A Publication of the

Foundation

for Landscape Studies

Volume ıv | Number ıı | Spring 2009A Journal of Place

Essays: The Landscapes of Classical Antiquity 2Paula Deitz: Garden Letter from Greece

John A. Pinto: Hadrian’s Villa and the Landscape of Allusion

Kathryn Gleason: Digging Ancient Gardens

Place Keeper 12Margaret Bamberger, Land Steward

Book Reviews 14Reuben M. Rainey: The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume VII, Parks,Politics, and Patronage, 1874-1882Edited by Charles E. Beveridge, Carolyn F.Hoffman, and Kenneth Hawkins

The Master List of Design Projects of theOlmsted Firm, 1857-1979, 2nd ed.Edited by Lucy Lawliss, Caroline Loughlin,Lauren Meier

Claudia Lazzaro: Magnificent Buildings,Splendid GardensBy David R. Coffin. Edited by Vanessa Bezemer Sellers

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: The Last Days ofOld Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City TransformedBy Michael Meyer

Memorial 21Wilhelmina Jashemski (1910-2007)

Awards 23

Contributors 23

Ilike to stroll in the recent-ly renovated Greek andRoman galleries at theMetropolitan Museum ofArt. The daylight bathing

figures of white marble cre-ates a sunny Mediterraneanatmosphere even on a coldgrey day. Here one feelsimmersed in a kind of happyidyll, but always there is thehaunting question, “Who,really, were they – the onesrepresented by these careful-ly cataloged fragments dis-played with instructivecuratorial commentary?” Thegods, athletes, portrait busts,sarcophagi, mosaics, andPompeian wall paintingsseem strangely distant yetclosely familiar. In spite ofthe fact that the remains areso tantalizingly fragmentary,their world is somehow ourworld, the foundation of ourWestern culture. We sensethe connection.

The Renaissance markedthe end of centuries of indif-ference to ancient remains,and humanists’ avid curiosi-ty about antique literature,art, and architecture initiatedWestern civilization’s recon-

nection with its past. Ruinsbegan to speak.

In the eighteenth century,a pilgrimage to Rome was derigueur for artists and youngnobleman making the GrandTour. The rediscovery of theburied cities of Pompeii andHerculaneum, along with thewritings of the pioneeringHellenist Johann JoachimWinckelmann (1717–1768),helped give birth to thefields of archaeology and arthistory. It became possible to make period distinctionsand discriminate betweenGreek, Greco-Roman, andRoman art. Neoclassicismcame into fashion.

At the same time, the pic-turesqueness of broken

columns and ivy-entwinedarches and the elegiac mute-ness of these signs of van-ished glory stirred Romanticemotions. Ruins became ametaphorical mine for poets,a subject for artists, and a source of inspiration forlandscape designers.

Paula Deitz writes abouther first view of the AthenianAcropolis and her discoveryof the landscape of the Agorabelow. The oaks, plane trees,and laurels planted there inaccordance with archeologi-cal research during a restora-tion dating from the 1950swere intended to simulatethe Agora’s appearance in thetime of Plato. On a hillopposite stands the Templeof Hephaestus (449 BCE), themost intact Doric temple inGreece. Its grounds, replant-ed as part of the restoration

of the Agora, raise the issueof the validity of interpretivelandscape intervention with-in an archaeological site,even when sponsored byscholarly institutions of thefirst order (in this case theAmerican School of ClassicalStudies at Athens). Deitz,however, argues that “seeingthe temple with its clippedhedges today, so complete inappearance itself and in bal-ance with the landscape,makes the scene feel con-temporary with antiquity.”

Kathryn Gleason, a pro-fessional archaeologist andlandscape historian, tells ushow she learned by theexample of classical land-scape archaeology pioneer

Wilhelmina Jashemski(1910–2007) to interpret theconfiguration of ancientlandscapes. Using her recentwork at the Villa Arianna inStabia, Italy, as an illustra-tion, she describes the meth-ods contemporary landscapearcheologists employ in thisrelatively new field. At sitessuch as Stabia that wereburied by the eruption ofMount Vesuvius in 79 CE,wall paintings, mosaics, plas-ter casts, and ground-pene-trating radar all play a partin identifying the types ofvegetation that were origi-nally planted and in recover-ing the outlines of walks andbeds.

John Pinto, an architec-tural historian whose abid-ing interest in the classicaltradition led him to coau-thor the definitive work onHadrian’s Villa, revisits thisscholarly endeavor in orderto explore the powerful com-bination of site and associa-tion. Pinto sees thismagnificent landscape andarchitectural ruin as a para-digm of classicism’s role inWestern art and the power ofallusion. He maintains thatby introducing themes thatdominate the pastoral tradi-tion – growth, decay, death,and rebirth – Hadrian’s Villa is a progenitor of theeighteenth-century gardensof English lords, many of whom visited the villa on

their Grand Tours. From this experience they wereinspired to see landscapeand antiquity as comple-mentary forces. According toPinto, “A garden in ruins, agarden with ruins, forces usto muse on the passage oftime. Landscape is so allu-sive precisely because itcombines place and time;the place is fixed, but itchanges; it always looks bothforward and back.”

In this issue we begin anew feature, “Place Keeper,” aprofile of a land stewardwhose lifework exemplifiesthe nurturing, improvement,and interpretation of a par-ticular landscape. Our firstsubject is Margaret Bam-berger, a natural scienceeducator who disseminatesthe methods used by herhusband and fellow landsteward, J. David Bamberger,to transform their Texas HillCountry ranch, “Selah,” froma derelict property into acynosure of sound environ-mentalism as well as a placeof great beauty.

Good green wishes,

Elizabeth Barlow RogersEditor

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Letter from the Editor

On the Cover:

Corinthian capital and Acanthus,

the Athenian Agora, with the

Temple of Hephaestus (449 BCE)

in the background. (Unless

otherwise credited, this and other

photographs in this issue are by

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.)

The Athenian Acropolis with the

Erechtheion (421–407 BCE) in the

background.

The Landscapes of Classical AntiquityGarden Letter from Greece

But on a well-banked plotOdysseus found his father in solitudespading the earth around a young fruit tree.

– Book xxiv, The Odyssey by Homer (24.250–52), translated by Robert Fitzgerald

Many years ago, on our first visit to London togeth-er, my husband and I spent hours studying theElgin marbles at the British Museum, particularlythe sculptures from the east pediment of theParthenon. On the left, Helios, the sun god, rises

with his horse-drawn chariot at daybreak; the central figuresdepict the birth of Athena; and to the right, Selene, the moongoddess, descends with her chariot, closing the arc of the com-position at the far end. So taken were we with the beauty ofthese figures that we bought from the museum shop a life-sizereplica of the head of the horse of Selene, the final figure inthe sequence, straining visibly against the efforts of his night’srun. Now mounted on driftwood at the end of my lawn inMaine, overlooking Blue Hill Bay, he presides over the waterypath of the August full moon. Living with him each summerfilled me with the desire to visit the sculpture’s original settingon the Acropolis in Athens.

But it was another occurrence that finally propelled me toGreece last spring. In 2000 and 2001, respectively, I read theobituaries of the eminent archaeologists Dr. Homer A. Thomp-son (93) and his wife Dr. Dorothy Burr Thompson (101). Thetwo died in Hightstown, New Jersey, almost exactly a yearapart. Their romance began in 1934 when Homer was the act-ing deputy (he later became the director) of the excavation ofthe Agora, the civic center of ancient Athens, and Dorothy thefirst woman appointed a fellow of the excavation. His obituarytold how her research on ancient gardens was eventually usedto fulfill her dream of replanting the Agora. Although I tried tomeet with her after learning this, her advanced age had closedthe door to outsiders. Nevertheless, I followed up by readingGarden Lore of Ancient Athens, the booklet she prepared withRalph E. Griswold, a prominent Pittsburgh landscape architect.In the 1950s, based on their research, Griswold undertook the

replanting, transforming the Agora into a tree-lined archaeo-logical park ornamented with indigenous shrubs and flowers.

While the buildings and monuments of ancient civiliza-tions crumble under the desecrations of time, which oftenburies their remains under new settlements, the landscapesthat give these historic sites their sense of place – the contourof the terrain, the native vegetation – often endure. In the end,although I went to Greece to experience these ancient sites, Ibecame equally entranced byexceptional contemporarygardens built in our own eraby those who had wrestedfrom this arid climate culti-vated environments of sin-gular beauty and purpose.

My embryonic knowledgeof Greek gardens was firstexpanded in the unlikely set-ting of the Athens airport, as I awaited my flight to theisland of Skiathos. TheAirport Museum was hostinga prize-winning archaeologi-cal exhibition, MesogeiaAttica History & Civilization.The show documented theexcavation of the rural town-ships or demes of Attica nowoccupied by the new international airport and its landingstrips – excavations that exposed the many layers of develop-ment from 3200 BCE through the 18th century. After admiringthe handsome collection of terracotta pottery from severalperiods, I concentrated on site models of Hellenistic-era coun-try houses that were built, according to the catalogue descrip-tions, next to cultivated fields or at the far end of gardens, in landscapes that can’t have been very different from those Iwould soon see for the first time.

Having arrived in Skiathos late at night, only the nextmorning did I experience waking up amidst a hillside olivegrove that swept down to the sea. The gnarled and irregularbranches, some interlocking with neighboring trees, formed a

solid canopy over a dry terrain. At harvest time, the gardenergathers the ripe fruit and delivers it to a local press, sendingsome of the olive oil back to the grove’s owners in exchange.

Views from the high cliffs of this pine-fringed coast tonearby outer islands, like Skopelos, reminded me of RobertFitzgerald’s travel notes to The Odyssey (8th century BCE) inwhich he describes how he recreated the voyages of Homer,and thus Odysseus, in order to translate accurately the Greek

descriptions of the clusteredislands and their landscapes.At night, brilliantly lightedferryboats connecting theseislands glide across the dark waters, illuminatingeach island port in turn.

I soon learned thatSkiathos possesses an activegarden club, its membersincluding both seasonal andresident gardeners. In mak-ing a round of visits, I dis-covered how enterprisingthese women were in culti-vating a kind of lush beautyalongside the practical.Christina Kofinas, who livedat the end of a dirt road on a cliff, had constructed aseries of arcades, massedwith climbing roses, leadingup to her low-slung housewith its ample verandah. An

orchard of oranges, lemons and apricots, the source of herrenowned confitures, shaded the surrounding garden areas,including a kitchen garden. While there was a marked differ-ence between the cultivated areas and the scruffiness of theparched landscape, I found that this contrast between wild andtame added to the beauty of Grecian gardens.

At the end of another dirt road, Chantal Prieux and herhusband had made a single long house out of three huts thathad originally provided temporary shelter for shepherds graz-ing their sheep and goats on the high cliffs. The compoundwas painted gaily in the typical Grecian palette: pure white

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Watercolor rendering of Ralph E.

Griswold’s 1950s landscape restora-

tion plan for the Athenian Agora.

walls set off louvered shutters, doors, and windows in ceruleanblue. The patio, which hugged the perimeter of the house, wascovered with flowerpots and ceramic bowls of the same vividhue. These overflowed with a variety of tropical plants, allshaded by a pergola draped in wisteria vines that extended theentire length of the patio. Lavender fields terraced into thehillside provided Chantal with the raw material for her ownspecial brand of lavender oil, which she packaged in elegantsmall bottles and sold locally.

On walks along the cliff roads, I could look down into gar-dens below – and in one instance catch glimpses of the mostprominent rose garden on the island. Even from a consider-able height it revealed trim beds with dense patches of deepred and pale pink roses. Though not native to Greece, roseshave been grown there at least since Herodotus wrote aboutthem in his Histories in the fifth century BCE. But beauty isoften trumped by practicality in Greece; I found myself spend-ing one day helping others gather basketsful of humble Saint-John’s-wort, the small, five-petaled, yellow flower that hasproven to have prodigious healing powers when stored in oliveoil.

Though it was close to midnight when I arrived in Athensfrom Skiathos, I left my hotel in the Plaka, the old city, to visitthe Acropolis. After climbing through narrow back streets, Isuddenly faced a sheer wall of glowing rock rising to clas-sical grandeur under a sliver of moon. That held me untilmorning when I began the true ascent. First I entered the new Acropolis Museum at the base of the mount, designed byBernard Tschumi, who won the commission in a fourth roundof international competitions. Worth the wait, in my opinion:it is a streamlined glass, steel, and concrete structure that hintsat the classical by its delineated vertical sections. The top-floorexhibition gallery that is intended to house the Parthenonsculptures is rotated slightly off the base to face the object ofits study. The museum was not yet officially opened with fully-installed galleries; nevertheless, visitors were permitted to view the building’s grand entrance area, which turns out to bea museum in itself, perched over the ancient landscape.Through interior and exterior floors of fritted glass, peoplecan examine the excavated ruins of the earlier neighborhoodsthat once clustered around the Acropolis as they walk above

them. Recently planted olivegroves will be the main fea-ture of the landscaped gar-dens surrounding themuseum.

No photograph does jus-tice to the physical sensationof approaching the monu-mental scale of the Acropolisalong the DionysiousAreopagitou, the promenadethat runs parallel to the pow-erful buttressed walls as itwinds its way upward pastthe Dionysus Theater to thetop amidst plantings ofcypress and pine. Althoughvisitors pass quickly betweenthe Doric columns of thePropylaia, the ceremonialgateway, this edifice is in factthe only classical structureon the Acropolis that may beentered and therefore anexperience to be savoredboth coming and going.Unlike the ancient Romans, who constructed their buildingson direct axes derived from military installations, the Greekspreferred more circuitous routes. Hence the Parthenon isdeliberately situated to one side of the Propylaia, providing anearly example of their indirect site planning.

Although I had read copiously about the Parthenon, I stillfound myself counting the fluted marble Doric columns as Imoved slowly around to view the east pediment. I knew thatthe original of my horse’s head, that of one of the four horsesdrawing Selene’s chariot, was lowered from the pediment onMay 10, 1802, under the aegis of the permit or firman LordElgin received from the Turkish government. As I turned thesoutheast corner, I saw to my astonishment Selene’s horse’shead, like mine, straining over the edge of the pediment.There, too, were Helios’s rearing horses and the recliningfigure of Heracles at the opposite end. I discovered later thatthese casts of the originals were placed within what remains of the pediment by the Greek Archaeological Service. I wasunprepared for this realism; nevertheless, the casts convey howdetails of the sculptures would have been starkly articulated in the searing light of the noonday sun.

Before I left the stony landscape of the Acropolis, I lingeredfor awhile near the caryatids of the Ionic temple called theErechtheion (see page 2). As I watched, restorers worked fever-ishly to raise marble blocks on ropes, using a system of cranes and pulleys. They were filling in missing elements ofthe Parthenon to make it whole once more. It could have been 440 BCE, when the Parthenon was being constructed inthe age of Pericles, except for the white beach umbrellas that had sprouted up all over the temple to protect workers fromthe sun. It was an engaging, industrious sight.

While this sacred summit was stunning in its architecturaldetail, I was anxious to descend to the Agora – literally thegathering place, the center of civic life. Though I could imag-ine the religious processions celebrating Athena on theAcropolis, my heart beat faster as I followed the paths oncewalked by Socrates. Because the teachings of the Greekphilosophers are integral to our own culture, they feel closerin time than pagan rituals of the same period. Once, in writingabout porches, I cited the stoa (an open gallery with a roof

4

The Acropolis, Athens, Greece.

supported by a colonnade) as an early example of this inside/outside form, and pointed out that Zeno’s austere Stoic schoolof philosophy had been named after the Poikile Stoa on thenorth end of the Agora, where he taught his disciples. Now Icould stand there.

