on the California frontier, Olmsted planned numerous sections of the cemetery to be used by such groups for their members. Even the poorest folk were to be clearly included in this community of the dead: two large areas near the entrance were reserved as potter’s fields. Olmsted also made liberal provision for individual grave sites. But in keeping with his desire for the cemetery to be “a place of our common grief, our common hopes and our common faith; a place wherein we may see and feel our sympathy one with another,” he urged that special monuments for important persons be neither conspicuous nor greatly isolated. They should “group and associate in architectural harmony with all that surrounds them,” he observed, since “a lonely grave suggests a dreary life and the absence of cordial affection, even when it is marked with stately honors.”

The Mountain View Cemetery design is also significant because it is Olmsted’s earliest surviving design for a semiarid site, and the only cemetery in whose design he is known to have played a major role. In his later career he occasionally gave general advice concerning the treatment of cemeteries, but he never again accepted a design commission for one. This was due in large part to his feeling, expressed in the Mountain View report, that any attempt to secure an appropriate sense of restfulness in cemeteries through the use of pastoral scenery was bound to prove unsatisfactory, since the gravestones made breadth of landscape treatment impossible. He repeated this view a decade later to the English gardener William Robinson, explaining that “I do not think I could lay out a burial place without making conditions about the monuments such as I fear few but Quakers would be willing to accept.”

Because he had already come to the conclusion that landscapes with large areas of grass were inappropriate and too expensive to maintain in the California climate, Olmsted proposed to create at Mountain View a series of enclosed spaces with dense planting that would block views of [454]the middle distance. On the flat portion of the site this effect would be achieved by a formal arrangement of plots and plantings, while on the steep bowl of hillside beyond, informal planting of shrubs and low trees along curving roads would achieve the same effect.

Olmsted did not indicate what plants he would use in the sheltering bands of shrubs and “coppice-wood” on the hillside section of the site, nor what the “very large variety of shrubs and herbaceous plants” would be that he expected to thrive in their lee; but he did begin in this report to name the larger trees that he felt would be fitting for the cemetery and that could be expected to reach large size and full form there. As he stated in the report, the appearance of trees in the San Francisco area at that time gave little hope for securing the full and shapely growth of trees; but he reasoned that at least a few species could be found that would have the desired appearance. He suggested two evergreen trees native to California: the live oak, which produced such distinctive natural pastoral scenery in the rolling hills around San Francisco, and the Monterey cypress, native to Baja California and Mexico. In addition, he proposed to use the narrow heaven-pointing Italian cypress, which had “always been regarded as typical of immortality.” To secure contrasting roundness of form and denseness of shape, he chose the Cedar of Lebanon and the stone pine of Italy. Both trees were indigenous to very dry and exposed sites, and he anticipated that they would grow well on the Oakland site. In his discussion he made no mention of the palm tree, which would become a common feature of Mountain View Cemetery in later years. This was presumably because, aside from the Italian cypress, he wanted trees with full-growing form and dark foliage.

One further issue concerns the style, or rather styles, in which Olmsted chose to work at Mountain View. As he declared in the report, a whole range of styles and materials were potentially useful so long as they contributed to a design’s central purpose, which in this case was honoring the dead. Olmsted’s statement is significant, since it shows clearly that he did not believe the informal character of the “pastoral” and “picturesque” styles of landscape design to be superior in all situations to the formal, geometrical style that had preceded them historically. The great advantage that he found in the pastoral style, and the reason he employed it so extensively in his park designs, was that it produced an experience of landscape more powerful, and more beneficial psychologically, than any other style. He believed that cemeteries should not be planned for their scenery, and in California, breadth of effect in the pastoral style was neither desirable nor possible. He used a curvilinear road and path system for the hilly parts of the Mountain View site for the same reason that he had used curving walks in the Central Park [455]Ramble—to provide easy grades and a sense of enclosure on steep and otherwise exposed hillsides.

Considerations of both climate and use led Olmsted to reject the open, gently rolling greensward of the pastoral style for the flatter part of the cemetery site. He could have used curving roads there, as he was to do within four years in the residential suburb of Riverside on the flat prairie west of Chicago. That prairie terrain did not dictate curvilinear treatment; rather, use and function called for curving streets in a residential suburb. Such streets hindered cross-traffic by commercial vehicles, discouraged transformation of a residential area into a commercial one, and strengthened the feeling of protective enclosure that was an important element in a domestic setting. At Mountain View, a different feeling of community was needed, and the straight allées and crossing axes of the formal section created a sense of unity, of relation of one area to another, that an entirely curvilinear design could not have provided.

