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Presenting Nature
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Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)
Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)
Western Field Office
(1927-1932)
Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)
State Parks
(1933-1942)
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Presenting Nature:
The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942 |
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II. ORIGINS OF A DESIGN ETHIC FOR NATURAL PARKS (continued)
THE AMERICAN PARK MOVEMENT (continued)
CHARLES W. ELIOT, JR.
Charles W. Eliot, Jr., a Boston landscape architect who had worked in the Olmsted office, was a pioneer in developing a methodology for preserving regional character and outstanding natural features and for developing and managing scenic reservations. Eliot defended the preservation of a stand of virgin trees and presented a plan for conserving scenic areas in an article, "Waverly Oaks," printed in Garden and Forest in February 1890. His argument resulted in the formation of the Trustees of Public Reservations in Massachusetts in 1891 and state legislation in 1893 that established the Metropolitan Park System around Boston, the first such system in the country, which included parks of natural scenic character such as Blue Hills and Middlesex Fells. [46]
Highly prizing regional character and scenic values, Eliot was greatly concerned with the development of vistas within parks and series of parks connected by natural systems such as rivers and meadows. Eliot advocated clearing vegetation to reveal and maintain scenic vistas that expressed regional character and united disparate geographical features. Eliot's understanding of vista and regional character had considerable influence on the landscape design of national parks, which often covered many thousands of acres, great variations in landform, and unified systems of mountains and valleys.
Eliot was strongly influenced by Prince von Puckler Muskau's theories and his naturalistic pleasure ground at Muskau, Germany. which Eliot had visited in the early 1890s. Von Puckler-Muskau summarized his philosophy: "Wherever Nature has herself glorified a country. and made a picture bounded only by the horizon. . . . we should content ourselves with laying out good roads, to make the fine points more accessible, and here and there the cutting of a few trees, to open vistas which Nature has left closed." Eliot was also influenced by his own formative experience at Mount Desert Island in Maine, his affiliation with the Olmsted firm, and his other travels abroad. His career was cut short by an untimely death in 1897. His reports and letters to the commissioners of the Massachusetts reservations and his speeches and writings were published by his father in 1902. [47]
One of Eliot's most important contributions to park design was his insistence on planning before developing a natural park for public use. Vegetation management and the preservation of vistas were important aspects of planning in his opinion. Although planning was an accepted part of the design of public squares and buildings, its use for natural areas was generally considered unnecessary. In a letter to the commissioners of June 22, 1896, Eliot urged planning for the rural park just as for a public square or building. He recognized, however, essential differences:
Unlike the architect, the landscape architect starts in the new reservations, for example, with broad stretches of existing scenery. It will be his calling and duty to discover, and then to evolve and make available, the most characteristic, interesting, and effective scenery. Practically, his work will be confined to planning such control or modification of vegetation as may be necessary for the sake of scenery, and to devising the most advantageous courses for the roads and paths from which scenery will be viewed. [48]
Eliot recognized that what made certain areas distinctive and significant was the beauty of their vegetation or the scenic views they provided. For these reasons, Eliot emphasized that planning should be "comprehensive and not fragmentary" and should include controlling and modifying vegetation to expose scenic vistas and removing poor trees and encouraging better ones to improve woodlands. [49]
In an article in Garden and Forest of August 26, 1896, Eliot asserted that planning with attention to the environment was needed "to make the wildest place accessible or enjoyable." He argued that public reservations of any sort would only be saved from "decorative and haphazard development by the early adoption of rational and comprehensive plans." He wrote,
If consistent and fine results are to be attained, the engineer must be ever ready to subordinate his special works for the sake of the general effect in "landscape," and the forester must likewise be willing to work in the same spirit. Administered in these ways by sufficiently active men, the forest scenery, may in a few years, be restored to that fortunate state the beauty of which, barring fires and other accidents, is inevitably increased by the passage of time. [50]
Eliot pioneered in the field of landscape forestry. through which reservations could be rehabilitated by following the ecology and natural systems of the region, when he prepared a study entitled Vegetation and Forest Scenery for the Reservation for the Boston Metropolitan Park Commission in 1896. Eliot had distinguished between the roles of landscape architects, landscape engineers, and landscape foresters. Work in the metropolitan reservations to date had consisted of removing dead wood, both standing and fallen, and constructing preliminary roads on the lines of the old woodpaths. Because reservations had suffered from forest fires or been used as woodlots, fields, and pastures, the existing forests consisted mostly of sprout and seedling woods. He estimated that the "restoration" of the land to an interesting and beautiful condition would "require years of labor in accordance with a well-laid scheme of economical management." [51]