I entered the Agora from the south end to find not the drypanorama of sun-baked ruins I still half expected, but a citypark filled with wildflowers and families. Systematic excava-tion of the Agora by the American School of Classical Studiesat Athens began in 1931. Before Dorothy Burr Thompson’sstudy of the plants of antiquity in the Agora, however, scholar-ly interest in the 10-acre site related to its unique importanceto the history of Athens’ planning and the placement of itsgovernmental, religious, theatrical, and commercial buildings.These would have been laid out in harmony with the naturallandscape and established pathways, rather than superimposedon the site. It wasn’t until 1953 that Ralph E. Griswold – whohad been trained in landscape architecture at Cornell Univer-sity and the American Academy in Rome, and designedPittsburgh’s Point State Park – arrived in Athens to draw up alandscape plan for the Agora and execute Thompson’s vision.Realizing the pioneering aspects of the undertaking, he wrotein his report: “It is as unique in modern archaeological prac-tice as the Agora was in its historical significance and will addnew interest to its ancient traditions.”

Fortunately, Griswold’s elegant watercolor renditions ofproposed plantings, painted over earlier photographs of thesite, have been preserved and published in Craig A. Mauzy’sAgora Excavations 1931-2006, a pictorial history celebrating theentire project’s seventy-fifth anniversary (see page 3). The plantlist, based on writings by ancient authors and inscriptionsreferring to the Agora, included only indigenous plants or oth-ers acclimatized to the area. According to the notes I took thatday, most of them are still inevidence, although the treeshave grown to a stately size,providing welcome groves ofshade.

Griswold’s plan, whichwas the result of his observa-tions of tourist routes andhis study of irrigation pitsand aqueducts, has an intrin-sic beauty that is structuralas well as horticultural.Large trees – plane and oak –

were planted along paths that frame the major antiquities;smaller laurels and carobs provided background for importantstructures; cypress and pine emphasized boundaries; and darkevergreens punctuated the landscape, replacing the myriadmissing heroic statues that had once been a part of thepanoramic view. For the rest, there are olive and almond trees,and an abundance of wildflowers and plants in open spaces:oleander, rosemary, tree heather, and yellow jasmine, to namea few. There is also, of course, acanthus, which gave its leafform to the Corinthian column (see cover). (Thompson andGriswold point out that in antiquity wreaths were fabricatedfor every honorific occasion; their ubiquity in art and litera-ture provided Griswold’s team with additional guidance con-cerning plant material.)

Simultaneously with the landscape restoration, the Ameri-can School rebuilt the Stoa of Attalos II (king of Pergamon inthe 2nd century BCE) along its eastern boundary to be theAgora Museum. A shopping arcade in antiquity, the stoa nowcontains sculpture and artifacts from the excavation that por-tray the Agora’s political and commercial life. Its verticalityand long double colonnade of Doric and Ionic columns forthe display of sculpture provide a welcome sense of scale,helping one to imagine how the now-mature landscape wouldhave embraced buildings of comparable size.

Among the most challenging aspects of the excavationrelating to landscape was the discovery of the planting pitsaround the Temple of Hephaestus, which stands on a hill over-looking the Agora (see cover). Built in 449 BCE by one of thearchitects of the Parthenon, the Temple of Hephaestus is themost intact Doric temple in Greece. Once surrounded byfoundries, the temple is dedicated to the god of fire and theforge, who played a pivotal role in Greek mythology: Zeuscommanded Hephaestus to alleviate his severe headache by

striking him with a forginghammer, thus splitting openhis head to give birth toAthena – the scene depictedon the east pediment of theParthenon.

It was customary in the4th century BCE to stick ter-

racotta pots filled with earth on the ends of tree limbs; oncethe limbs took root, they were cut off and placed into tree pitswith the pots broken underneath. In this case, the trees wereplanted on either side of the temple, parallel with the temple’scolumns. Instead of reproducing the original design, Griswoldcreated a starkly classical planting: a double hedge of pome-granate and myrtle surrounding the temple on three sides.Seeing the temple with its clipped hedges today, so completein appearance itself and in balance with the landscape, makesthe scene feel contemporary with antiquity.

This is what the restoration of landscape produces: a senseof continuity that the ruins themselves cannot convey alone.In the Mauzy book, there is a photograph of Ralph Griswoldparticipating in a Greek circle dance with his male workers inMay 1955, after completing the planting of these splendidspaces so significant to Western democracy and philosophy. Ifelt like dancing myself after I saw the Agora.

On the plain of Mesogeia, an agricultural and wine-growingregion east of Athens extending to the Aegean Sea, three con-temporary gardens preserving local traditions in horticulturehave influenced and even inspired the wider world of garden-ing. In 1962, after spending many summers in Greece, MaryJaqueline Tyrwhitt, an Englishwoman and professor of urbandesign at Harvard University who specialized in the evolutionof human settlements, purchased land near Peania. She hadspotted the location on a walk down Mount Hymettos, themountain that dominates Athens and the surrounding area,and her knowledge of shifting populations told her that thissite would not soon be suburbanized, although it offered hereasy access to the city and the airport.

Thus was born Sparoza, “the hill of sparrows,” a four-acregarden (purchased in narrow strips called stremata) that grad-ually climbed up a hillside. Tyrwhitt constructed a simplehouse of local stone, with a high-ceilinged living room fur-nished with tall bookcases and a southern glass wall shaded bya covered verandah. Entwined with wisteria vines, the veran-dah leads to a sunken walled garden partially shaded by ajacaranda tree. Tyrwhitt’s purpose was to create a garden ofdrought-resistant indigenous plants capable of survivingstrong winds and the unrelenting heat of stifling summermonths, when the concrete-hard dirt had to be blasted to plantnew trees.

After retiring from Harvard in 1969, she lived there fulltime, and, before her death in 1983, she wrote a book entitledMaking a Garden on a Greek Hillside that includes a monthlyjournal of events, chores, climate, fauna, and native plant lists

5

Picnickers on the slope between the

Agora and the Acropolis.

totaling around five hundred species and sub-species. Pene-lope Hobhouse has pointed out that this number of plants ispractically the same as the one found in De Materia Medica byPedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the first centurywho traveled the Mediterranean with the military forces of theRoman emperor Nero.

Bequeathed to the Goulandris Natural History Museum, thegarden had one interim tenant before the knowledgeable andenergetic Sally Razelou became the resident gardener in 1991.With intermittent advice from a few professional designersand a loyal volunteer corps, she has maintained the garden toperfection ever since. In 1994 Ms. Razelou and her associates,meeting at Sparoza, founded the Mediterranean GardenSociety. The society, which now has twenty-three chapters ineleven countries (including three in California), spreads thegarden’s horticultural message through its informative quar-terly journal, The Mediterranean Garden, and frequent meetingsand plant exchanges.

By the time I arrived in late May, the brilliant wildflowerseason was over, and the garden was a lush silvery haze. It wasentering what Ms. Razelou calls the estivation or dormantperiod of summer, characterized by little or no rainfall, and nowatering. And although interns were already cutting backplants, the outlying gardens and three descending terracesalong the east facade of the house had retained their layeredappearance: canopies of trees, including olive, Mediterraneanoak, and pomegranate with tiny red blooms, provided shadefor the undergrowth of shrubs, grasses, and aloes, vines cling-ing to stone walls, and a preponderance of long-stemmedplants blooming in subtle shades of white, lavender blue, pink,and yellow – salvia, larkspur, iris. The hillside beyond waspunctuated with dark cypress trees, and tucked in everywherewere decorative terracotta pots and jars overflowing withfoliage. Sparoza is the mother lode of Mediterranean gardens.

From there I traveled north. At the base of Mount Penteli,after a circuitous route along suburban Socrates Street, theroad narrows to the sort of a dirt trail that typically signifiesan approaching dead end. But one more bend lands the visitorin a forested wilderness at 6 Asclepiou Street. This is NeaPenteli Phytorio, probably the most serious and specializednursery in Greece. Fortunately, the owner, ChryssanthiParayios, exudes a cheerful enthusiasm for her calling despiteher embroidered black cotton widow’s weeds. While otherGreek nurseries sell typical resort flowers, like petunias andgeraniums, Mrs. Parayios combs the mountainside and the

beaches for rare and unusual native plants, like Saponaria offici-nalis and Bupleurum falvum, which she grows from cuttingsand seeds. She lays them out in unlabeled pots so closelypacked together that the three acres of extensive clearings atthe forest’s edge are like a fantastic pointillist landscape. Thenursery stretches out on either side of a mountain stream,which can be crossed on a wobbly but serviceable suspensionbridge.

One of Mrs. Parayios’s customers is Eleni Martinos, whoowns an elegant gallery of antiques in Athens and gardens ona grand scale in Pallini, halfway between Sparoza and the nursery. When the Martinoses bought the land in 1991, theeight-and-a-half-acre site was covered in pine trees and had spectacular views of the foothills of Mount Penteli and of the Mesogheia plain. A devastating series of fires left theland barren and vulnerable to the fierce winds while the newairport destroyed the view.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Martinos made a fresh start in 1992 withthe American architect Charles Shoup, who lives in the

Peloponnese, where he has built his own series of houses andgardens in the classical style. Though ample in size, the field-stone house Shoup designed feels like a garden pavilion. It has arcaded outdoor rooms for family occasions and widestaircases that lead directly into an elaborate and seeminglyendless series of walled gardens that bear the direct influenceof other Mediterranean landscapes: the water gardens of theGeneralife at the Alhambra, and the garden Nicole de Vésiandesigned near Bonnieux in Provence, with its clipped greenglobes using every imaginable plant conducive to the form.

Water is plentiful here. Green expanses of lawn, often orna-mented with a pond, fountain, or a piece of sculpture, are sur-rounded by borders burgeoning with plants and flowers, somewith elaborate color schemes. The high point is a long canal,bordered by olive trees trimmed into cubes, with underplant-ings cascading romantically over the water’s edge. Levels areconstantly changing as one climbs up and down the manystone staircases; distant views lure the visitor to outer gardenswith ornate examples of topiary – an exuberant variety ofshapes and shades of green juxtaposed one against the other.It is a masterful design that also has its hidden corners, like asecret garden where Cavafy’s famous poem “Voices” recallingthe voices of those who are departed has been inscribed.

While each of these three gardens represents a differentapproach to the landscape of Greece, their success derivesfrom an understanding and appreciation by their overseers ofthe challenge of maintaining the rich selection offered in thisarid climate. Through the centuries, the possibilities inherentin cultivating the harsh terrain of Greece have remained con-stant. In a final touching scene in The Odyssey, Homer relateshow Odysseus, desperate to prove his identity to his fatherafter returning to Ithaca, resorts finally to this shared memory:

Again – more proof – let’s say the trees you gave meon this revetted plot of orchard once. . . .

You gave thirteen pear, ten apple trees, and forty fig trees. Fifty rows of vineswere promised too, each one to bear in turn. (24.371–72, 24.375–77)

This could be a garden today, say, on the island of Skiathos.– Paula Deitz

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Eleni Martinos’s garden, Pallini.

(Credit: Maya Bailey)

Hadrian’s role in the cre-ation of the villa is notdirectly documented, butancient texts record hisinterest in planning anddesign. It is reasonable toassume that serious discus-sions took place among the

emperor, his architects, and his artists, and that in this broadsense the villa was Hadrian’s creation: we should view itthrough the lens of the emperor’s will.

Hadrian situated a variety of discrete architectural forms –strongly differentiated enclosures, pavilions, and peristyles – inunanticipated sequences across a vast, broadly terraced park.With no grand allées, the design was one of considerable sub-tlety: the villa revealed itself only as it was traversed. The three

principal axes evident in thevilla’s plan were largelydetermined by the topogra-phy, but Hadrian’s engineersalso imposed structure uponthe land, extending terracesout over valleys and accentu-ating the natural contours ofthe site. Water was broughtin from the aqueduct linesthat supplied the imperialcapital. Displayed in over ahundred fountains of differ-ent types, including reflect-ing pools, grand nymphaea,and moving sheets, its visualand aural play contributed tothe definition of place.

A pleasing place, or locusamoenus, emerges early as acentral trope of the pastoral,and the veneration of itspresiding spirit, the geniusloci, is a recurrent theme

from Ovid to Alexander Pope, who memorably advised hispatron Lord Burlington to “Consult the genius of the place inall, / That tells the waters or to rise, or fall.” From its inception,Hadrian’s creation was a pragmatic manifestation of the pas-toral. To the east of the villa the contours drop off sharply toform a valley of great natural beauty, and temples and towerswere erected to provide lofty viewpoints over the surroundingcountryside. At the same time, the contradictions of the pas-toral tradition are nowhere more starkly evoked than here.Although the villa was in one sense a rural retreat, a placewhere Hadrian could remove himself from the concerns of thecapital, it was also the hub of an empire and a reflection of itsruler’s authority.

In fact, the grounds themselves were designed to evoke portions of Hadrian’s far-flung territories. In the course of hisreign, Hadrian traveled extensively, acquiring a first-handknowledge of the classical world in all its cultural complexity.On his tours of inspection he demonstrated a fascination withGreece and Athens in particular. A passage in a fourth-centurybiography of Hadrian relates that the emperor had portions

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Hadrian’s Villa and the Landscape of Allusion

From classical times to the present, artists of all kindshave drawn on landscapes both real and imagined togive significance to their works. In architectural andlandscape design, the inspiration of place is obviouslycrucial – intrinsic to the designer’s intentions and the

ultimate physical manifestation of those intentions. In paint-ing and poetry as well, a given place – metaphorical or sub-stantial – often plays a central role in creating both a startingpoint and a final meaning. Artists use landscape and a sense ofplace to allude to eternal themes: the transience of fame andthe desire for immortality.

Poetic and pictorial evocations of place are, of course, fun-damentally different from existing sites. Whether we think ofShakespeare’s forest of Arden or Poussin’s poetic distillationsof the Roman Campagna, we must acknowledge that they areidealized and abstracted versions of reality, and by virtue of their medium, incapable of change. In contrast, actual land-scapes are perennially in flux. With the passage of time, func-tion and patterns of use also change, and intended meaningsbecome blurred or forgotten as new interpretations emergeand are projected onto the landscape.

Few classical sites illustrate this process – and the richcomplexity of the landscape of allusion – better than Hadrian’sVilla near Tivoli, twenty-two kilometers east of Rome. Laid out between 118 and 134 CE, Hadrian’s Villa surpasses all otherancient villas in its scale, architectural originality, and reso-nance. It can also be seen as a paradigm of classicism’s role inWestern art, and its extended history is an unusually fullrecord of the crosscurrents and projections such visionary cre-ations can generate.

Set against the background of the Sabine Hills, the villaremains one of the most haunting sites in the Roman coun-tryside: it represents an inspired integration of architecturalstructure with the contours of the surrounding landscape. Asthe great twentieth-century architect Le Corbusier remarked,“At Hadrian’s Villa the levels are established in accordancewith the Campagna; the mountains support the composition,which is indeed based on them.” The villa’s ancient limits aredifficult to define, but it likely occupied more than 300 acres.Its scale is suggested by comparisons with modern parks: KewGardens (292 acres), Hyde Park (365), and the extended Wash-ington Mall (357).

The so-called Temple of Venus at

Hadrian’s Villa. The circular temple

anchors the northern end of what was

once an extended landscape composi-

tion probably intended to evoke the

Thessalian Vale of Tempe near Mount

Olympus.

of the villa made in such a way that he might call them afterfamous places and provinces of the Greco-Roman world:

Hadrian fashioned the Tiburtine Villa marvelously, in sucha way that he might inscribe there the names of provincesand places most famous and could call certain parts, forinstance, the Lyceum, the Academy, the Prytaneum, theCanopus, the Poecile, the Vale of Tempe. And in order toomit nothing, he even made an underworld.