With the Mountain View report, Olmsted was beginning his investigation into the plant materials that would prove usable in the California climate. He was also beginning his quest for an appropriate landscape style for the semiarid American West. Yet he was already following the four basic design principles he would finally and formally enunciate during his work in Colorado a quarter-century later: (1) the plantings along the roads of the cemetery left little “naked ground” that was “fully exposed to view near the eye”; (2) the “frequented places and ways” of the cemetery were easy to keep clean, watered, and in order; (3) the shrubs and rows of trees would be sufficiently dense to block middle-distance views that showed anything but other ranks of shrubs, “coppice-wood,” and trees, while (perhaps) permitting some views of distant hills and water; and (4) as the illustration in the report indicates, there would be “a picturesquely intimate association of natural and artificial objects” in the form of stone piers, grave markers, vases, potted plants, shrubs, trees, and herbaceous plants.

Berkeley Campus and Neighborhood

While preparing the plan for the campus and neighborhood of the College of California at Berkeley, Olmsted had to deal with the inappropriate and expensive desire to transfer Eastern landscape treatment to a California setting. When Olmsted first visited the site, Samuel H. Willey and the trustees had already developed a concept of where they wished to place the college buildings, and simply sought to engage Olmsted to plan the rest of the property as a “park.” Olmsted explained the inappropriateness of such treatment, and gained their permission to draw up a comprehensive plan for the whole site. He was reluctant in [456]the end to do away with all greensward, feeling strongly the beauty and effectiveness of such landscape even where it was costly to maintain. He also thought it important to have some grassy space in the campus for “athletic games and other agreeable exercises.” Consequently, he kept that irreducible minimum of turf that he seems to have felt virtually every landscape design should have, whatever the climate. In the Berkeley plan this consisted of two connected areas. One was to be a strip of lawn on the formal allée that extended from the proposed site of the central college building down a gentle incline toward the Golden Gate. The other was to be a lawn of twenty-seven acres in a low section of the property that was flat and naturally “moist, fertile and meadow-like.” This was to be the extent of open ground; all the rest, he warned, in order not to be dusty and unsightly, must be “hidden from sight by the foliage of trees, shrubs, or vines . . . . “

The problem, as Olmsted described it, was that the foreground of the natural landscape was “coarse, rude, raw,” while “the surface of the ground beyond the immediate foreground commonly seems hard, bare, dead and bleak; what few trees there are appear stiff and rigid, and are as dull and monotonous in color as they are ungraceful in form. Even the atmosphere, when it is not foggy and chilly, is colorless and toneless.” The solution lay in novel treatment of both public and private areas. The most important element of the public landscape was the roadside, which Olmsted proposed to plant thickly with shrubs and trees. This would block any view of the “harsh, brown surface” beyond, and would before long produce sheltering shade from the fierce summer sun. The richness of natural vegetation along Strawberry Creek led Olmsted to anticipate that plants could be found for roadside planting that, with no watering, would have the same character—“thick, intricate, luxuriant, rich, and graceful, completely sheltering the visitor from the sun.” Where possible, he planned the roads to follow the branches of Strawberry Creek, taking advantage of the moisture along the banks.

The chief landscape feature of Olmsted’s plan for the private residences at Berkeley was a densely planted green foreground that would hide the bleak middle distance and heighten the beauty of distant views of water, hills, and clouds. This concept of foreground treatment was fundamental to Olmsted’s design approach in semiarid regions. The most ingenious aspect of his approach at Berkeley—and he repeated it on other hillside sites—was that the foreground of one residence became the green middle distance of residences further up the hill. Thus, the requirements for landscape beauty of foreground, middle distance, and distant prospect were fulfilled.

