Frederick Law Olmsted

Mike Segar/Reuters

Frederick Law Olmsted was born in Hartford in 1822. When he was 3 his mother died, and there was then a stepmother and other children while he was sent away to a series of rather odd schools, an experience that left him susceptible to depression and gave him a taste for solitary rambles in the New England landscape. His father, a dry-goods merchant, was a loving man and patient with this son, who seemed directionless for a long time, first trying farming, then going to sea, then reporting extensively on slavery in the South, publishing several books and eventually going into publishing himself. Though a handsome young man of good family, Olmsted had as much trouble finding a wife as he had settling on an occupation. In the end he married his brother John's widow, with whom he raised several children and stepchildren; he was a faithful husband, albeit one who was often taken away from his family by work.

In 1857, Olmsted managed to wangle a job as superintendent of the Central Park, as it was then called, in New York, a project that was just getting under way. A publishing venture had failed, and he was personally in debt. When the architect Calvert Vaux suggested that they enter the competition for the job of actually designing the park, he agreed: it is typical of Olmsted that he fell by happenstance into the work at which he became a genius. The jury was divided between Democrats, who, paradoxically, were attracted to formal European designs, and Republicans, who liked the English picturesque style that Olmsted had studied intensively in travels abroad. The Republicans were in the majority, and they all picked the submission by Olmsted and Vaux.

Olmsted believed in the restorative power of landscape for ordinary people. In a time of neo-classical fervor, he disliked straight lines. He loved contrasting textures, but it was a cardinal rule with him to blur the boundaries. The architecture of Europe impressed him, but trees were his true love.

Another reason for the humble way Olmsted,didn't think of landscape design as a legitimate profession, wore his talent could be that landscape design came to him so naturally. He mapped out a city plan for all of Buffalo in a couple of hours.

In Olmsted's midlife, work came to him plentifully, but power politics and budgets that had a tendency to dry up continued to plague him. The decision of a Buffalo official to build his own house in the middle of a public green is an example of the sort of obstruction to his vision that he frequently encountered. In that case Olmsted prevailed. Rarely did he have a free hand. An exception was Biltmore, George Vanderbilt's estate in North Carolina. -- Susanna Lezzard