This passage in the Historia Augusta not only underscoresthe potential of one place to evoke another but also, throughits reference to the underworld and its associations with themyth of Pluto and Proserpine, introduces themes that woulddominate the pastoral tradition to come: growth, decay, death,and rebirth.

The circular colonnade of one structure, often identified asa Temple of Venus, anchors the northern end of what was oncean extended landscape composition probably intended toevoke the Thessalian Vale of Tempe, near Mount Olympus, thepastoral setting par excellence. Hadrian’s passion for collect-ing, as it were, evocations of buildings and places whosenames ring with hallowed associations anticipates the attitudeof well-traveled English lords whose gardens were sown withallusions to favorite spots on their Grand Tours.

Varro, in his treatise on agriculture, drily commented onthe fashion among wealthy Romans for attaching exotic namesto their villas. “They do not think they have a real villa,” heobserved, “unless it rings with many resounding Greeknames.” The villa of Cicero’s friend Atticus, in Epiris, includedan Amalthaeum, named after the legendary site on Mount Idawhere Zeus was raised. The Amalthaeum comprised a grove, astream, and a sanctuary, together forming a planned landscapecomposition that Cicero was eager to imitate at his own villa.

We also learn from Cicero that Brutus’s villa at Lanuviumincluded a Eurotas and a Persian Porch. Brutus’s Eurotasreferred to a river flowing through Sparta, and his porch to aportico commemorating a Spartan victory over the Persians.Brutus’s choice of these landmarks for inclusion in his gardendeclares his political and philosophical affinity with Spartanliberty as contrasted with Persian servility to an absolutemonarchy. Hundreds of years later, similar moral and politicalvalues were expressed in eighteenth-century English gardens –notably Kent’s Elysian Fields at Stowe. At the same time, suchallusions to earlier eras may be expressions of poetry or power

as well as political opinion – and sometimes they are all three. The appearance and nomenclature of English gardenswere meant to recall such classical locations as Palestrina or Posillipo but also, by extension, the order and grandeur ofAugustan Rome. The landscape of Hadrian’s Villa reflected a similar regard for yet more venerable sites such as Tempe,with its poetic associations of a golden age of pastoral ease,even as it simultaneously appropriated the site for its ownenhancement.

If scholars are on less secure ground in identifying othersurviving portions of Hadrian’s Villa with famous places men-tioned by his biographer, it is largely due to one extremelyimportant characteristic of these topographical allusions.Rather than being literal imitations of the older monumentswhose names they carried, all were of new and innovativedesign, often bearing only the most general visual relationshipto their namesakes.

The revival of classical forms that emerged as a centralaccomplishment of the Renaissance similarly involved a vital,creative process of translation or imitation, inspired by activecommerce with past masterpieces. Several centuries later, theEnglish Augustans viewed the architectural forms of classicalantiquity primarily through the medium of Renaissance trans-lations codified in the treatises of Serlio, Palladio, and others.Their vision of landscape was likewise based on classical texts,many of which had been visually translated by such seven-teenth-century painters asClaude and Poussin.

The most influentialEnglish landscape theoristsand gardeners were at theirease with Latin verse –Alexander Pope and JosephAddison were poets steepedin classical literature – andthey were also often architec-tural dilettantes of consider-able erudition. But this didnot mean that they werecontent merely to illustrate

specific classical texts or to erect reproductions of Romanbuildings. Literal copies of classical temples began to appearin English gardens only after the middle of the eighteenthcentury. For the generation of Pope and William Kent, it wasenough to suggest a correspondence without realizingabsolute visual congruity.

Roman taste had sanctioned copies of original works of art,especially of statues by Greek masters, recognizing the copiesas admirable in their own right. The context and function of such copies, however, invariably differed from the originals.Witness the caryatids that line one of the most striking features of Hadrian’s Villa, the so-called Canopus, or ScenicCanal. Hadrian’s caryatids are reflected in the shimmeringwater of the canal and outlined against the shadowy concavityof the Serapaeum, rather than silhouetted against the Attic sky – a transformation that cannot fail to affect our perceptionof their form and meaning. The emperor’s contextual transfor-mation of the Erectheum caryatids was paralleled in a later ageby James “Athenian” Stuart in a garden folly at Shugborough,which was modeled on the Arch of Hadrian at Athens.

Any man’s time and accomplishments will pass, whether heleads the simple life of a shepherd or the sophisticated life ofan emperor. After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Hadrian’sVilla was systematically despoiled and served as a quarry for over fifteen hundred years. And yet the villa’s connection tothe enigmatic emperor and the great natural beauty of its

8

The Canopus, or Scenic Canal, at

Hadrian’s Villa.

setting ensured that it would be visited by future generationsof artists, writers, and patrons. Most of these visitors wouldcome from Rome, leaving the city behind them to enter thisArcadian scene, where shepherds tended flocks and farmers’ploughs turned up tessellated pavements and fragments ofstatuary. As they wandered over the vast site, so richly strewnwith mementos of the past, they would inevitably muse on itsimperial associations and ponder the implications of its decay.At the same time, the particulars of the scene before them –magnificent ruins in a pastoral setting – only strengthened theconnection between landscape and antiquity, which wouldremain one of the central manifestations of the pastoral forcenturies.

Landscape is so allusive precisely because it combines placeand time; the place is fixed, but it changes; it always looks bothforward and back. Evocations of place and time are themesintertwined through history at Hadrian’s Villa, like the strandsof ivy that form natural garlands pendant from the villa’sruined vaults. These strands appeared repeatedly in examplesof villa and landscape design from the Renaissance throughthe eighteenth century, and we can trace parallel themes inpainting and literature, extending through the haunting land-scapes of Claude Lorrain and Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirsof Hadrian.

When François-Auguste-René Chateaubriand, one of thefathers of French Romanticism, visited Hadrian’s Villa in 1803,he was surprised by a rain shower and sought refuge in one of the baths:

A vine had penetrated through fissures in the arched roof,while its smooth and red crooked stem mounted along thewall like a serpent. Round me, across the arcades, theRoman country was seen in different points of view. Largeelder trees filled the deserted apartments, where some soli-tary black-birds found a retreat. The fragments of masonrywere garnished with the leaves of scolopendra, the satinverdure of which appeared like mosaic work upon thewhite marble. Here and there lofty cypresses replaced thecolumns, which had fallen into the palaces of death. Thewild acanthus crept at their feet on the ruins, as if naturehad taken pleasure in reproducing, upon the mutilatedchefs d’oeuvre of architecture, the ornament of their pastbeauty. . . .

While I contemplated this picture, a thousand confusedideas passed across my mind. At one moment I admired, at the next detested Roman grandeur. At one moment I thought of the virtues, at another the vices, which distin-guished the lord of the world, who had wished to renderhis garden a representation of his empire. I called to mind the events by which his superb villa had beendestroyed. . . . While these different thoughts succeededeach other, an inward voice mixed itself with them andrepeated to me what has been a hundred times written onthe vanity of human affairs. There is indeed a double vanity in the remains of the Villa Adriana: for it is knownthat they were only imitations of other remains, scatteredthrough the provinces of the Roman empire. The real temple of Serapis and Alexandria, and the real academy atAthens no longer exist; so that in the copies of Hadrian you only see the ruins of ruins.

Chateaubriand’s text bristles with the contradictionsimplicit in the pastoral tradition: complexity and simplicity,urbanity and rusticity, reality and artifice, vanity and humility,the temporal and the eternal. He concluded his meditationswith these remarks:

Many travelers, my predecessors, have written their nameson the marbles of Hadrian’s Villa; they hoped to prolongtheir existence by leaving a souvenir of their visit in thesecelebrated places; they were mistaken. While I endeavoredto read one of the names recently inscribed which Ithought I recognized, a bird took flight from a clump of ivy,and in so doing caused several drops of water from therecent rain to fall: the name vanished.*

Here is the preoccupation with mortality that informs somuch of the pastoral mode, and yet in Hadrian’s grand designthe human desire for immortality still struggles valiantlyagainst the inexorable cycles of nature. – John A. Pinto

*Chateaubriand, F.-A.-R., Voyage en Italy (Paris, 1969), pp. 134-135;translation: Recollections of Italy, England and America (Philadelphia,1816), pp. 27-28.

Digging Ancient Gardens

In the dusty haze of this warm December morning, I amstanding with archaeologist Ehud Netzer on the slopes of an artificial mountain at Herodium, looking out towardsJerusalem, visible to the north. This is where ProfessorNetzer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently dis-

covered the tomb of Herod the Great. The archaeologicalworld is humming with the news, made vivid in a recentNational Geographic special and cover story (November 2008).As part of a four-day conference on villas of the RomanEmpire that we are both attending, Professor Netzer hasagreed to give participants a private tour of the site. As we waitfor the others, he says he has a surprise for me: a tomb garden.I urge him to explain how he knows this, but he responds simply, “You will see.” We scramble along the steep slope, thefortress palace looming above and the great pool and colon-nades of this ancient royal burial complex extending outwardsbelow.

Reaching the terrace where the limestone tomb was recent-ly discovered, we study the fine masonry of its central cham-ber, which contained the remains of several sarcophagi, orcoffins, now at the university. (The most distinctive amongthem, presumably Herod’s, had been deliberately smashed byvandals.) Outside the tomb, a pool originally flanked one sideof the chamber, its waters leading out to the forecourt of the terrace. And there, sandwiched between the crushed whitelimestone construction fill below and the destruction debrisabove, is a deep brown layer of loam. The soil must have beencarried up the hill from the surrounding fields and spreadacross the terrace, which would have been watered from anearby cistern. Now we know that Herod – like his friend andbenefactor, Augustus – was buried in a tumulus with a gardenor grove.

The moment takes me back to 1985, during my doctoralstudies, when Professor Netzer first offered me the opportuni-ty to examine an ancient garden at the Hasmonean andHerodian winter palaces at Jericho, dating from the secondand first centuries BCE. Excavations by various teams over the previous three decades had revealed a highly constructedlandscape of terraces, palace structures, artificial hills, watersystems, pools, and ornate retaining walls, including a stepped theater whose benches held flower pots rather than spectators.My first project was a small courtyard beside the dining hall,where Netzer had unearthed several pots in a test trench. The

9

features and even the designof the garden emerged clear-ly: seven simple rows witheleven planting pots or treepits in each. The originalsurface soil contours andsubsurface construction wereremarkably intact.

Cultivated soils are oftenthe first indicator of anancient garden or park, butthey are not always so dra-matically presented; it hastaken me years to developtechniques to confidentlyidentify garden features inthe field. I subsequentlyfound evidence of gardenson Masada and in the palace areas at Herodium, but it would be thirteen years before I found such well-preservedfeatures as at Jericho – this time in Italy at the villa of theancient Roman poet Horace, a contemporary of Herod’s.Again, ceramic planting pots, cultivated soils, and soil discol-orations revealed a garden laid out along a central axis.

The most famous Roman gardens are those excavated byWilhelmina Jashemski at Pompeii and other areas buried byMt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. These landscapes were abruptly sealedby volcanic ash and lava flows instead of succumbing to over-growth, erosion, or changing uses. With the assistance of herhusband Stanley, an eminent scientist, Jashemski excavated allkinds of gardens, from small urban peristyles decoratedornately in the latest fashion to shopkeepers’ gardens, templegardens, vineyards, commercial plots, and orchards. She alsoinvestigated the monumental and luxurious villa at nearbyOplontis, discovering delightful interplays among gardens,garden paintings, and architecture.

The conditions of the Vesuvian region are unique in theclassical world. Many of the methods developed there for gar-den archaeology are not applicable to more typical sites, whichare usually less well preserved. Indeed, gardens were generally

considered so ephemeral that few historians bothered withthem. But the Jashemskis’ work spurred first a new sense ofpossibility and then a dramatic growth in the field of gardenstudy, and the couple’s method of combining scientific tech-niques with humanistic inquiry remains the model. ProfessorJashemski collaborated for nearly forty years with DumbartonOaks in Washington, D.C., to gather archaeologists workingaround the world to develop garden-finding methods thatwould be useful on sites with more typical preservation condi-tions. The first of these conferences was held in 1979, featuringBarry Cunliffe of Oxford University, who had discovered animportant villa garden at Fishbourne in Sussex, and JorgeAlarcão, who had found peristyle gardens with intricatelyplumbed fountain basins at Conimbriga in Portugal. Theirsuccess inspired many archaeologists to tackle the gardens ofthe famous places of antiquity.

Since then, Italian and Danish archaeologists have foundthe gardens of the imperial villa of Augustus and Livia atPrima Porta, which boasts the the most famous classical gar-den painting discovered to date (see page 11). Bernard Frischerand I studied the large peristyle of Horace’s villa in Licenza,Italy, for the American Academy in Rome with great success.Investigators at the École Française de Rome revealed a seriesof gardens on the Palatine, and the Soprintendenza archeolog-ica di Roma exposed for the first time the great public garden

of the Temple of Peace in the Imperial Fora. At Petra, Jordan, ayoung doctoral candidate, Leigh Ann Bedal, set out to explorethe Lower Markets and discovered an extensive pool and gar-den complex that once greeted parched travelers along theArabian trade routes. As part of an ongoing initiative begun byMichel Conan, then director of Landscape Studies at Dumbar-ton Oaks, and the Society of Garden Archaeology to create a sourcebook of garden archaeology, this project became a textcase. Thanks to these and other discoveries, Dr. Jashemski wasable to catalog over 1500 Roman gardens around the empire by the time of her death last year. With three fellow scholars, Iam now preparing for publication the manuscript of this great work, Gardens of the Roman Empire.

The evidence for gardens in typical preservation conditionsis a complex combination of soils, artifacts, and “ecofacts.” Wecan detect the shape of planting beds, paths, and often post-holes of fences and trellises. We can recover rows of plantingpits, which sometimes contain ceramic planting pots; thesemark the location and suggest the general size of plants. Thework of the young scholar Elizabeth Macaulay Lewis hasdemonstrated just how widely such vessels were used through-out the Roman Empire. Understanding the movement of waterleads to further understanding of any garden, and we findwater channels and pipes, pools, fountains, and grottos. Artplayed a large role in the Roman garden, and nymphaea, wallpainting fragments, paths with mosaics, and statues and theirbases are often among the remains. This cultural and environ-mental evidence, when interpreted together, allows us to visu-alize the three-dimensional space of the garden and the variedhuman activities that took place there. We can also begin toreconstruct the garden’s relationship to the architecture andsurrounding landscape.

One big surprise from archaeology is the nearly completeabsence of the type of plan assumed to be quintessentiallyancient: the quadripartite garden. Not one example has beenidentified in the hundreds of sites in Jashemski’s catalog, yet ithas been so ubiquitously represented since the Renaissance as the “Garden of the Ancients” that most gardens recreated atRoman villas opened for tourists take this form. Not only isthe quadripartite garden absent in Roman culture, there is nofirm evidence of it in the Persian, Egyptian, and Greek tradi-tions either. We do have evidence within the geometries ofRoman gardens for cruciform pools or paths that casuallycross, and we may yet find a geometrically laid out quadripar-

10

Plan of Villa Arianna, Stabia, Italy.

The villa, with its large peristyle

viridiarium, sprawls along a high

cliff above the Bay of Naples.