Olmsted worked out his basic concept of the Berkeley plan during the summer of 1865 with the help of Edward C. Miller, an engineer on Central Park who had come to California to work on the Mariposa [457]Estate. When Olmsted returned to the East in September, his report was not finished, and it was not until June 1866 that the firm of Olmsted, Vaux & Company submitted the final report and had it published in New York. Just at this time the trustees of the college, faced with financial failure, transferred their campus site at Berkeley, along with the plans prepared by Olmsted and Vaux, to the newly founded University of California. Although the university eventually paid the outstanding bill for Olmsted, Vaux & Company’s report and plans, at least one faction of the regents opposed the proposals and they were never implemented. In 1872 a new president, Daniel Coit Gilman, was unable even to locate the detailed plans and drawings that the partners had sent from New York six years before. And despite Gilman’s expression of a strong desire to have Olmsted’s guidance in 1872, no opportunity to advise developed in later years. In a letter to Leland Stanford that he wrote after visiting California in 1886, Olmsted gave his view of the way the Berkeley campus had developed. The arrangement of the campus buildings and “of all the grounds and offices about them,” he observed, “betrays heedlessness of the requirements of convenience and comfort under the conditions of the situation and climate.”

Although Olmsted’s concept for Berkeley never materialized, he did have one more opportunity to design a campus in California. It came twenty years later, at Stanford University.

Leland Stanford intended to reproduce a New England campus for his university. As Olmsted described it:

I find Governor Stanford bent on giving his University New England scenery, New England trees and turf, to be obtained only by lavish use of water. The landscape of the region is said to be fine in its way but nobody thinks of anything in gardening that will not be thoroughly unnatural to it. What can be done I don’t know but it will be an interesting subject of study.

Stanford also intended to build the university on a level area in Palo Alto near his house. Olmsted attempted to interest him in siting the university buildings on the hills behind that plain, from which there were fine distant views of San Francisco Bay and the mountains along its eastern shore. The hilly terrain would have enabled Olmsted to plan a series of foregrounds for buildings that would have supplied an “artistic middle distance” for those above and behind them, in the manner he had proposed for the residential grounds at Berkeley in 1865.

In the end, each man got part of his way: Olmsted had to accept the fiat, lower site, but Leland Stanford allowed at least partial realization of a unified architectural and landscape scheme for the campus which drew from Spanish Mission and Mediterranean examples. The central buildings, designed by Amasa Walker, president of the Massachusetts [458]Institute of Technology, and the Boston architectural firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, successors of H. H. Richardson, formed a quadrangle connected by arcades that gave protection from sun and rain. Olmsted proposed that most of the open center of the quadrangle be paved with stone, which would be easy to keep neat and clean. Within that open space there would be eight circles, within which he proposed to have a concentrated profusion of plants, providing rich density of foliage and shade. Near the edges of the circles there would be low-growing plants; the height of the plantings would increase toward the center, rising from shrubs to low trees, above which would be visible the tops of palm trees, adding some of the effect of “gloria in excelsis” that Olmsted had responded to in the scenery of the isthmus of Panama.

Olmsted’s other major effort to provide alternatives to the traditional approach of using turf for large open spaces was his plan for the area directly in front of the main quadrangle. To provide a foreground for the buildings as viewed from the principal approach, he planned a broad area four feet below the level of the roads and paths, to be filled with shrubs that would thrive with a minimum of watering. The shrubs to be used were part of the nursery that the arboriculturist Robert Douglas established at Stanford beginning in 1889.

Leland Stanford kept Olmsted in suspense as work on the campus began. He kept changing his views on the material to use for the surface of the center of the quadrangle, alternating between macadam, stone, and grass. Stanford finally approved the surface of stone blocks that Olmsted wanted, but then resisted installation of stone curbing around the circles. Stanford also halted the planting of the circles when it was only partly finished, ordering that no more high-growing plants be added and so leaving incomplete the layering of foliage that was essential to the effect Olmsted wished to achieve. Moreover, Stanford caused Olmsted concern about the sunken shrubbery panels in front of the buildings, as when he commented in August 1889 that there was no need to lower the ground there for shrub plantings, “as we shall have plenty of water to keep the place green.” In March 1892, when his firm was no longer effectively involved in the campus work, Olmsted was shocked to learn from Robert Douglas’s son that the sunken panels were to be seeded for turf. “Grass cannot be successfully grown into a turf in the climate,” he expostulated in reply, “and can only be kept alive at an outrageous expense. Besides, the large quantity of stock which you have been raising expressly for the purpose of covering those areas with bushes will be overgrown, and will have to be thrown away before the grass experiment has proved to be a failure.” In fact, the shrubs were never planted, and the area became what Olmsted had predicted it would be in that case—lush greensward when artificial watering was employed, and otherwise “unsuitable, dreary and forlorn” during the dry season. When a member [459]