The use of the axe in public reservations was a much-debated issue at the time. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and J. B. Harrison had published a pamphlet entitled "Observations on the Treatment of Public Plantations," in which they defended the selective cutting of trees and other vegetation to improve the overall character and health of forest plantations. In a letter to the editor of Garden and Forest of January 27, 1897, Eliot further defended this point of view:
A good park plan is fundamentally a scheme for the creation of more and more pleasing scenery through modifications to be made in the preexisting vegetation, by clearings, thinnings, plantings, and the like, and only secondarily a scheme for making the resulting scenery agreeably accessible by roads and walks. [52]
Eliot noted that the axe could achieve good work in the reservations, including the removal of trees to encourage shrubby ground cover and to reveal distant prospects and fine crags concealed by existing vegetation. The selective removal of competing species encouraged the growth of certain plants, such as white dogwood on southern slopes, winterberry in swamps, bearberry on rocky summits, and white pine on ridges. Eliot wrote, "The axe, if it be guided wisely. may gradually effect the desired rescue and enhancement of that part of the beauty of the scenery of the reservations which depends upon the seedling woods and shrubberies." [53]
Eliot's plan for restoration entailed several steps. First, the present condition of vegetation, including types and variations, was to be recorded on topographical maps. This information was then to be used to define the principal landscape types. In the case of the metropolitan reservations, these types included summits, swamps, areas of sprout- growth called coppices, fields and pastures, bushy pastures, and seedling forests. Each type was to be analyzed according to its character and the proportion to which it covered the overall parkland, and recommendations were to be made for the treatment of each type. Eliot's study concluded that, in the case of the metropolitan reservations, the vegetation resulted from repeated or continuous interference with the natural processes by men, fire, and browsing animals. This finding helped justify a plan of vegetation control and management that, under the skillful guidance of a landscape professional, would slowly induce the "greatest possible variety. interest, and beauty of landscape." Eliot summarized the practices that would preserve, restore, and enhance the scenic beauty of natural areas:
To preserve existing beauty, grass-lands must continue to be mowed or pastured annually, trees must be removed from shrubberies, competing trees must be kept away from the veteran Oaks and chestnuts. . . . To restore beauty in such woods as are now dull and crop-like, large areas must be gradually cleared of sprout-growth . . . the stumps must be subsequently killed, and seedling trees encouraged to take possession. To prepare for increasing the interest and beauty of the scenery, work must be directed to removing screens of foliage, to opening vistas through "notches," to substituting low ground-cover for high-woods in many places, and other like operations. [54]
Eliot's work, immediately recognized as seminal by the profession, had major applications for both national and state park work. First of all, it established a methodology for selecting parks based upon their representative characteristics. It further established a process for planning and managing natural areas, whereby the protection of natural vegetation took preeminence over the development of roads and trails. His approach was particularly useful for park landscapes that had been damaged by previous land uses. Although the first national parks were in the West and were essentially primeval in character, many parks contained former homesteads or Indian camping grounds and thus had been altered by human intervention as well as by natural flooding, fires, or blights. Eliot's report also provided a well-ordered process and philosophy for preserving scenery, and his advice on clearing vistas was followed by national park designers as early as 1919. From Eliot came a philosophical basis for much of the common landscape work in national and state parks, including clearing for vistas, meadow protection, roadside and lake cleanup, and selective thinning of trees.
As more and more areas affected by human intervention entered the national park system and as the National Park Service began to transform submarginal land into state parks and recreational areas in the 1930s, Eliot's ideas and the field of landscape forestry assumed greater importance. From meadow clearing to fire protection by selective thinning of wooded areas, Eliot's principle that cutting should be based on long-range goals of beauty and scenery enhancement would predominate for many decades. His lessons on managing viewpoints and vistas would have far-reaching applications in the development of park roads and scenic parkways.
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Last Modified: Mon, Oct 31, 2002 10:00:00 pm PDT
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