(Credit: M. Palmer)

The GreatPeristyle

TrapezoidalPeristyle

PeristyleCourtyard

Atrium

O 25M 50M

tite peristyle garden. However, we must dispense with thePost-Enlightenment view of the garden as an axial and symmetrical form, one shared with the mandala and othersymbols of the cardinal directions.

Most large Roman gardens were in fact laid out as sequencesof linked spaces for perambulating on foot or in a litter. Eachgarden space was almost always oriented toward a scenic view.Wherever one ate, whether in temples, schools, urban domi-ciles, or villa gardens, reclining rather than sitting at mealswas the norm. For that reason we find no conventional diningtables, only stone couches.

In two famous letters Pliny the Younger (61/63–113 CE) leadsus through each of his villasnot simply by stating thecontents of the rooms andgardens, but by telling uswhat we will see and fromwhat vantage point we willsee it. Like other ancientRoman gardens, his appearto have been linear and view-based. In spite of Pliny’swords to this effect, manylatter-day architects havedrawn imaginary reconstruc-tions of his two villas thattake the form of symmetri-cally axial layouts of the kindthat became prevalent fromthe time of the Renaissance.

Earlier, in his famous DeArchitectura, the architect andengineer Vitruvius (c. 80–70BCE–c. post-15 BCE) saysthat extensive walks shouldbe laid out according to thestatus of owner. He describesa variety of architectural andgarden walks, such as thecolonnaded portico or peristyle; the freestanding xystus or lin-ear walks along the cliffs of the Villa Damacuta on Capri; andthe hippodrome garden – that strange horticultural adaptationof equine sport – seen on the Palatine and at Hadrian’s Villa.All of these walks feature dramatic landscape views and gar-dens alongside or within the circuit. Places for delightful din-ing are arranged throughout the gardens and structures, with attractive views framed by windows to resemble paintingsor illusionistic paintings simulating views.

The equivalent of landscape architecture in the Romanworld was called ars topiaria – not the craft of clipping shrubs,but the art of making places. A Danish scholar, Lena Landgren,has recently shown that the term appears in Rome suddenly inthe mid-first century CE, along with the word for its practi-tioner, the topiarius. Garden effects range from oases in desertlocales, as at Jericho, Masada, or Petra, to miniaturized topogra-phies, including hanging gardens in emulation of mountains,as on the Palatine in Rome or on the coast of Caesarea Mar-itima (Israel), and imitation rivers or canals, an example beingthe Canopus at Hadrian’s Villa or the cool Euripus that carriedthe waters of the Aqua Virgo through the Campus Martius in

Rome. We know from poetrythat flowery valley meadowswere also recreated in minia-ture, although as yet noexamples have been foundarchaeologically. All theseinnovative garden featureswere not merely surfacetreatments but insteadexpensive, man-made ecolo-gies requiring engineering,aesthetic, and horticulturalknowledge comparable tothat employed in landscapearchitecture today.

Also appearing in the literary record in the firstcentury CE are places calledviridiaria, long translatedsimply as green spaces.Oxford scholar NicholasPurcell now interprets themas collections of green plants(viridia), perhaps in the senseof imported trees, shrubs,and herbaceous species, butmore probably in the senseof arrangements curated tocreate a topia, or richly evoca-tive place. During this peri-od, garden paintings became

popular as well. The earliest and preeminent example is the Garden Room of Livia at Prima Porta, now housed in the

Museo Nacionale in Rome, a staple image of every garden his-tory textbook. This garden has always been interpreted as anidyllic one, whose plants flower and bear fruit simultaneouslyin a timeless moment of abundance. The viewer can strollaround the room along the wall, studying its exquisitely por-trayed plants and birds, all of which can be identified scientifi-cally. Yet from a stationary position, perhaps while dining, theviewer notices a rocky ledge at the top of the painting, evokingthe sense of reclining in a cave and looking out on a lushlyplanted garden.

Garden paintings abound around the Roman empire, bothon interior and exterior walls, creating imaginary verdure forurban courtyards or extending small gardens into fictionalspaces. This phenomenon is not, however, what has broughtme to Jerusalem. Instead I am here to report on the discoveryof what I believe to be an actual viridiarium at the Villa Ariannain Stabia, Italy, a site buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. Infact, the great peristyle of the Villa Arianna appears to be themost densely planted monumental ornamental garden pre-served in the Roman world.

Two years ago, archaeologists from the Soprintendenzaarcheologica di Pompei removed the volcanic lapilli from thesurface of the villa’s largest peristyle to find only dirt – no art,no pavements – which is highly unusual. At their invitation, Ivisited last spring to record the contoured surface with itsmany root cavities, which were awaiting plaster casts. Workingwith a team from the Restoring Ancient Stabia Foundation, weused LiDAR, a type of advanced scanning technology, to createa detailed contour map of the surface, allowing us to calculatethe careful grading used to manage water flow across the site.Ground-penetrating radar has also allowed us to see, beneaththe surface, the terrace’s original construction and the varyingsizes of the cavities left after the decay of plant roots. I workedwith colleagues and students to carefully remove lapilli fromhundreds of these cavities. Our analysis indicated that numer-ous small trees, shrubs, vines, and herbaceous plants had oncegrown there. We also found other holes indicating the formerpresence of fence posts and stakes.

While the final design awaits our studies later this year, wehave the overwhelming impression that this garden at the VillaArianna, with its rich array of vegetation held back by finefence-work, strikingly resembles the garden room of Livia atPrima Porta, as well as other garden paintings around theRoman Empire. It seems that these beautiful representationswere not merely idyllic; they portrayed actual viridiaria,strolling gardens that, with the provision of abundant waterand many kinds of plants, offered the smells, sights, andsounds of spring – even in the heat of an August day in theshadow of Mt. Vesuvius. – Kathryn Gleason

11

Detail, garden painting, the Garden

Room of Livia at Prima Porta. (Credit:

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)

Place Keeper

Margaret Bamberger, Land Steward

Have you seen my blog?” Margaret Bamberger asksme. It is the fall of 2008, and we are sitting in thekitchen of her house on a sparkling day in theTexas Hill Country. Both Margaret’s life and herwork revolve around Selah, the 5,500-acre ranch

cum nature preserve surrounding us that her husband of thelast 11 years, J. David Bamberger, began creating in 1969. “I’mgetting ready to post my 52nd entry,” she continues. “When I started last year I promised myself I wouldwrite one a week. As a cancer patient, it’s notalways been easy. What I miss most is myenergy. But the blog is my way of continuingmy life as an environmental educator – evenif I can’t teach at the Center, take kids on asmany nature walks, or develop new programslike I used to do.”

In 2004 Margaret was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer; a miracle of modern oncologyhas prolonged her life but not cured the disease. Many patients with terminal diseasesmake a career of illness. In contrast,Margaret’s career is life, the life of nature.During my visit last fall, I found her happy,relaxed, and focused on the beauty and ecological richness of world surrounding her.If you visit the Bamberger Ranch website(www.bambergerranch.org) and click on“Margaret’s Blog” at the top of the page, you will find a potpourri of information about life at Selah – part ranch news,part journal, and part lesson in environmental science – with wonderful illustrations, for Margaret is an excellent photographer.

The Bamberger house rests on a hilltop, and out of the win-dow there is a view of rolling grassland punctuated withstands of live oaks whose dense low-hanging canopies provideshade and cover for whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus). The Texas live oaks are one of a number of oak species that arecalled “live” because their leaves are never shed at the sametime and remain a glossy dark green all year. These includethe Spanish oak (Quercus buckleyi), the Lacey oak, (Q. laceyi), andthe plateau live oak tree (Q. fusiformis).

Even though the handsome live oaks are resisting the con-ventions of the season, we are also surrounded by deciduous

oaks in shades of scarlet, yellow, and russet – the Spanish oak(Q. buckleyi), the Texas red oak (Q. Texana), the bur oak (Quercusmacrocarpa), and the small blackjack oak (Q. marilandica). Andon the Bamberger ranch many other native tree species, suchas the drought-tolerant big tooth maple (Acer grandidentatum) –now a glowing crimson – contribute to the fall spectacle. If you go to Margaret’s November 23, 2008, posting (brp-journal. blogspot.com/2008/11/selahs-colors-of-fall.html) you’ll find her images of these trees in their full autumnal splendor.Although you wouldn’t guess that they weren’t spontaneouslyseeded, some of them are not indigenous to the Hill Countrybut were propagated from seeds of trees growing elsewhere inTexas. The Bamberger policy is to reintroduce to the extent

possible native trees that may have grown onthe ranch before being extirpated by over-grazing and agriculture. The tall thick grassrippling on the meadow slope below us ispart of the same plan to replant the ranchwith different species of native Texas vegeta-tion.

Beauty is often deceptive. The Texas HillCountry is environmentally fragile, drought-prone, and historically unfriendly to farmersand ranchers. Although it looks entirely nat-ural, the landscape of the ranch is as much aproduct of human ingenuity as is New York’sCentral Park. To understand the nature ofDavid Bamberger’s accomplishment andMargaret Bamberger’s love of this place it isnecessary to look at the geological structureof the land and the dynamics of its vegetativecommunity.

In geological terms the ranch is part of the EdwardsPlateau, an uplifted portion of the calcified sediments of theCretaceous sea that covered a large portion of the middle ofthe North American continent a hundred million years ago.Because it is a marine formation, the limestone has numerousfossils of mollusks and other forms of sea life embedded in it. It also has the occasional set of dinosaur tracks imprintedby the large reptiles that roamed the shallow margins of theprehistoric sea. The southern edge of the Edwards Plateau issharply defined by an escarpment known as the Balcones

Canyonlands. As the soft, uplifted limestone weathered overtime, creeks and rivers such as the Colorado, Guadalupe, and Pedernales carved numerous canyons between distinctiveridges. This undulating topography is what gives the HillCountry its name.

The geological uplift also caused fissures to open up in theporous rock. Water percolating belowground created whatgeologists call karst, a spongelike layer of partially disintegrat-ed limestone in which caves form, some pocket-size and others quite large. Spelunkers are attracted to the caves, andbats often colonize them in huge numbers. But the main function of the permeable karst strata is to serve as an aquifer,an underground reservoir where subsurface water collects.Rainwater replenishes these aquifers, and it was throughunderstanding the intimate bond between sky, earth, and sub-surface aquifer that David was able to transform a formerlydesiccated landscape into a parklike series of meadows andflowing streams, a continuing labor that Margaret has sharedfor the past fifteen years.

When David first bought the ranch in 1969 it was complete-ly overgrown with Ashe juniper (Juniperus ashei). Often called“cedar” (a common misnomer), Ashe juniper is extremely rot-resistant, making it an ideal wood for fence posts, and itsdense, green, feathery foliage is appealing to the eye. For HillCountry ranchers, however, these assets are far outweighed bythe fact that this native species spreads like a weed in soil-impoverished, overgrazed areas. The remaining grasses have adifficult time surviving as the juniper’s shallow roots drink upmuch of the groundwater that would otherwise nourish theirgrowth. Moreover, much of the rain falling on the juniper’sdense leaf canopy evaporates before reaching the ground.Because there is little vegetation and mostly bare earthbeneath this canopy, the rain that does fall to the grounderodes the already thin layer of soil. The run-off washes overthe bare ground and little water is absorbed. Thus the aquiferis not adequately recharged, and the seeps and springs thatflow from it at the surface dry up.

David knew that the only way he would be able to restorethe land to the kind of savannah Native Americans had keptopen through periodic burning was to remove as muchjuniper as possible, leaving only a few stands to serve as breed-ing habitat for such birds as the Golden-cheeked warbler(Dendronica chrysoparia), an endangered species whose summerrange is restricted to this part of Texas. With the purchase of asecond-hand bulldozer and the hard work of a knowledgeableneighbor and a small crew of Mexican laborers, he began amultiyear clearing operation. Where open ground was exposedby the juniper removal, he sowed native grass seed. As the

12

Margaret Bamberger

grass roots trapped water in the soil and filtered it into theaquifer, dry springs started to flow again, and the rollingsavannah visible from the kitchen window where Margaret andI were talking began to take form. The bulldozer also served as an earthmoving machine, which David used to carve basinsand build earthen dams to create lakes that are fed by a largeaquifer reservoir he was lucky enough to tap. The largest of these artificial water bodies is Lake Madrone, named for theMadrone tree (Arbutus texana), a rare and delicate specieswhose peeling bark reveals pinky tan limbs and trunk.

David named the ranch “Selah,” a biblical term meaning“pause and reflect.” Although it is nominally a working ranchand cattle are grazed there, its real mission is to teach theethics of responsible land stewardship by serving as a rolemodel for environmental regeneration and management prac-tices that, in the words of David, “nurture Mother Nature.” Hecalls this “people ranching.” In 2002 he formed the BambergerRanch Preserve, a not-for-profit corporation whose purpose isto keep Selah intact and perpetuate David’s land-stewardshipethic beyond his own lifetime.

For now, however, the vigorous 80-year-old people rancheris working every day, planting native tree species or overseeingthe prescribed mating patterns of a herd of scimitar-hornedoryx (Oryx dammah) on a 640-acre section of pastureland he set aside in 1980 under the terms of an agreement with theSpecies Survival Program of the American Association ofZoological Parks and Aquariums. The purpose of the programis to breed genetically diverse animals culled from the remain-ing 29 African bloodlines and in the future to reintroducesome scimitar-horned oryx back into the wild. In the mean-time, to see a herd of these graceful animals running acrossthe ranch range, as opposed to observing them individually in

a zoo, is a thrilling sight. Ifound a wealth of information

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people who are thinking on conservation issues to cometogether.”

Part of David’s talent for people ranching lies in his abilityto attract exceptionally knowledgeable and dedicated personsto work with him. Not long after they met he invited Margaretto come live at the ranch and begin a series of environmen-tal education classes at the Center. Soon their relationshipdeepened into something more than mutual admiration, andthey married in 1998. Although she often dryly teases her hus-band when his penchant for hyperbole in extolling the perfec-tions of Selah exceeds her more scientifically descriptiveapproach, Margaret has obviously found both the perfect out-door classroom and her ideal life partner.

David’s instinct for lucky recruitment paid off again in 1999 when he was selling Christmas trees for a charity in SanAntonio and Colleen Gardener, a Peace Corps volunteerrecently returned from Niger, stopped by to choose a Douglasfir. When her interest in environmental preservation becameapparent, David invited her to the ranch, and soon she hadbecome its indispensable factotum and Margaret’s teachingassistant. At the Center they set up easels for poster-board pic-tures of wildlife and built a library of field guides and otherbooks on natural history subjects. Schoolchildren and families,as well as local ranchers in need of David’s persuasion in theways of land stewarding, were invited to the Center. Afterfocusing the attention of their ranch guests on the lesson ofthe day, Margaret and Colleen would take them on a walkwhere they learned to identify birds and marine fossils and –most exciting of all – to recognize a set of dinosaur footprintsthat calcified eons ago in the now-exposed limestone on oneof the bluffs at the ranch.

Some say, “Build it and they will come.” This was true in thecase of the bluebird nest boxes. As Margaret explains in herMarch 10, 2008, blog posting (brp-journal.blogspot.com/2008/

03/bluebirds-set-up-housekeeping-at-selah.html), eastern bluebirds (Sialia sialis) arefound in the eastern and central UnitedStates, including Texas. When she set up theboxes on the ranch, a breeding pair soon tookup residence in one. The photos for this particular lesson in bird identification andbehavior are credited to Amanda Fulton,whose husband Steven, a biologist, teaches atthe ranch along with Colleen. Accompaniedby Margaret’s captions, the photographs show

about their behavior, their native habitat (the savannahs ofMauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and Sudan), and the program tosave them from extinction in Margaret’s blog posting ofFebruary 4, 2008 (brp-journal.blogspot.com/2008/02/scimitar-horned-oryx-at-bamberger-ranch.html).