Bird’s-Eye View of Stanford University Quadrangle and Approach

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A further aspect of the Stanford campus plan was Olmsted’s attempt to make an arboretum in the hills behind the campus, where he had first wanted to site the buildings of the university. Stanford appeared to favor the project at first, and Olmsted set out to create an extensive proving ground for the plant materials of a California landscape style. He engaged Robert Douglas and his company, who were well known for their ability to make successful forest plantings under difficult growing conditions. At that time he was using Douglas’s skills both in the Boston park system and at Biltmore Estate. Olmsted directed Douglas to plant between four and five hundred acres, and to prepare for the planting by starting a nursery with 6,000 trees, 10,000 shrubs, and 10,000 plants of ivy, honeysuckle, and other vines. In the nursery he proposed to include both plants native to the Pacific slope and those from other parts of the world that could be expected to thrive on the Palo Alto site. Douglas started a large nursery and as early as 1889 was transplanting thousands of seedlings, especially coniferous trees, to the “open ground” of the site. At the same time, Leland Stanford was showing reluctance to continue with the arboretum plan developed by Olmsted, and said in any case that “he was not going to have the hills covered with trees.” Olmsted received little news from Palo Alto, and played a very limited role in the construction of the grounds, after the summer of 1890. At that time, while Senator Stanford was in Europe, his brother-in-law Ariel Lathrop took charge of work on the campus, reversing arrangements that Olmsted had made with Stanford. Effective communication with Stanford was never restored, although the Olmsted firm supplied planting plans and instructions to Douglas at least as late as the spring of 1891. Olmsted’s last information concerning the fate of the arboretum seems to have been a letter from Robert Douglas in April 1892 reporting that Stanford was not going to carry through the arboretum plan. So far as Olmsted knew, therefore, the senator had failed to carry out his advice in the siting of the campus, the planting of the circles in the main quadrangle, the planting of the sunken panels in front of the quadrangle, and the creation of an arboretum. In addition, because of the hostility of Ariel Lathrop, the Olmsted firm played no effective role in directing the planting done on the campus after the summer of 1890. In the most important elements of his concept for the campus, therefore, the final result fell far short of what Olmsted had hoped to achieve.

San Francisco Pleasure Grounds

In his final design project of the Civil War period in the San Francisco area, Olmsted made even clearer than he had at Berkeley how inappropriate he felt it would be to create a “park” for San Francisco of the Eastern or English sort in that region. He carefully titled his report as one for “public pleasure grounds” for the city, and referred to no part of the proposed system as a park. The principles he laid down were that any “ornamental” part of the system should be compact, should be “rich in detail, close to the eye,” and should be “easily kept clean and free from dust.” In making such recommendations, he was influenced by the success at gardening with shrubs and flowers in sheltered areas which residents of San Francisco had already achieved. His report also reflected his doubts about the possibility of achieving satisfactory size and shape in trees planted on the exposed San Francisco hills.

For the major element in the system, the general promenade along the line of Van Ness Avenue from the bay to a point four miles inland, Olmsted solved the problem of dreary middle distance by proposing to run the promenade in a cut at least twenty feet deep. The steep slopes running down from street level would at no point be much more than forty-five yards from the pedestrian mall in the center of the promenade. The surface of the slopes on each side would be covered with turf or flowers and, higher up, with shrubs and trees. Hydrants set at intervals along the top of the slopes would make it possible to keep the plantings well watered and flourishing at reasonable expense. For the most part, Olmsted hoped to plant the slopes with smooth-leaved evergreen shrubs and vines that would provide richness of tone and texture with a minimum of care. The result would be an evergreen “winter garden” of laurel, myrtle, rhododendrons, Chinese magnolias, and ivy.

Moreover, a great deal of variety and decorativeness in planting and other features was possible along the promenade. In some sections, Olmsted suggested, the slopes could be covered with shrubs and plants gathered from canyons along the Coast Range, while other areas could display shrubs from countries with climates similar to California’s. For the border of the central pedestrian mall, Olmsted outlined a whole series of possible elements: naturalistic treatment might alternate with formal; there might be successive sections of different flowers and plants, including exotic plants in tubs, these to alternate with displays of live animals, fish, or other “suitable objects of art or curiosity.” In other sections of the pleasure grounds, as at the great terrace for public gatherings, the plantings were to be floral or formal, but concentrated and easy to care for and water.