In contrast to David, Margaret does not speak the languageof mission statements; hers is the factual speech of someonetrained in both biological and environmental science. Livingin Austin as a single mother, she raised three children whileworking in a laboratory analyzing white blood cells. Becauseshe was able to get her lab work done in a thirty-five ratherthan forty-hour week, she could use the remaining time toeducate herself as a naturalist, learning a great deal about geol-ogy, botany, and ornithology by serving as a volunteer in theAustin Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas. The moreshe immersed herself in natural history, the better she under-stood how she could change her focus from the cytotechnolo-gist’s microscope to the whole-earth perspective of theenvironmental educator. She jumped at the chance when shewas offered the opportunity to teach at the Austin Nature andScience Center. She could never have imagined that she wouldeventually have a 5,000-acre ranch for her outdoor classroom.

In 1994 a mutual friend introduced Margaret to her futurehusband. At first, Margaret did not know what to make of thiswealthy, ebullient man whom she admired but who was, shesays, “much too rich for me,” adding, “I certainly didn’t want tobecome anyone’s trophy wife and buy expensive clothes. But Iliked coming to the ranch on an occasional field trip to gobirding or attend one of David’s land-stewardship conferences,so I kept driving over from Austin when something was goingon.” David had by this time built the Center, a large, one-storymeeting hall and dormitory of native Texas limestone. Thepurpose of the conferences at the Center, which were led byagricultural scientists, was, according to him, “to get all those“Selah,” the Bamberger Ranch.

what the bird looks like from different directions and how themale flies back and forth to feed the nesting female whosehead pokes expectantly out of the box hole.

A yet greater triumph in habitat creation occurred soonafter David and Margaret were married. Previously David had helped to make publicly accessible a privately owned HillCountry cavern that had been colonized by migratory bats.Disgusted by its subsequent commercialization as a touristattraction, he decided to build his own bat cave on the ranch –an entrepreneurial piece of real estate development skepticsdubbed “Bamberger’s Folly.” He and Margaret wanted to use their manmade Chiropotorium – a neologism they coined, conflating the bat’s genus name, Chiroptera, with “audi-torium” – not as a sightseeing experience but rather as part ofthe ranch’s nature education program. The only question was:Would bats populate the 6,500 square feet of domed spacesawaiting their arrival? For five years their organically irregular,grass-covered, manmade cave, nestled in the side of a low hill, remained empty. Then Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadaridabraziliensis), the most prevalent of the 32 species of Texas,began to colonize it. Today the bats are prolifically breeding,and one of the great Selah spectacles is the emergence on amid-June evening at dusk of well over a hundred thousandbats. Margaret’s photographs in her January 11, 2008, posting(brp-journal.blogspot.com/2008/01/crazy-about-bats.html)show how, as if on cue, a cloud of these nocturnal-foragingmammals swoops from the cave mouth and soars into thedarkening sky in search of moths and other insects.

In addition to the ones already mentioned, last year’s 52postings on Margaret’s blog consist of descriptions of educa-tional activities such as “Birding Workshop held May 17 and18,” with her own painted illustrations of birds (May 19, 2008);plant and animal lessons, such as “Ragweeds and other Plantsthat Make us Sneeze,” written from her hospital room inHouston between chemotherapy treatments (September 22,2008); images she has captured with her ever-busy single-lens-reflex digital camera while on vacation with David; and per-sonal accounts of family visits, including “A Wonderful 70thBirthday” (December 18, 2008).

On this occasion, her birthday present to herself and herreaders was her blog pledge “to continue for at least another 52posts.” – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Books

The Papers of Frederick LawOlmsted, Volume VII, Parks,Politics, and Patronage,1874-1882Edited by Charles E. Beveridge,Carolyn F. Hoffman, andKenneth HawkinsThe Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2007

The Master List of DesignProjects of the OlmstedFirm, 1857-1979, 2nd ed.Edited by Lucy Lawliss,Caroline Loughlin, LaurenMeierNational Association forOlmsted Parks and NationalPark Service, Frederick LawOlmsted National HistoricSite, 2008

If presenttrends contin-ue, the ever-expandingshelf ofFrederick LawOlmstedscholarshipmay soonrequire itsown bookcase.Since the pub-lication ofLaura WoodRoper’s magis-terial study FLO, a Biographyof Frederick Law Olmstedthirty-five years ago, histori-

ans, biographers, and designcritics have focused moreattention on Olmsted thanany other American land-scape architect. No one iseven a close second. Theirlabors have produced a widespectrum of results, includ-ing reverent accolades, vigor-ous criticisms, and insightfulhistories.

The first of the accolades,which predates Roper’s biography, was the 1922 pub-lication of a selection ofOlmsted’s professionalpapers, Forty Years of Land-scape Architecture, edited byFrederick Law Olmsted Jr.and Theodora Kimball withlaudatory introductions andglosses. Censorious voicesdid not emerge until later inthe century. Roy Rosenzweigand Elizabeth Blackmar’scontroversial The Park and

the People: A History of Central Park (1992) presents a revisionist view of Olmstedas an upper-class elitist who believed “it his duty as agentleman to train the poorand uneducated, whom hedid not entirely trust, in thetastes and manners he hadinherited.” More nuancedand better-documentedbooks and articles by AlbertFein, Elizabeth BarlowRogers, Charles E. Beveridge,and Charles Capin McLaugh-lin, published during the lastthree decades, have struck abalance between these twopoles, providing insight intoOlmsted’s work and legacy.

Olmsted well deservesthis ever-increasing applica-tion of scholarly effort. Hisextensive body of significantdesign work has shaped theAmerican cultural landscape

more than anyother practi-tioner of land-scapearchitecture.In addition,the sheerquantity andquality of hisbooks, articles,professionalreports, andprivate corre-spondencecomprise a

rich legacy of design ideas tobe reckoned with in thetwenty-first century. Tworecent works substantiallycontribute to our under-standing of Olmsted’s

remarkable career. The Papers of Frederick Law

Olmsted, Vol. VII: Parks,Politics, and Patronage 1874-1882 is the latest addition toan editorial endeavor begunin the early 1970s by the lateCharles Capin McLaughlin.Over the 65 years of his pro-fessional career, Olmstedproduced no less than60,000 personal and profes-sional papers. The intent ofthis projected twelve-volumeseries is to publish “the mostsignificant” of Olmsted’spersonal correspondence,unpublished writings, pro-fessional reports, designplans, and newspaper andperiodical articles in anno-tated form. This latest vol-ume, produced by theeditorial troika Charles E.Beveridge, Carolyn F.Hoffman, and KennethHawkins, exhibits the superbscholarship of its predeces-sors and adds yet anothersignificant I-beam to animpressive structure of edi-torial achievement.

Since it has taken almosta generation to arrive at vol-ume VII, it is obvious thatthe various editorial teams ofthe series will not be rushed.The almost glacial time spanis witness to their scholarlyrigor as well as testimony tothe formidable task theyhave undertaken. Their edi-torial policy is both clear and

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sound. Every documentselected must satisfy at leastone of these criteria: “pro-vide insight into Olmsted’scharacter, present valuablecommentary on his times, orcontain an important state-ment on design.” The 756pages of volume VII renderit literally one of the weight-iest tomes of the series, yetits strict adherence to editor-ial policy makes it one of themost fascinating and infor-mative of the lot.

As Beveridge notes in hisintroduction, the periodfrom 1874 to 1882 was one ofthe most active and signifi-cant of Olmsted’s career.With a nod to the nauticalterms Olmsted often used tospice his correspondence,one might say that his pro-fessional practice was run-ning at full sail before thewind through often-stormyseas. The period begins with the last years of his New York office and ends withhim happily relocated insuburban Brookline, Massa-chusetts. The editors haveselected extensive materialrelating to his designs forTompkins Square andMorningside Park, his con-tinuing work on CentralPark, and his planningefforts to develop a masstransportation system and topologically apt street system for the Bronx. Anadditional wealth of materialincludes plans for theBoston, Montreal, and

lucid and informative gener-al introduction by Beveridgehighlighting Olmsted’s work of the period and plac-ing it in historical context.Chapters are arranged inchronological order, andeach is introduced by a help-ful synopsis of its mainevents. Some chapters aredevoted to only a fewmonths, others several years.About 80 percent of the 136entries are private corre-spondence, with the remain-der consisting of projectreports, published articles,and personal memoirs.Because the material is orga-nized chronologically, thenarrative leaps from topic totopic, conveying a sense ofjust how diverse, stressful,and fast-paced Olmsted’spractice was. Thus, to tracethe development of a specificproject, copious use of thewell-designed index is amust. Each selection is pro-vided with extensive foot-notes on every imaginablesubject related to the text.This will no doubt please thescholar, but less so thelayperson who may wellbecome entangled in thethicket of references or justbored.

The portrait of Olmstedthat emerges from thiswealth of material is consis-tent with the one revealed inthe previous six volumes ofhis papers. By twenty-firstcentury standards, Olmstedwas clearly a work-obsessedpolymath, but he appears

sentence from his entry on “Landscape Gardening”from Johnson’s New UniversalCyclopaedia (1877) is typical:

In the possibility, not ofmaking a perfect copy ofany charming naturallandscape, or of any partsor elements of it, but ofleading to the production,where it does not exist,under required condi-tions and restrictions, ofsome degree of the poeticbeauty of all natural land-scapes, we shall thus findnot only the special func-tion and the justificationof the term landscape gar-dening, but also the firstobject of study for thelandscape gardener, andthe standard by whichalone his work is to befairly judged.

Much of his personal cor-respondence is warmer andmore graceful, however,revealing him as a loyalfriend and caring father. Inone letter to his six-year-oldson, Frederick Law OlmstedJr., he invents a tale featur-ing a locomotive namedSuccotash and a rat, Tzaskoe(the latter of Norwegianprovenance). While revealinga playful imagination, the plot concludes with thetragic death of Tzaskoe, aclear warning to young Fred of the disastrous conse-quences of hubris andneglect of social responsibil-ity. Olmsted’s moralism,

which was rooted in hisPuritan heritage, prevails.

As Beveridge notes in hisintroduction, at no time inhis career was Olmsted moredirectly involved in hisdesign work than duringthese eight eventful years.While this volume does doc-ument the corruption andcomplexity of New York politics and illuminates a few interesting facets ofOlmsted’s character, itsgreatest value lies in theamount of detail Olmstedreveals about the develop-ment of some of his mostsignificant design projects –the U.S. Capitol Grounds, the Boston Park System, theBronx, Tompkins Square, the Campaign for theNiagara Reservation, MontRoyal, Montreal, and severalplanned communities andprivate residences. The edi-tors have included plans formany of these projects, butin most cases they are poorlyreproduced. This has been a problem with all seven vol-umes. One hopes the twolast volumes of the twelve-volume series devoted pri-marily to plans and drawingswill fare better.

At the end of the volumewe find Olmsted mostlyfreed from the turbulence ofNew York’s politics and tak-ing up residence in the qui-

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Buffalo park systems, reportson the site plan of thenation’s capitol, an architec-tural critique of the NewYork State capitol in Albany,several private estate com-missions, preservation initia-tives for Niagara Falls,suggestions for a resorthotel, and even an evaluationof the federal government’sReconstruction policy andcivil service reform.

The scale, complexity, andsignificance of many of theseprojects could occupy a fullcareer, but for Olmsted theywere less than a decade ofwork. This frenetic pacesorely tested his psychologi-cal and mental health. In let-ters to friends he wrote ofbeing “dilapidated” and “sodog tired I could hardly situp.” “A little exercise” set his“heart bouncing.” The addi-tional strain of confrontingthe politics and patronagesurrounding his work inCentral Park was especiallytrying. Two long confession-al ruminations on the vicis-situdes of work in the publicrealm in New York Cityround out the editorial selec-tions: the bitter, self-pub-lished catharsis “The Spoilsof the Park” and a series ofprivate journal fragmentsdealing with similar subjectmatter.

The volume contains a

less so when viewed in anineteenth-century context,surrounded by individuals of similar energy and ideal-ism. We meet again the fer-vent idealist, certain hisdesign work embodies thevalues of American democra-cy. Unwavering in his per-sonal integrity, he abhors thechicanery of political patron-age and is exasperated bythose who fail to grasp thedepth and nuances of hisconcept of urban parks. Heconstantly argues for the status of landscape architec-ture as a rigorous professionrequiring such specializedknowledge as site engineer-ing, planting design, aesthet-ics, design precedents, andthe ability to relate designform to social and individualneeds. His maturity andmastery as a designer aremanifest – a quick and deci-sive eye for the intrinsicqualities of a site, the abilityto weigh complex alterna-tives and choose the best,and the capacity to workeffectively at a wide range ofscales.

Olmsted was quite awareof his limitations as a writerand speaker. Responding toan 1877 invitation to lecturein Montreal, he remarked, “Icannot write in a popularway upon my subject and Ihave no gift for public speak-ing.” This rather Germanic

eter water of leafy Brookline,adopting the suburban lifehe believed to be “the idealmiddle landscape betweencity and countryside.” Hispsychological health is muchimproved and no longer isthere “a great noise” in hishead, and he feels lighter onhis feet. As he confides to hislifelong friend CharlesLoring Brace:

You can have no idea whata drag life had been to me for three years ormore. . . . I enjoy this sub-urban country expressionbeyond expression. . . . We have had great trialsand agitation in the pastyear but their result onthe whole has been withaltranquilizing. I am to turnsixty with two grandsons.

In the remaining thirteenyears of Olmsted’s career, ina new place with a newbeginning, even more out-standing work was yet tocome.

Yet another valuable addition to the Olmstedshelf, The Master List ofDesign Projects of the OlmstedFirm, 1857-1979, is a much-improved second edition ofa work published elevenyears ago. It is an indispens-able reference for scholars,lay persons, and preserva-tionists interested in the

its projects. Of special meritis “Researching an OlmstedLandscape” by Lawliss andMeier, a step-by-step guidethat also lists all availablearchives and their locationsand Web sites. This entry willprove especially helpful tolaypersons and preservation-ists. Excellent photographsand plans of representativeexamples of the firm’s workcomplement the essays.

The new editors havebeen wise to retain the veryuseful classification systemof the old edition devised byCharles E. Beveridge andCarolyn F. Hoffman. In brief,the system is typological andgeographical, dividing thematerial into fourteen cate-gories (parks, private estates,suburban communities,arboreta and gardens, etc.).Within each category theprojects are listed by state inalphabetical order, alongwith their job numbers. Atpresent it is necessary to visitthe archive at the FrederickLaw Olmsted NationalHistoric Site to access thismaterial, but eventually allthe documents will be avail-able online. Also, each typo-logical section includes abrief, helpful introduction bya leading Olmsted scholarplacing the designs in his-torical context.

This system is quick,informative, and compre-hensive. For example, I may

assembles the fragments ofthought embedded in hiscollected papers and notesthe extraordinary signifi-cance and range his projects,there emerges a powerfullegacy of design that speaksto the challenges of thetwenty-first century. Hereminds us the essence ofdesign is the giving of formto values. He affirms land-scape architecture as a jointendeavor with architects,engineers, planners, andother professionals. Heemphasizes meticulous,comprehensive, well-docu-mented site analysis and themelding of design form withhuman needs and the wel-fare of the natural environ-ment. He advocates thecreative interpretation ofdesign precedent to meetpresent challenges andinsists on staunch commit-ment to the welfare of thepublic realm in a democraticsociety. Finally, his vision ofpark systems reminds usthat one indispensable ele-ment of a vibrant, sociallyjust, and functional city is aninterconnected matrix ofparks, plazas, parkways, andother types of civic spaces.These excellent books unrolla scroll of remarkable designachievements and testify tothe scope of an enduringlegacy. – Reuben M. Rainey

work of Olmsted himself aswell as his firm, which con-tinued practice until 1979.For over a century Olmstedand his successors at theBrookline office produced aprodigious number of pro-jects – about 6,000 in all.These included site plans for700 public parks, parkways,and recreational facilities,350 subdivisions andplanned communities, 2,000private estates, 250 collegeand school plans, 100 hospi-tals and asylums, and 125commercial and industrialbuildings. Plans and corre-spondence for much of thiswork are housed in the officearchives. Unless you live in avery remote part of theUnited States, there is a goodchance that a design byOlmsted or his firm is near-by or at least once existed inyour vicinity. If you wish tolocate this work or perhapsengage in efforts to preserveit, this master list will per-form admirably.

This second edition,cosponsored by the NationalAssociation for OlmstedParks and the National ParkService’s Frederick LawOlmsted National HistoricSite, is a welcome metamor-phosis of the more minimal-ist earlier version. EditorsLucy Lawliss, CarolineLoughlin, and Lauren Meierhave added 1,000 new entriesand four new succinct andinformative essays on thehistory of the Olmsted firmand the scope and nature of

want to know if the Olmstedfirm designed any privateresidences in my hometown,Charlottesville, Virginia. Aquick glance at the privateestate category reveals thatbetween 1932 and 1937 thefirm produced a site plan forW.A. Rinehart, and that 27plans and related correspon-dence are available under jobnumber 09319. If I wish toresearch this project, I sim-ply set up an appointment atthe archive and make plansto journey to Brookline. Tosupplement my efforts, I willalso follow the advice of edi-tors Lawliss and Meier toconsult my local historicalsociety as well as the OlmstedResearch Guide Online(rediscov.com/olmsted). Thelatter will allow me to refer-ence additional materials inthe manuscript division ofthe Library of Congress.

Both of these recent pub-lications complement oneanother. Volume VII of theOlmsted papers is a fascinat-ing primary source revealingOlmsted’s innermostthoughts concerning someof his most enduring andsignificant design work. TheMaster List of Design Projectsof the Olmsted Firm leads usto the plans and correspon-dence relating to these pro-jects, as well as many othersby him and his successors.

Olmsted never wrote asystematic or comprehensivetreatise on his overall designtheory. However, when one

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in theVanishing Backstreets of a City TransformedBy Michael MeyerWalker & Company, 2008

All cities are palimpsests,landscapes on which themarks of time are constantlybeing inscribed and erased.Even a city’s topography andland forms, such as its hillsand bodies of water, cannotwithstand the relentless pas-sage of time and the actionsof subsequent generations ofinhabitants. Infrastructureand street patterns maychange at a slower rate thanthe structures that are con-stantly being erected, altered,and torn down as citiesrebuild themselves, but eventhey are subject to transfor-mation.

One of the most conspic-uous examples of urbantransformation today can beseen in Beijing. The 2008Olympics focused theworld’s attention on the dra-matic rapidity of this city’sseemingly overnight alter-ation. The confidence with which its governmentplanners are adding a West-ern-style inscription to thelatest layer of its palimpsestgives pause to those who seecities as amalgams of newand old, places where pastand present can coexist in harmony. China’s rapidmodernization due to itsrecent economic prosperityis clearly bringing a higher

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standard of living to manymillions of people. But atwhat social and environmen-tal cost? This is a criticalquestion for our times.

In The Last Days of OldBeijing: Life in the VanishingBackstreets of aCity Transformed,Michael Meyerwrites about thecountry’s ruth-lessly changedcapital city notmerely as aninformed out-side observerbut also assomeone withintimate knowl-edge gained by living insidehis subject. He first came toChina in 1995, as a PeaceCorps volunteer. For twoyears he taught in Neijiang, amid-size city located on abend in the Tuo River in thesouthwestern province ofSichuan. In 2003 he returnedto China and settled inBeijing where he became fas-cinated by the city’s vanish-ing traditional architectureand the social structure thatit represents. To master writ-ten Chinese, he spent a yearat Tsinghua University, usingcity-planning histories as his texts. Then he found tworooms for rent in a dilapi-dated courtyard of thehutong called Red Bayberryand Slanted Bamboo Street,in the venerable neighbor-

After it was announcedthat Beijing would host the2008 Olympics, the Handredoubled its efforts to erad-icate the city’s hutongs andrelocate their residents tohigh-rise apartments on theurban perimeter. Because the communist governmentowns the land, long-termlease arrangements withreal-estate developers havespurred the destruction ofmost old neighborhoodscloser in toward the centerand their replacement withcommercial buildings, shop-ping malls, and chain opera-tions. In this way Beijing is acquiring a cityscapewhere lanes and stall-linedstreets are rapidly giving wayto wide motorways andplazas anchoring banks andcorporate headquarters. Aseverywhere, the city hassprouted a plethora of inter-nationally familiar globalfranchises such as Starbucks,McDonald’s, and MarriottHotels. Signaling thisaggressive westernization,new names such as Invest-ment Plaza and CorporateSquare are being conferredon old places, while hutongslike Glazed Tile FactoryAntique Street, Prolong LifeStreet, and Red Bayberry and Slanted Bamboo Streetin Dazhalan have become anendangered species. At thesame time the government isaware of heritage as a touristcommodity, and thereforethe Hand spares some

city’s many eras from prehis-toric times to the present ina lively account of his life asa teacher and the lives ofthose he lived among. Helets his story emerge vividlyfrom the voices of his neigh-bors: the officiously solici-tous Widow, Recycler Wang,the Hans, who repair cellphones, Soldier Liu whoruns his family’s shaved noo-dle shop, and Miss Zhu, his Coal Lane Elementaryco-teacher. Anecdotally, hemakes the reader aware that an “urban corner,” theChinese euphemism forslum, can be a place where“you heard laughter and live-ly talk and occasionally, tearsand arguments, just like any-where else.” He says that incomparison with the newBeijing of detached high-riseapartments, “People treatedeach other with something Imissed the minute I set footoutside the hutong: civility.”

The longtime tenancy of the Widow in the govern-ment-owned courtyardhouse Meyer shares gives herunspoken authority over theother residents. She keepswalking into his apartmentwith bowls of steameddumplings saying, “Eat,Little Plumblossom!” Insidethe classroom with Miss Zhu(who longs to have the onechild she may bear under thecountry’s population-controlpolicy), he teaches the chil-dren of Coal Lane Elemen-

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hood of Dazhalan. Located just outside Front

Gate, the main opening inwhat was once the outer wallalong the city’s north-southaxis, Dazhalan, whichincludes 114 ancient lanes, or

hutongs, datesfrom the 1200s.In the seven-teenth centurythe neighbor-hood assumedits lively com-mercial charac-ter after theemperor for-bade theaters,artisans’ shops,teahouses,inns, restau-rants, brothels,

and other such establish-ments within the imperialconfines of the Inner City.Today a conglomeration ofsubdivided and badlydecayed mansions housing57,000 residents within halfof a square mile, Dazhalan isone of the densest popula-tion clusters in the world,sustained by a vibrant web of human connection.Unfortunately, it is also inthe process of beingdestroyed. For the Hand, asMeyer characterizes theimpersonal governmentalauthority that anonymouslypaints the character chai –raze – under the cover ofdarkness on the mud andbrick walls of its houses andshops, this ancient neighbor-hood is an affront to thecity’s image of itself as amajor contender in the racetoward modernization.

hutongs or architecturallyinteresting parts of them.But when restored, these areonly semblances of their for-mer selves, for their socialvibrancy has been drainedaway as their current occu-pants can no longer afford torent their old apartments.

To live in Dazhalan as itslone foreigner and not seemodd, it was necessary forMeyer to become an activemember of the community,which he did by talking his way into a job as a volun-teer teacher at Coal LaneElementary School. With theability to read the languageand speak colloquially, hecould both dig in historicalarchives and share in thelives of his fellow hutongdwellers as they went abouttheir daily business whilewaiting for the Hand tomark their shops and abodeswith the character chai.During his Peace Corps days,the Chinese name of HeroicEastern Plumblossom hadbeen conferred on himbecause his surname sound-ed like mai’er, the word for“sold son,” meaning a boythat had been auctioned offby his parents. His Dazhalanneighbors now nicknamedhim Little Plumblossom, andit was as Teacher Plum-blossom that he was knownin the classroom.

Meyer shifts back andforth between the grandsweep of Beijing’s historyand the quotidian details ofhis neighborhood and per-sonal relationships, embed-ding his summary of the

tary to read English from a Chinese primer featuring amischievous monkey calledMocky. They are supervisedby educational authoritieswith total jurisdiction overthe school curriculum. Theseofficials also provide songsencouraging patriotic rightthinking that Miss Zhu andMeyer must teach the chil-dren to sing.

On Red Bayberry andSlanted Bamboo StreetMeyer became friendly withhis neighbor Recycler Wang,who haggles with the otherneighbors over the amounthe is willing to pay for theirdiscarded rubbish and then,in turn, with the wholesalegarbage entrepreneurs ofTrash City who pay him aslightly marked-up price thatyields him a profit of a fewyen. Once Recycler Wanginvited Meyer to accompanyhim to Trash City. The dumpis organized as a series oflanes that are named accord-ing to the recyclables thatare bought and sold there.Navigating Plastic Bottles,Bottle Caps, Fan Blades, PaintBuckets, Sink Basins, Card-board, Musical Instruments,Bedsprings, Bicycle Frames,Bus Seats, Cooking OilBottles, Office Papers, andPillows, Recycler Wang andhis wife negotiate the bestprices they can get for whatthey have brought in theirdilapidated truck that day.Meyer notes that the nameof one of Trash City’s lanes isBeams from Old CourtyardHouses, thereby giving the

reader a sign of the times andan indication of the meagereconomic thread that will bebroken when Recycler Wangand other hutong residentsare relocated.

The modernizing ofBeijing that Meyer describesis not a singular phenome-non. In the four chapters inwhich he recounts the city’surban history, it is apparentthat the current transforma-tion is only the latest ofmany periods of construc-tion and alteration.

In 1271, a few years afterconquering China and estab-lishing the Mongol empire,Khubilai Khan founded thecapital of the Yuan dynastyon the site that would oneday become Beijing. He exca-vated the lake known as BeiHai, or Northern Sea, andcreated hunting preserves –today public parkland – surrounding it. Little else ofthis first imperial cityremains. After taking powerin 1403, the second Qingemperor, Yongle, createdwhat is now thought of asthe ancient city. Guided bygeomancy, Confucian sym-bolism, and cosmology, theimperial city planners creat-ed a hierarchical ordering ofspace in which three mas-sively walled enclosures – theInner City, the Imperial City,and the Forbidden City –were nested each within theother. This closely guardedtriple complex, still the heartof the capital, was centeredon a great north-south axis

punctuated by ceremonialgates. Just outside the gate of the Inner City – the outer-most enclosure – Yonglebuilt the Altar of Heavenflanked by two circular tem-ples, the Temple of Heavenand the Temple of Agricul-ture, or Hall of Prayer forGood Harvests. To the southof Front Gate he decreed the creation of Dazhalan as a commercial quarter.

During the reign ofJiajing (ruled 1522–1566),altars were raised to theEarth, Sun, and Moon at thecardinal points just outsidethe Inner City. At about thesame time a fourth wall wasbegun, only the southernportion of which was com-pleted. The Outer Citydefined by this wall – an areacontaining Dazhalan and theadjacent neighborhood ofFresh Fish Junction, a hutongdistrict where the currentpace of demolition is evenmore advanced – was there-fore a large rectangularappendage attached to thesouthern portion of the wallsof the Inner City. Today thecombined walls of the Innerand Outer City are gone, andin their place is the SecondRing Road. Beyond it are theThird and Fourth RingRoads, where the suburbanresidential towers for formerhutong residents are beingbuilt.

Forced relocation is not anew policy in Beijing. In

1648 when Qing emperorShunzhi wanted to turn theInner City into an ethnicenclave for Manchu admin-istrators, Han residents, justlike the residents of Dazha-lan today, were subject to acompensated eviction policy.And over the next two and a half centuries, Beijing sawthe usual transformationswrought by emperors, wars,and natural disasters as newimperial landmarks andpleasure gardens were builtand subsequently destroyedby edict, conquest, and fire.But it wasn’t until the twen-tieth century that the twinforces of politics and mod-ern technology all but eradi-cated what remained ofBeijing’s past.

In 1912 Sun Yat-sen’sNationalist Party took con-trol of the county and estab-lished the Republic of China.With this move toward anapparently more democraticsociety, the public wasallowed to tour the Imperialmonuments within theInner City and admitted forthe first time into theForbidden City. The throneroom became the PalaceMuseum, and the space adja-cent to the Altar to the Godof Land and Grain becameBeijing’s Central Park. Moatswere dredged, the city wallwas pierced by roads in sev-eral places, and trolley tracks were built around theperimeter of the old wall.Electric lights and macadampavement appeared, and thebicycle became a common

mode of transportation. ButDazhalan remained in a time warp. Meyer conjuresup the neighborhood then as “a procession of profes-sions, including barbers,china menders, lamplighters,herbalists, toy makers,florists, fortune-tellers, magi-cians, and bear baiters” navi-gating the crowded narrowhutong on foot and in rick-shaws – as is still the casetoday.

After Beijing was overrunby Japanese invaders in 1937,the occupation governmentbuilt roads inside the OldCity but located its own resi-dential quarters in a newdistrict. Westerners stayedon in the colonial sector,romantically attuned to thecity’s beguiling charms.Their idyll ended for good in1949 when Communistforces defeated the National-ists. Simultaneous with thefounding of the new People’sRepublic of China, ChairmanMao Zedong proclaimed thatindustrial production wouldbe the primary goal of thecommunist regime and thatthe old hutong neighbor-hoods of Beijing wouldbecome a sea of smoke-stacks. The Chinese architectand planner Liang Sicheng –whom Meyer met with sever-al times and quotes at somelength – questioned thetransformation of the capitalinto a Chinese Manchesterin a country where there areso many other urban centers.

Liang soon learned, however,that Mao’s regime was if anything more authoritarianthan its imperial predeces-sors. By the mid-1950sBeijing could boast of beingthe home of 149 of China’s164 types of industry includ-ing petrochemicals, rubberproducts, plastic, pig iron,power generators, woolencloth, cars, color televisions,internal combustion engines,washing machines, refrigera-tors, sewing machines, andbeer.

Mao declared that the OldCity “completely serves feu-dalism and the imperial era”and that the eradication of this taint was one of themandates of communism.Spurred on by Soviet plan-ners, much of the Inner Citywas altered to serve as gov-ernmental headquarters. Theremaining parts of the wallthat once enclosed the InnerCity were deemed politicallyincorrect. The People’s Dailyexhorted people who lovedthe Party to “use their handsto destroy – you pull down apiece of stone, who can standby idly? ‘A single idiot canmove a mountain,’ so shouldcitizens of every district helppull down the wall.” The onlypart of the outer wall thatwas left standing was thehistoric Front Gate’s twintowers. Inside the FrontGate, facing the Inner City’sGate of Heavenly Peace(Tian’anmen), Mao built thelargest urban square in theworld, now expanded to fiftyacres with the capacity tohold a crowd of six hundred

thousand. Only the collapseof the Great Leap Forward in1958 spared the hutongdwellings from being eradi-cated. They were simply leftto deteriorate.