These suggestions indicate how willing Olmsted was, in this situation, to design for display, and even for ornament and decoration. The [462]California climate would not permit creation of broad effects of scenery. This being the case, there was no need to subordinate all elements of a design to a single “ruling motive,” as was necessary with “passages of scenery” that were intended to act by an unconscious process on those passing through them. Accordingly, Olmsted was willing in his San Francisco plan to use all his ingenuity to provide variety and interest.

Only further inland, in a sheltered dell that was protected and naturally moist, did Olmsted permit himself, as he had with the lawn at Berkeley, a bit of the pastoral and picturesque scenery reminiscent of the well-watered East. There he planned a small Ramble area, “a surface of picturesque form, with rocks and terraces, and planted closely and intricately with shrubs and vines, with walks running among them, and frequent seats, arbors, and small sheltered and sunny areas of turf and flowers,” while in a lower, flat section he proposed “a small clear lawn of turf sloping down to a pool of still water, on the other side of which there should be the finest display of foliage in natural forms which art could command.” In this one small space in all of San Francisco, then, there could be that soul-refreshing lushness and green of the English park, one small indulgence in what the climate would not permit year-round and that Olmsted had found so revivifying in Yosemite Valley at the height of the parching Mariposa summer.

By the time Olmsted submitted his report, his supporters had lost the ability to see his plan realized, or even accepted. When the San Francisco park movement revived a few years later, and enabling legislation was passed in 1870, what the city secured was not the succession of small, sheltered spaces that Olmsted had proposed, but rather the 1,000—acre Golden Gate Park, extending to the western shore of the peninsula. The site for the park was similar in size and shape to Central Park in New York, and William Hammond Hall, who received the authority to draw up a plan, set out to make it similar in planting style to that Eastern model as well. With great skill he gradually established plants on the shifting sands of the site, and then proposed to use the natural reservoir under the park to create extensive areas of greensward as well as shrubs and trees. In August 1871, soon after his appointment as superintendent of the park, Hall asked Olmsted for advice. In response, Olmsted sounded the thinly veiled warning that he would repeat each time thereafter when Hall approached him for comment:

I have given the matter of pleasure grounds for San Francisco some consideration and fully realize the difficulties of your undertaking. Indeed I may say that I do not believe it practicable to meet the natural but senseless demand of unreflecting people bred in the Atlantic states and the North of Europe for what is technically termed a park under the climatic conditions of San Francisco. Experience in Persia, Turkey, Smyrna, Spain and Portugal would afford more suggestions for what is practicable and [463]desirable than any that could be derived from English authorities. But the conditions are so peculiar and the difficulties so great that I regard the problem as unique and that it must be solved if at all by wholly new means and methods. It requires invention, not adaptation.

Hall proceeded with the preparation of a plan that paid more heed to the example of Central Park than to Olmsted’s counsel concerning the need for originality in design. The park commissioners adopted Hall’s plan in December 1871, and Hall soon after wrote Olmsted in New York, asking him to elaborate and criticize the plan and suggest appropriate alterations. Olmsted replied that “no more difficult problem has probably ever been presented in our profession than that involved in the San Francisco park undertaking,” and set a high fee for consultation on the matter.

During the next few years, with great determination and resourcefulness, Hall reclaimed sections of the park site from the sand. Olmsted was impressed with his success, and in 1874 wrote to encourage him. At the same time, at least indirectly, he sought to direct Hall to a course of experimentation with plant materials that would make possible broad landscape effects of “rich, constant, and varied verdure” with plants that would require little watering. And above all, Olmsted urged continued experimentation and originality:

Cutting yourself completely clear of the traditions of Europe and the East, and shaping your course in details by no rigorously predetermined design, but as you find from year to year that nature is leading you on, you will, I feel sure, be able to give San Francisco a pleasure ground adapted to the peculiar wants of her people, with a scenery as unusual in parks as the conditions social, climatic, and of the soil, to which your design is required to be accommodated.