Further erosion of thecity’s imperial heritageaccompanied Mao’s GreatProletarian CulturalRevolution of 1966. The lastremaining intact gate in thecity wall came down in 1969to enable the construction of the Second Ring Road. Inspite of his earlier forcedconfession of the error of hisopinions, Liang was labeled“a piece of contemptible dog shit” for protesting thedestruction of his city’sarchitectural patrimony.Although rehabilitated afterthe Cultural Revolution, hisplan for a progressive citywith a protected past wentunheeded; it soon becameabundantly clear that urbanplanning in China was stillin the hands of authoritarianofficials and that there wouldbe as little transparency as in imperial times. Today“Progress” remains the Party line, and protesters arereduced to bargaining overthe terms of resettlement.

The fate of the hutong res-idents in modernizingBeijing prompts reflectionon all urban palimpsests astestaments to changing cul-tural values and systems ofgovernance over time. In1998, when Meyer was still

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teaching in the northwestpart of the city, he observedthat a nearby farming villagehad been plowed under tomake way for a high-techresearch park. Noticing threepits dug in the now bareearth, he introduced himselfto an archaeologist from theCultural Relics Bureau whotold him, “I don’t have muchtime. These will all be buriednext week.”

The archaeologist hadbeen collecting artifactsfrom what he surmised to betombs of a Han dynasty settlement. He said that thegovernment-sponsoreddeveloper had promised tobuild a museum to displaythe two-thousand-year-oldpottery and tools discoveredon the site. Wryly, Meyerremarks, “It never did. Nowit is filled with identical rowsof walk-up apartment build-ings. They are made fromcement and painted bone-white – ossuaries for a latergeneration to exhume.”

Meyer does not see thecurrent reinvestment in theurban core to be contextuallybeneficial. In one of theirconversations, the architectLiang characterized the“starchitecture” of Beijingand so many other present-day cities as “objects” discon-nected from their surround-ings. These architecturalicons as well as the uniformhigh-rise apartment build-ings that are replacing the courtyard houses of thehutongs stand in isolation.Deprived of street life, their

environs are vulnerable tocrime. However, the issuethat Meyer wants his readersto face is not just the erasureof an architecturally historicand socially vibrant part ofthe Beijing palimpsest or thecost in human terms ofdestroying the homes of itspresent hutong populationbut rather the ways in whichtoday’s developer-drivenurban planning is impover-ishing human life every-where.

No one would argue thatthe coal-burning stoves con-tributing to the city’s pall ofpolluted air are better thancentral heating or that publiclatrines are preferable toindoor plumbing. What isbeing lost in Beijing andother globalizing cities is,besides their individualidentities, the familiarity ofneighbors who recognizeeach other as they mingle onthe street or in the market.Meyer, who has read JaneJacobs’s Death and Life ofGreat American Cities, wantsus to see that ripping apartthe physical and social fabricof place and reweaving itwith coarse indifference tothe form and texture of whatmakes urban life rewarding –a vibrant mixture of com-mercial and residential uses,neighborly face-to-faceencounters on a daily basis,easy access to work, and lessdependency on bureaucraticgovernmental agencies – is,

in a word, insane. In sum, heis asking why, in its racetoward industrial and com-mercial hegemony, shouldChina repeat the sins of theWest in copycat fashion?What is the toll that is beingtaken not only on Chinesesociety but also on the healthof the planet if a country solarge and populous contin-ues on this present course?

History never reversesitself, and the economy andculture of China are chang-ing irrevocably. To assert itsreal greatness as a nationChina should be accommo-dating this process by build-ing more humane andlivable cities that mix tech-nological improvementswith local customs, indige-nous planning forms, andbuilding technologies, whileinstituting effective controlson industrial pollution. Butwithout similar actions onthe part of other countriesthis is not likely to happen.The real question to ask our-selves is why isn’t the coun-try that has been such anunfortunate role model forthe whole world in terms ofobject architecture, heedlesssprawl, automobile owner-ship per capita, and overallenvironmental degradationnot engaging in leadershipby example. Perhaps in thesedawning days of an adminis-tration committed to changewe can have the audacity tohope that American citiescan be transformed into bet-ter planning models for therest of the world. – Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Magnificent Buildings,Splendid GardensBy David R. Coffin. Edited byVanessa Bezemer SellersPrinceton Department of Art& Archaeology in associationwith the Princeton UniversityPress, 2008

In April 1971,eleven yearsafter the publi-cation of hisgroundbreak-ing study TheVilla D’Este atTivoli, David R.Coffin orga-nized the firstconference atthe newly insti-tuted Gardenand LandscapeStudies program at Dumbar-ton Oaks in Washington,D.C., modestly titled “TheItalian Garden.” In a lateressay, Coffin described notonly the limited character ofpublications on the subjectat that time, but also howdifficult it was to find pan-elists for the conferenceitself. His many phone callsand letters produced onlyfour participants, oneAmerican scholar and threeEuropeans; there were sim-ply no other scholars work-ing on gardens.

Coffin invited as arespondent to the papers SirGeoffrey Jellicoe, the promi-nent British landscape archi-tect and co-author with John

Shepherd of Italian Gardensof the Renaissance, publishedthirty-six years earlier.Jellicoe’s presence highlight-ed the revolution going onin the field, since he repre-sented an earlier generationof landscape architects whohad focused on garden plans

supplementedwith snippetsof largelyfamiliar histo-ry and legend.Predictably hewas irked bythe newapproaches heheard, whichfocused onmeaning andsocial and cul-tural context,

instead of on what he pro-claimed to be most impor-tant about Italian gardens:their design. For youngeracademics, however, both theconference and the subse-quent volume of its proceed-ings, which Coffin editedand published, representedthe exciting future directionof garden studies.

Widely credited as one ofthe founders of the new aca-demic discipline of gardenhistory, Coffin approachedItalian Renaissance gardenswith the full apparatus of thediscipline of art history. He published five books andthe edited volume on theDumbarton Oaks confer-ence, as well as numerousarticles and book reviews.His last book, MagnificentBuildings, Splendid Gardens,

assembles twenty of his mostsignificant articles andessays on Italian Renaissanceand later architecture andgardens, and on English gar-dens of the seventeenththrough the nineteenth cen-tury. Produced over fiftyyears, 1951–2001, the articleswere chosen by Coffin him-self and published after hisdeath through the efforts ofhis former student, VanessaBezemer Sellers, herself ascholar of seventeenth-cen-tury Dutch gardens. The volume stands as witness tothe accomplishments of this prolific scholar andreflects his many interests.

Coffin’s academic andintellectual life centeredaround Princeton, where hewas both an undergraduateand a graduate student, andsubsequently a faculty mem-ber from 1949. There hestudied with Erwin Panofsky,the German émigré scholarwho from 1935 was professorat the Institute for AdvancedStudy in Princeton andtaught at the university. Cof-fin’s moving tribute toPanofsky (1968), which isincluded in this volume,praises him as “the greatesthumanist.” The legendaryPanofsky is most associatedwith iconography – the study of subject matter ormeaning in works of art andthe ways in which culturalideas resonate in images.Profoundly influenced by hismentor, Coffin was the first

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to recognize that gardens,like painting and architec-ture, have intellectual con-tent and culturally specificmeanings; he was also one ofthe first scholars to investi-gate those meanings.

Scholarship resembles agood mystery story. Thescholar tracks down clues –bits of evidence – and out ofthese clues constructs a nar-rative, whether about theattribution, meaning, orlarger cultural significanceof the object of inquiry.Departing from the limitedinformation and intereststhat characterized previousstudies on Italian gardens,Coffin sought a great rangeof evidence. He is famous forhis emphasis on facts, butwhat is really novel in hisearly writing on gardens isnot that he gets the factsright but that he gathers awhole new kind of evidence.

Evidence, for Coffin,began with documents.Many of the documents hesought are housed inarchives in Italy. Handwrittendocuments from the earlymodern period are some-times barely decipherable,especially those in Italian, asLatin was more suited to finepenmanship. Coffin spentlong hours searching out therecords of notaries docu-menting payments to artistsand architects, property-saledeeds, and other legal mat-ters. He also made great useof letters and avvisi – hand-written newsletters by a

private agent sent to hispatron in another city. Coffinuncovered a cache of suchdocuments in the StateArchives of Modena duringhis study of the Villa d’Este,which allowed him to deter-mine the dating and attribu-tion of fountains and tocompile a complete buildinghistory.

Coffin also unearthedclues in published texts,especially early guide booksand travel journals, as bothgenres gained popularity inthe later sixteenth centurywhen Italy became theacknowledged cultural capi-tal of Europe and bothItalians and foreigners beganto tour the country with gar-dens prominently on theirlist of sites to see. The wordsof some of those contempo-raries form the substance ofa brief essay in MagnificentBuildings, “The Gardens ofVenice,” one of his later pub-lications (2001). From thevisitors quoted by Coffin, welearn that Venice was filledwith lovely gardens as earlyas the late fifteenth century.We also discover how theywere planted, organized, anddecorated with fountains,and how they played animportant role in entertain-ing. Titian, the most famousVenetian artist, had a gardenoverlooking the lagoon,where he invited otherartists and intellectuals to

feast on delicious food andsophisticated literary conver-sation.

Documents themselvesare idle clues – finding themis only the first step. Theyneed to be checked againsteach other, analyzed, andquestioned in order to con-struct a larger story. An earlyessay in this volume, “JohnEvelyn at Tivoli” (1956), con-cerns the visit of the Englishdiarist and horticulturalist toTivoli. Individuals, evenlearned ones like Evelyn,commonly copied descrip-tions from another traveljournal or guidebook ratherthan recording what theyactually observed, or addedonly limited original com-ments. To determine whatwas only planned, but neverexecuted, or what may havebeen altered, Coffin in thiscase compares Evelyn’s diaryentry with both printedviews and early guidebooks.

Engraved views of gar-dens were increasingly pop-ular from the late sixteenthcentury, but even moreimportant for reconstructingthe original state of Renais-sance gardens are the viewsof villas that were commonlypainted inside the villasthemselves. These may indi-cate a state before laterchanges or losses, or alter-nately, original intentionsthat were not carried out. In a relatively recent article,“The Self-Image of theRoman Villa during theRenaissance” (1998), Coffinbrings together and analyzesa number of these painted

views and explains their sig-nificance as images of position and wealth, not justchronicles of the site.

Beyond gatheringdescriptions, views, and con-temporary accounts tounderstand Renaissance gar-dens, Coffin also embarkedearly in his career on a sus-tained study of one of thearchitects most deeplyinvolved in creating originalgardens, Pirro Ligorio, thedesigner of the sixteenth-century Villa d’Este at Tivoli,near Rome. A humanist withwide-ranging interests andabilities, energy in abun-dance, and an encyclopedicknowledge of ancient arti-facts (which he recorded intwo unpublished manu-scripts), Ligorio worked foran influential cardinal beforehe was appointed papalarchitect. After his ambitionscollided with rivalries at thepapal court, the architect andantiquarian ended his careerin the employ of the duke ofFerrara. Ligorio’s erudition,his belief in the importanceof facts, his curiosity, and hisactivity as supplier of intel-lectual content for paintings,architecture, and gardens,made him a fitting subjectfor Coffin. One of the arti-cles in this volume, “PirroLigorio and the Nobility ofthe Arts” (1964), presents thedisillusioned and bitterarchitect’s reflections on hisown time. Ligorio castigated

those (including Michelan-gelo) who did not follow themodel of the ancients andignored the principle ofdecorum or appropriateness.This and several other stud-ies did not exhaust Coffin’sinterest in the multifacetedsixteenth-century figure. A monograph, Pirro Ligorio:Artist, Architect, and Antiquar-ian, was published posthu-mously in 2004.

Taking to heart Panofsky’slessons about iconography,the study of meaning, Coffindeduced the existence of an iconographic programdevised by Ligorio at theVilla d’Este at Tivoli. Cluescame from the garden’sfountain imagery, and fromcontemporary writings aboutthe villa. The brilliance inCoffin’s study was not justuncovering the meaningitself, but also in identifyinghow meaning emerged bymeans of design, plantings,and sculpted imagery as thevisitor progressed throughthe garden. The garden joinstwo themes, both common atthe time but both given par-ticular relevance at this site –a garden as a unique mar-riage of art and nature andits ability to convey the storyof a mythical hero – in thiscase, Hercules, the ancientdeity of Tivoli and legendaryancestor of the Este family.The Villa d’Este was a workof art carved out of the rawmaterials of its natural set-ting, the land terraced atgreat expense and the abun-dant springs and rivers of

the region harnessed intospectacular and ingeniousfountains. At the same time, its vertical axis, whichbranched into a Y at thesteep upper garden, evokedthrough design and statuarythe mythical Garden of theHesperides and Hercules’schoice of virtue over plea-sure – a choice that ultimate-ly won him the goldenapples of the Hesperides. Byimplication, the wisdom of Hercules was replicated byhis descendant, CardinalIppolito d’Este, in creatingthis garden.

Coffin was also in thevanguard in seeking mean-ing in eighteenth-centuryEnglish gardens. He oncetold me that it was the expe-rience of seeing gardens inEngland during his war ser-vice that originally inspiredhis academic interest inthem – although a return tothose particular gardenscame to fruition only a halfcentury later in his book TheEnglish Garden: Meditationand Memorial, published in1994. In “The Elysian Fieldsof Rousham” (1986), Coffinargues for a unified meaningof the Oxfordshire sitethrough the statues, gardenstructures, and topography,within the framework of thenatural garden and the cultural and philosophicalcontext of the eighteenthcentury. In landscape design-

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er William Kent’s work hefinds an evocation of theclassical theme of the earthlyparadise, interpreted inRenaissance gardens as theGolden Age, Parnassus, orthe Garden of the Hesperi-des, but at Rousham acquir-ing the elegiac associationsof the Elysian Fields, theHomeric paradise for thevirtuous.

Coffin’s habit of cullingevidence from a wide varietyof historical sources andsubjecting it to rigorousinquiry was part of the lega-cy he passed on to those whostudied gardens with him.He collected the fruits of hisarchival and library research-es in small blue notebooks,assembled by topic, added toand mined throughout hislife, and remarkably, sharedwith his students. Coffin alsokept his comprehensive –some might say obsessive –bibliographic card file in thelibrary, where it was accessi-ble to all. This was a particu-larly valuable resource in thedays before there were com-puters, electronic databases,or even a photocopymachine in the art library.

In May, 2003, five monthsbefore his death, VanessaSellers organized a celebrato-ry dinner for Coffin and hisformer students at ProspectHouse on the PrincetonUniversity campus. Many ofus fondly recalled Coffin’sblue notebooks at that din-ner, and our astonishmentthat they were entrusted tous. But this enormous gen-erosity, which launched our

own work and spared usmuch labor, was typical. Itwas at this dinner thatSellers announced to Coffinthe gift of this volume of hisessays. In the years that fol-lowed, many of the studentsat the dinner, as well as oth-ers who could not attend,contributed to MagnificentBuildings, Splendid Gardens bywriting brief commentarieson the selections. (These arepublished at the back of thebook and might best be readas prefaces to the essaysthemselves.)

Unassuming in both per-sonality and scholarship,Coffin was as devoted toundergraduate teaching andadministration as he was tohis own research. His gradu-ate students, as well as someundergraduates, remainedlifelong friends, and theirwork on gardens – in theTuscan and Roman Renais-sance, in eighteenth-centuryFrance and England, in sev-enteenth-century Holland –is a part of his legacy. At thecelebratory dinner in 2003,Coffin was presented with abooklet of reminiscencesfrom his former students. Init Richard Betts, architecturalhistorian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign, wrote, “He inspiredthe highest standards ofexacting scholarship whiletreating his students withkindness and respect.” Hiswords speak for all of us. – Claudia Lazzaro

Memorial

Wilhelmina Jashemski (1910-2007)

Wilhelmina Mary Feemster Jashemski, the pio-neering archaeologist and historian of ancientRoman gardens, has died at age 97. Duringdecades of work at Pompeii and other sitesburied by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79

CE, she studied the many and various gardens preserved there and brought them vividly to life for schoolchildren andscholars alike. Her work animated our vision of the Romanperistyle garden by supplying evidence for the mythical associ-ations of its plants, the delicious meals served under its pergo-las, the daily offerings made in its wall shrines, and the gamesplayed amidst its art and fountains. Much of this new evidencewas a result of the scientific techniques she developed withher husband, Stanley Jashemski, a noted physi-cist, and a team of specialists; together,the couple and their colleaguesestablished a new discipline, garden archaeology. In 1977 the American Society of Land-scape Architects awardedJashemski the BradfordWilliams Medal, which shedisplayed proudly on a book-case in her study, and in 1996the Archaeological Institute ofAmerica gave her a GoldMedal, its highest honor.

Wilhelmina Feemster wasborn in York, Nebraska, in1910. In her memoirs, she recalls how her mother, of Swiss andGerman descent, vainly tried to cultivate the northernEuropean garden flowers of her ancestors on the hot Nebraskaplains. With her daughter’s help, she stubbornly persisted; per-severance would become a hallmark of Wilhelmina’s characteras well. A favorite family photograph from those years recordsWilhelmina at about 11 years old, in a cotton dress, ankleboots, and neat braids, holding a plump, ripe tomato from herown garden.

Her father, a mathematics professor at York University,attached great importance to a classical education for hisdaughter. She recalls first learning about archaeology in TheLast Days of Pompeii and reading under her covers for hourspast lights-out. Her fascination with the way of life that had

been preserved there for millennia by the tragedy of the erup-tion ultimately led her to study history at York College. Shewent on to earn an M.A. in ancient history at the University ofNebraska and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Shealways considered herself a Nebraskan, however, in spite of alife spent far from the plains. The University of Nebraska pre-sented her with an honorary Doctor of Humanities in 1980,and in 2004 she was honored by the city of York and the Stateof Nebraska with a citation and exhibition of her life’s contri-butions.

At the University of Chicago she studied Roman law withJakob A. O. Larsen, completing her dissertation in 1942. AtChicago she also met and married her fellow graduate studentStanley Jashemski. Subsequently they both found posts in theWashington, D.C., area, and settled permanently there. In 1946,Wilhelmina joined the history department at the University ofMaryland and developed her dissertation into a well-receivedbook on Republican Rome, The Origins and History of the

Proconsular and Propraetorian Imperium to 27 B.C.Then, tenured and in her forties, she

pondered her next project.One morning, while she and

Stanley were enjoying breakfastin their own garden in SilverSpring, Maryland, he pro-posed the idea of studyingthe gardens of ancient Rome.

Wilhelmina later confessedher trepidation in raising this

delightful, and therefore possiblyfrivolous, idea with her mentor,

Professor Larsen. She recounted watch-ing with bated breath as he paced along his

bookshelves, pulling down volumes and thumbing throughindices. Eventually he turned and pronounced the topic to be not only of great importance but also barely touched by scholars. Ancient history, he felt, had too long focused on warstrategy, law, and political history. Gardens would shed newlight on Roman culture.

After several years of research with the ancient texts,Wilhelmina traveled to Europe for the first time with Stanleyduring her sabbatical in 1955 to see what the archaeologicalsites might reveal of ancient gardens. She assumed that theexcavation reports were already published and that she wouldquickly gather the evidence into a book entitled Gardens of the

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Stanley and

Wilhelmina Jashemski.

Roman Empire. A second trip, in 1957, brought the couple toPompeii and Herculaneum. Here she met the distinguishedRussian scholar Dr. Tatiana Warscher, who had worked in theancient city since 1911, photographing the buildings with theirgarden peristyles. Knowing the extent of the unpublished evidence, Warscher predicted, “My dear girl, your first bookwill be on the gardens of Pompeii.” Warscher was correct. Thus in 1961, at an age when many field archaeologists arewinding down, Jashemski began the systematic excavations ofPompeian gardens that she would continue over the next 25 years. Eventually she added gardens outside the region aswell, at Hadrian’s Villa and Thurburbo Maius in Tunisia.

The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius had covered Pompeii in alayer of volcanic ash, or lapilli, small pebbles of pumice stone.As the trees and shrubs gradually decayed beneath the thickblanket of ash, the lapilli sifted into the cavities left behind.Jashemski employed a technique that had been developed tovisualize the bodies of the human and animal victims of theeruption, in which a cavity is cleaned of the distinctive lapilliand braced with reinforcing wire. Plaster or cement is thenpoured into the cavity and allowed to set, creating a cast in theform of the original contents of the void. In many instances, acast of roots allows botanists to identify the plant that origi-nally grew there, or to narrow down the range of possibilities.

Stanley Jashemski, who always joined his wife on site as herstaff draftsman and photographer, brought his scientific perspective to other kinds of evidence. Carbonized plants andcharcoal were studied with scanning electron microscopes;pollen was sampled; the soils were analyzed; and zoologistsand entomologists examined faunal and insect remains. Theevidence was exciting, and the picture of Pompeii’s cultivatedurban landscape grew, along with a new understanding ofdaily life in the residential gardens, temple groves, commercialnurseries and vineyards, and luxury villas.

By the time of her retirement from the University of Mary-land in 1979, Jashemski had excavated and/or documentednearly six hundred gardens buried by Vesuvius. Decades ofjournal articles culminated in a spectacularly illustrated book,The Gardens of Pompeii: Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed byVesuvius, with a second volume containing a catalog followingsome years later. For many academics, this would have been aculminating achievement, but for Wilhelmina Jashemski it wasbut the beginning of the next phase of her career. She stillenvisioned the work at Pompeii within the larger context ofthe Roman world, and so she turned to her original goal ofbringing to light the gardens from around the empire.

Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s famed landscape research cen-ter in Washington, D.C., was the locus of much of this effortover the following decades. Working initially with the Directorof Landscape Studies, Elisabeth MacDougall, Jashemski hosteda conference in May 1979, “Ancient Roman Gardens,” to seewhether what had been learned from Pompeii could illumi-nate garden sites around the Roman Empire. The conferenceat Dumbarton Oaks attracted not only archaeologists and his-torians but also landscape architects, horticulturalists, scien-tists, and others. It is widely regarded as marking the momentof emergence of a new discipline. Many archaeologiststhought for the first time of looking for garden remains attheir own sites, and I as a young student became determinedto devote my career to this research. Wilhelmina encouragedme not to join her at Pompeii, as I had hoped she would, butto see what ancient gardens I might unearth elsewhere. As apromising beginning, that day I met Professor Barry Cunliffeof Oxford University who discussed his discoveries at theRoman villa of Fishbourne in England with me. He wouldlater become my supervisor.

In 1982 Wilhelmina and Stanley’s remarkable 37-year col-laboration came to end with his unexpected death. Whilepushing ahead with the excavations at Pompeii, Hadrian’sVilla, and Thuburbo Maius and promoting garden archaeol-ogy, Wilhelmina worked with their close friend Frederick G.Meyer of the National Arboretum to honor Stanley with thepublication of A Natural History of Pompeii (2002), which detailsthe scientific research the Jashemskis had undertaken over the years. The couple’s partnership at Pompeii was recognizedin 2005 with the creation of the Stanley and WilhelminaJashemski Lecture sponsored by the Archaeological Institute ofAmerica, offered annually in Washington, D.C., on a Romangarden topic.

Shortly before Stanley’s death, the Jashemskis discussed thecreation of a “garden room” off Wilhelmina’s study. When itwas completed a decade later, she would receive colleagues andguests from around the world there to share news, books, anddiscoveries over tea or luncheons of chicken sandwiches orWaldorf salad. At Christmas, her home and tree were decorat-ed with hundreds of dolls brought by these guests from theirtravels. Although long past retirement, she mentored threenew generations of young garden archaeologists, several ofwhom stayed with her regularly to work on her projects withDumbarton Oaks. Serving as a consulting advisor there,

Wilhelmina worked with its directors of landscape studies,especially Michel Conan during his tenure from 2000 to 2008,to make the institution the foremost center for the develop-ment of garden archaeology – not only of ancient Roman gar-dens but also of other gardens of other times and places. Forthose of us who worked closely with her in the last twentyyears, Wilhelmina’s garden room was the intellectual salon forthe continuing development of the discipline of gardenarchaeology.

Wilhelmina Jashemski’s greatest effort and perhaps ulti-mately her most important contribution is her posthumousGardens of the Roman Empire, the 56-year project that began herexplorations of gardens in 1951 and to which she returned in 1988. Because so many archaeologists, myself included, hadbegun to excavate gardens and ancient plant remains, shewanted to gather all of the new evidence in a catalog and vol-ume of interpretative essays. As part of this effort, she and Iput together a conference in 1995 at the University of Pennsyl-vania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at whichscholars and members of the public learned of an astonishingvariety of gardens that had been discovered around the Medi-terranean and Europe since the Ancient Roman Gardens symposium, sixteen years before. The conference was followedin 2003 by a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks to review theimportance of the findings. Since then, the project has collect-ed nearly 2,000 sites of Roman gardens – many at Pompeii andHerculaneum – and Cambridge University Press has agreed to publish this research.

As Wilhelmina entered her nineties and could leave homeless often, the scholarly world came to her. Fortified by herNebraskan persistence, she worked daily in the garden roomto complete the manuscript with the help of an assistant, for-mer students, friends, neighbors, and a team of colleagues. At the same time, she insisted on mastering the constant newdevelopments in internet technology so that she could stay in touch with her colleagues around the world. The volume’sprogress and the constant arrival of new discoveries for thecatalog delighted her daily. She died with the manuscript ather side on the morning of Christmas Eve, a year ago, but herlegacy of scholarship and mentoring scholars has ensured that this monumental achievement will soon be available toall. – Kathryn Gleason

Author’s note: Some of the information from this essay is drawn fromWilhelmina Jashemski’s unpublished memoirs, which she assembledwith the generous assistance of Professor Emeritus Clopper Almon of the University of Maryland. I would also like to thank her executor,Henry Ferry, for permission to use this material and for providingdetails.

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Awards

2009 David R. CoffinPublication GrantThe Foundation forLandscape Studies is proudto announce the winners ofthe 2009 David R. CoffinPublication Grant, which isgiven for the purpose ofresearch and publication of a book that advances schol-arship in the field of gardenhistory and landscape studies.

Lawrence HalprinA Life Spent ChangingPlaces: An AutobiographyPublisher: University ofPennsylvania Press

This book is an autobiogra-phy by one of the world’sleading landscape architects,environmental planners, andurban design innovators.

John Dixon HuntThe Venetian City Garden:Place, Typology, andPerceptionPublisher: Birkhäuser

This book is a history of theVenetian garden as a repre-sentation of the city’s uniquecultural and environmentalconditions.

Janet Mendelsohn andChristopher Wilson, EditorsMy Kind of AmericanLandscape: J. B. JacksonSpeaksPublisher: Center forAmerican Places

This publication is made upof a DVD documentary, abook of essays, and a portfo-lio of images. It provides a composite portrait of theteachings, writings, draw-

ings, and photographs of the cultural geographer JohnBrinckerhoff Jackson.

Judith K. MajorThe Evolution of aLandscape Critic: MarianaGriswold Van RensselaerPublisher: University ofVirginia Press

This book is the first full-length study of the artist,architect, critic, historian,and journalist MarianaGriswold Van Rensselaer’swritings on landscape gardening.

Contributors

Paula Deitz is editor of TheHudson Review, a magazineof literature and the artspublished in New York City.As a cultural critic, shewrites about art, architecture,and landscape design fornewspapers and magazineshere and abroad. Of Gardens,a collection of her essays,will be published in the nearfuture by the University ofPennsylvania Press.

Kathryn Gleason, Ph.D., isassociate professor of land-scape architecture at CornellUniversity. A specialist onthe archaeology of ancientRoman landscape architec-ture, she has excavated gardens around the Mediter-ranean, currently at Stabia(near Pompeii) and at Petra,Jordan. She is coeditor

with Naomi F. Miller of TheArchaeology of Garden andField (University of Pennsyl-vania Press, 1994), and execu-tive editor of Gardens of the Roman Empire by the lateWilhelmina Jashemski(Cambridge University Press,forthcoming).

Claudia Lazzaro, Ph.D., is pro-fessor of the history of art atCornell University. Amongher extensive publicationson Italian Renaissance villasand gardens is The ItalianRenaissance Garden: From theConventions of Planting,Design, and Ornament to theGrand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Central Italy (1990).With Roger J. Crum she edited Donatello Among theBlackshirts: History andModernity in the VisualCulture of Fascist Italy (2005),which includes her ownessay, “Politicizing a NationalGarden Tradition: TheItalianness of the ItalianGarden in Fascist Italy.”

John A. Pinto, Ph.D., teachesin the Department of Artand Archaeology at Princeton

University, where he offerscourses on Renaissance andBaroque architecture and thehistory of garden and land-scape design. Together withWilliam L. MacDonald hepublished Hadrian’s Villa andIts Legacy (1995). He is cur-rently finishing a book enti-tled Speaking Ruins, whichexplores architects, archaeol-ogy, and antiquity in eigh-teenth-century Rome.

Reuben M. Rainey, Ph.D., isWilliam Stone WeedonProfessor Emeritus in theSchool of Architecture at the University of Virginia.He is a former chair of theDepartment of LandscapeArchitecture and the authorof a wide range of studies onnineteenth- and twentieth-century American landscapearchitecture. His most recentbook, coauthored with J. C.Miller, is Modern PublicGardens: Robert Royston andthe Suburban Park (2006). Heis also coexecutive producerof GardenStory, a ten-episodedocumentary for public television.

23

David Coffin surrounded by his

Princeton colleagues and former

students at the tribute and reunion

held in his honor on May 16, 2003,

at Prospect House on the Princeton

campus. Celebrating Dr. Coffin’s

forty-year career as an architectural

historian specializing in the history

of landscape design are, left to

right: Lydia Soo, Patricia Fortini

Brown, Meredith Gill, Vanessa

Bezemer Sellers, Barbara Paca, Teri

Noel Towe, Edward S. Harwood,

David Coffin, Pierre du Prey, Claudia

Lazzaro, John Pinto, Richard J.

Betts, David van Zanten, Tracy

Erlich, Graham Smith, Betsy

Rosasco, David Gobel, John M.

Schnorrenberg, and Richard Turner.

Volume iv, Number iiSpring 2009

Publisher:Foundation for Landscape Studies

Board of Directors:Vincent BuonannoKenneth I. HelphandRobin KarsonNancy NewcombTherese O’MalleyJohn A. PintoReuben M. RaineyFrederic Rich, ChairmanElizabeth Barlow RogersMargaret Sullivan

Editor: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

Associate Editor: Alice Truax

Assistant Editor: Margaret Sullivan

Copy-editor:Margaret Oppenheimer

Designer: Skeggs Design

Contributors:Paula DeitzKathryn GleasonClaudia LazzaroJohn A. PintoReuben M. Rainey

For more information about the Foundation for Landscape Studies, visitwww.foundationforlandscapestudies.org, or contactrogerseb@aol.com.

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