Olmsted’s final involvement with issues of plant materials and landscape design in Golden Gate Park occurred in 1886, when he came to the defense of Hall’s thinning of tree plantings as the trees matured. Writing to the head of the park board as he returned East following what would be his last visit to California, Olmsted issued a final warning that San Franciscans should not value too highly the decorative gardening that had been installed in the park. The great value, he repeated, would be to achieve in the park something having “a unique and incomparable character.” Hall’s success in growing trees and other plants had laid the basis for final achievement of this end, he observed; there had been “the starting of growths which will successfully come to maturity, and be maintained at small cost on this site, having a park-like effect, unique and singular though it be.” Such oblique advice was lost on his audience, however, and those in charge of the park continued the heavy reliance on artificial watering that was already evident.

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The result of Hall’s labors, and those of John McLaren after him, was a park that was in many ways unique and based on the peculiar climate of San Francisco. But the extensive irrigation that supported the planting, while it solved many of the problems endemic to creating a large park in that place, did so with minimal concession to the fundamental climatic fact of the region—a six-month period each year without rainfall.

At the end of his career, Olmsted took a somber view of the result of his efforts to develop a landscape style for the semiarid regions of this country. Neither his Berkeley neighborhood and campus nor his system of pleasure grounds for San Francisco had been carried out. Leland Stanford had refused to complete his planting scheme, and William Hammond Hall had failed to confront directly the fundamental challenge of landscape design in a dry climate. In August 1894, less than a year before the end of his professional career, Olmsted complained to his son about the fate of his landscape work in California and the West:

I have some principles by which I have been guided in the little professional work that I have done, but I have had no opportunity of working out anything in practice; nor has anything been done honestly on my advice. Those whom I have attempted to guide have bolted. The general result is that I have never seen anything on a large scale in landscape work in the parts of our country where permanent greensward is not natural, that was at all satisfactory.

The solution and its demonstration lay in the future, and it was that task, in particular, for which Olmsted urged his namesake and successor to prepare himself. “I need not say that the great puzzle of our profession for the future, for your period,” he told his son, “is going to be how to deal satisfactorily with the difficulties of the more arid parts of our continent.” The man who solved that problem, Olmsted was convinced, would be at the head of the landscape architecture profession.

Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove

While there is no evidence that Olmsted appreciated the beauty of Yosemite Valley early enough to be involved in securing the legislation of 1864 that transferred it to the state of California, his camping trip there in the summer of that year made a strong impression on him. In particular, the contrast between the dry and dusty foothills of Bear Valley and the lush verdure of the valley in midsummer made Yosemite seem like paradise. Having often, while in California, conjured up memories of the “green, dripping, glistening, gorgeous” English countryside, it was significant that he could say of Yosemite Valley that “the stream is such a one as Shakespeare delighted in, and brings pleasing reminiscences to the traveller of the Avon or the upper Thames.”

The lesson that Olmsted taught in his report on Yosemite Valley [465]was that the parklike quality of the valley itself was at least as important as its towering rock sides and long cascades. There was no single element or view that constituted the glory of Yosemite. Rather, there were extensive passages of scenery, where the great cliffs were “banked and fringed and draped and shadowed by the tender foliage of noble and lovely trees and bushes, reflected from the most placid pools, and associated with the most tranquil meadows, the most playful streams, and every variety of soft and peaceful pastoral beauty.”

The Yosemite report taught Olmsted’s fundamental lesson—that the experience of scenery was most beneficial and health-giving when it acted on the viewer by an unconscious process. The great benefit of Yosemite would come not to those who stood on Inspiration Point and exclaimed at the vastness of the scene and the sublimity of towering El Capitan, or who gathered at the base of Yosemite Falls to marvel at their height and power. Instead, only immersion in the scenery as a whole, immersion such as Olmsted designed for in his urban parks, would lead to discovery of the true beauty of Yosemite. As he later testified, “I felt the charm of the Yosemite much more at the end of a week than at the end of a day, much more after six weeks when the cascades were nearly dry, than after one week, and when, after having been in it, off and on, several months, I was going out, I said, ’I have not yet half taken it in.’”

It was characteristic of Olmsted’s appreciation of scenery that he responded most to the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees when the view was diffused by clouds. In the notes he recorded during his first visit to the valley in August 1864, he mentioned the pleasure he gained from the smoky, hazy atmosphere that kept the elements of the scene from standing out in bold relief. Likewise, his most pleasing experience of the giant Sequoias came when he was camped at night, watching the flaring campfire occasionally reveal “the stately trunks of two enormous sequoias a few hundred feet off lighted up and standing out in a clouded golden color amidst & against obscurity perfect columns 170 ft then lost in general obscurity of foliage.” Both the great chasm of the valley and the towering trees of the Mariposa Grove were most impressive to Olmsted when light and atmosphere created a visual unity of the scene, obscuring their individual elements.

By the time Olmsted wrote his report for the Yosemite Commission in the summer of 1865, he had begun to consider the problems involved in creating parklike scenery in the San Francisco Bay area. The virtual impossibility of making a true park for San Francisco may well have increased Olmsted’s sense of the great resource that the Yosemite reservation offered that city. In some sense, Yosemite was the nearest place where profoundly beautiful park scenery could be made available to the citizens of San Francisco without great expense for construction [466]and constant expenditure for watering. This may explain in part why Olmsted devoted so much of his proposed budget to making Yosemite accessible to San Franciscans. He sought to reduce the price in money, energy, and time that a visit to the valley exacted, attempting to make it more than a resort for those with wealth and leisure. Twenty-five thousand dollars of the total two-year budget of $37,000 that he submitted, which included the cost of surveys, construction of facilities within the reservation, and a superintendent’s salary, was for building a forty-mile road from the valley to the end of the existing road from Stockton, the head of steamboat navigation. It was not, then, on windblown sands near the Golden Gate that San Franciscans should hope to find a park, but rather in Yosemite Valley.

The new road that Olmsted envisioned would, he believed, improve the experience of the Yosemite scenery while making it more accessible. As his letter to Clarence King of October 23, 1864, indicates, he planned to run the road high up on the ridge of the Sierra foothills as it approached Galen Clark’s ranch on the South Fork of the Merced River, providing spectacular first views toward Yosemite Valley across Devil’s Gulch and the valley of the South Fork. After descending to Clark’s, he wanted the new route from there to the Valley to run where “the most interesting views are to be commanded, and where the finest forest trees abound.”

Olmsted’s emphasis on the importance of the total experience of a scenic area was one that he repeated in his later career, most notably in connection with the Niagara Reservation. The report he wrote in 1887 to accompany a plan for that newly created reservation emphasized the unique beauty of the rapids and the foliage along their banks, as well as the spectacular falls themselves. As he had done at Yosemite, he pointed out the great difficulty of drawing up a plan that would permit the various beauties of a site to be experienced by many visitors without damaging what they came to view. The Yosemite report is unique, however, in the rationale that Olmsted set forth in it for reserving natural scenery for the general public. The analysis that it offers of the peculiarly beneficial psychological effect of scenery is one of the most effective of his many attempts to elucidate that crucially important concept.

Olmsted’s report of August 1865 marked the virtual end of his involvement with Yosemite. His return to New York in October and the suppression of his report the following month gave little hope that his counsel would be heeded. In 1868, when there was danger that the U.S. Congress would approve an attempt by the California state legislature to turn over several hundred acres of Yosemite Valley to men claiming land there under preemption laws, Olmsted did become involved briefly. Following approval of the proposal by the House of Representatives in early June, he wrote the article for the New York Evening Post containing the [467]long passage from his Yosemite report of 1865 that is incorporated into the text of the report presented in this volume. In June he also circulated petitions to Congress opposing the House bill, which was reported adversely by a Senate committee in July 1868.

Although Olmsted did not return to Yosemite after 1865 and tried to avoid being drawn into later controversy concerning the management of the reservation, he made at least two public statements on the question. In December 1888 he provided an interview to a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in which he confined himself primarily to a statement of the management policy recommended by the first Yosemite Commission. Structures and roads were to be as inconspicuous as possible, he said, and cultivation of crops was to be restricted to areas that had already been plowed. The remaining natural meadows were to be carefully preserved, while the limited amount of cutting of trees that would be permitted was to be carried out under the close supervision of a landscape gardener. There was to be no cutting of trees for lumber. In his one direct response to the reporter’s description of a current practice, the trimming off of the lower limbs of whole groves of white pine, Olmsted was quoted as replying that “nothing could be worse than such treatment of coniferous trees.” Another statement came in March 1890, when Olmsted published a public letter entitled “Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery,” dealing with developments that had occurred in the intervening fifteen months. His involvement at this time began when Robert Underwood Johnson, associate editor of Century magazine in New York, wrote him from California in June 1889. Johnson reported that he had just visited Yosemite Valley and had been “shocked in riding over it to see how ignorantly the landscape is being treated.” In some places he found “fields of stumps,” and the grounds of the principal hotel presented a “desolate view”; in other places vistas had been cut through the forest, and elsewhere the lower branches of trees had been trimmed off. Johnson reported that he was trying to have the Yosemite Commission employ Olmsted to examine the valley and halt the destruction of scenery that was taking place. Should the commission not adopt his suggestion (and it did not), Johnson was prepared to begin a campaign in the Century to bring about a change in policy. He sought to engage Olmsted to investigate the situation in person and write on the subject for the Century. Olmsted declined, pleading the press of business, but said that he would like to meet and talk with Johnson or John Muir on the subject. He did make one attempt to write something for the Century, but was dissatisfied with the result. As he explained to Johnson, “The truth is I do not like to find fault without better knowledge of the facts; without hearing more of the Commisioners’ side of the case; without being more sure where the fault—the organic fault—lies, or without being able to advise how it is to be avoided.” He felt the gravity of the problem strongly, [468]however, and concluded his letter to Johnson by observing:

I know that the question is one of far greater importance and of far greater difficulty than can be generally realized; that it is most foolish to take it up in an occasional and desultory way as a question of details, or as a question the answer to which will be chiefly important to the people of the present century. It is preeminently a question of our duty to the future.

Nevertheless, Olmsted did declare that the alleged proposal by one of the Yosemite commissioners to cut out all the young trees and undergrowth in the valley would result in “an irreparable calamity—a calamity to the civilized world.” Johnson quoted this statement, without naming Olmsted as the source, in his own article in the Century of January 1890. That article provoked hostile responses in California, including an accusation by Governor R. W. Waterman, which he sent to California’s congressmen, that Johnson was Olmsted’s nephew and was motivated primarily by a desire to gain work for his relative. At this point Olmsted was moved to respond in the public letter “Governmental Preservation of Natural Scenery,” which he wrote in early March 1890 and published soon after. In the letter, he described the course of his exchange with Johnson concerning natural scenery and the Yosemite reservation, defended Johnson as an honest man who had the public interest at heart, and briefly explained why stewardship of a scenic reservation called for different qualities than those required for boards of businesses and institutions. And, concerned by the growing threat of the introduction into Yosemite of “artificialities,” he concluded with the warning he had sounded in his report on Niagara three years before:

Having regard to the enjoyment of natural scenery, and considering that the means of making this enjoyment available to large numbers will unavoidably lessen the extent and value of the primary elements of natural scenery, nothing of an artificial character should be allowed a place on the property, no matter how valuable it might be under other circumstances, and no matter at how little cost it may be had, the presence of which can be avoided consistently with the provision of necessary conditions for making the enjoyment of the natural scenery available.

The development of public support for a policy of managing scenic reservations with such a sense of stewardship of the scenery and duty to the future remained a concern of Olmsted’s through the rest of his career. The report on the management of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove published in this volume represents his first and most comprehensive statement on scenic reservations. Other reports published below present his first statements on a number of other issues. The report on San Francisco pleasure grounds is his first proposal for a connected system of recreation grounds for a major city. The Berkeley report contains his first discussion of the arrangement of the grounds of [469]an academic institution, his first plan for the street system and public open space of a residential neighborhood, his first discussion of planning the grounds of individual residences and the “open-air apartments” he felt they should have, and his first proposal to create a pleasure drive for private carriages separate from the traffic of commercial wagons and carts.

The landscape design reports in this volume also present the first stage of Olmsted’s development of his ideas on the style of planting and planning that should take place in the semiarid American West. His sense of what was “appropriate,” the importance of respecting the “genius of the place,” which he had learned from English writers, was already leading him to abandon the English-inspired style in which he had designed previously in the East. The reports below show how he laid the basis of the design principles for the American West that he bequeathed at the end of his career to his son and other successors in the Olmsted firm. At the time of his retirement, his ideas on scenic reservations and western landscape design had not gained the general acceptance he had hoped for; nor have they yet done so. Still, the increasing flow of visitors to national parks and the growing pressure on the water resources of the West make his concerns more clearly relevant for us than they were for California in the 1860s. In that respect, the landscape design reports printed below are tracts for our time as well.