Presenting Nature

Cover

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Overview

Stewardship

Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)

Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)

Western Field Office
(1927-1932)

Park Planning

Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)

State Parks
(1933-1942)

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

Presenting Nature: The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942

II. ORIGINS OF A DESIGN ETHIC FOR NATURAL PARKS (continued)

AN AMERICAN STYLE OF NATURAL GARDENING

By 1917, Frank Waugh, Henry Hubbard, and others recognized the emergence of a unique American style of landscape design based on indigenous plant materials and naturalistic principles of design. There were a number of reasons for the emergence of this new style. In part, it was one manifestation of the back-to-the-woods movement and a progressive philosophy of conservation. To a certain degree, it reflected the general nostalgia and sense of loss experienced by a nation that had reached its westernmost limits and that turned inward toward national parks to recapture the experience of wilderness. Nevertheless, the movement for an American style coincided with the growing role of stewardship within the landscape design profession.

In the 1840s, Downing urged American gardeners to heed the beauty and potential of American plants for landscape gardening. He advocated, however, preserving the natural landform while introducing plants from other locations for their aesthetic quality. William Robinson's idea of naturalization in 1870 was to introduce exotic wild plants from all over the world into wild gardens; he was especially impressed with the diversity and beauty of American plants and urged English gardeners to naturalize them in their wild borders, woodlands, and water gardens. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the creative possibilities of native plants for American landscape design gained widespread interest among American practitioners.

American landscape designers began to strongly urge the use of native species over exotics about 1890, with the development of mass plantings by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., at Biltmore, the Vanderbilt estate outside Asheville, North Carolina. Mass planting, Waugh wrote, "represents a most substantial advance, since nature manifestly offers her plantings nearly always in large masses. The white pine, for instance, used to exist in solid unbroken forest masses hundreds of miles in extent. There used to be thousands of miles of prairies in this country covered with blue stem and bunch grass." [67]

In the early twentieth century. the idea of an indigenous style derived from the principles and practices of Downing and Robinson was promoted in the United States by several leading landscape architects and writers. The style was dominated by a concern for preserving and enhancing natural character and harmonizing manmade improvements with the natural setting and topography, using informal and naturalistic elements of design. The preservation of existing vegetation and rock formations, the creation of naturalistic rockwork, the development of vistas and viewpoints, the construction of rustic shelters, and the planting of native vegetation were central to the interests of the style's practitioners.

WILHELM MILLER AND THE PRAIRIE STYLE

In 1911, Wilhelm Miller, a horticultural writer and editor, published What England Can Teach Us About Gardening, a series of writings that had previously appeared in Garden Magazine and Country Life in America. His ideas were based on his interest in America's native flora and a trip to England, where he visited Robinson's home and gardens at Gravetype. Miller advised his readers, "Let every country use chiefly its own native trees, shrubs, vines and other permanent material, and let the style of gardening grow naturally out of necessity, the soil and the new conditions." At the time, Americans had only a few books contributing to what Miller called an "American Style of Gardening." These included writings of Downing, Olmsted, and Eliot, as well as Liberty Hyde Bailey's Cyclopedia and Neltje Blanchan's American Flower Garden. A complete analysis of American wild flowers worth cultivating had appeared in Country Life in America in July 1906, and an article on the roadside gathering of plants appeared in Garden Magazine in July 1908. [68]

Miller promoted the creation of both formal and informal gardens, drawing on Robinson's work and writings. Most valuable, however, was his adaptation of Robinson's ideas for creating irregular borders around a home or estate with perennials that in time would spread and create meandering displays of great beauty and require a minimum of upkeep. He adopted Robinson's love of vines, ground covers, masses of perennial plants, ferns, roses, and water gardens. Although he encouraged Americans to adopt Robinson's techniques, Miller abandoned Robinson's call for the naturalization of exotic wild plants in favor of using only native species. Miller envisioned a style that synthesized nature and landscape design. He praised the beauty of American landforms and scenery and saw them as features worthy of enhancement by the planting of native materials. Seeing the potential for such art in a waterfall in Virginia, he wrote, "America has thousands of natural cascades, the beauty of which we can enhance by planting." [69]

In 1915, Miller wrote a circular for the University of Illinois's Agricultural Experiment Station called The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening. Here, he recognized and promoted a style of landscape gardening that drew inspiration from the native landscape of the Midwest, its landforms, waterways, and vegetation. This "spirit" could be displayed in both formal and informal gardens. This emerging school of gardening was based on the principles of preserving, restoring, or repeating some aspect of the prairie. Miller wrote,

The prairie style of gardening is an American mode of design based upon the practical needs of the middle-western people and characteristics by preservation of the typical western scenery, by restoration of local color, and by repetition of the horizontal line of land and sky, which is the strongest feature of prairie scenery. [70]

Miller attributed the origins of the style to O. C. Simonds, who had worked at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago beginning in 1880 and had transplanted from the wild many of Illinois's common shrubs and trees. These included oak, maple, hornbeam, ash, pepperidge, thorn apple, witch hazel, dogwood, sheepberry. and elder. Simonds had similarly worked with native materials at Lincoln Park in Chicago and on the grounds of several homes along Chicago's North Shore. [71]

To Jens Jensen, Miller credited the original idea for taking the prairie as a "leading motive" in landscape design. Jensen, inspired by the natural beauty of the Midwest, incorporated fields of wild flowers and used natural and naturalistic features such as waterfalls, brooks, streams, and lakes in his work. At Chicago's Humboldt and West Side parks, Jensen elevated the imitation of nature to a fine art for the enhancement of public parks and recreation. Miller quoted "one member of the new middle-western school of artists," who although unidentified was obviously Jensen:

Of course the primary motive was to give recreation and pleasure to the people, but the secondary motive was to inspire them with the vanishing beauty of the prairie. Therefore, I used many symbols of the prairie, i.e., plants with strongly horizontal branches or flower clusters that repeat in obvious or subtle ways the horizontal line of the land and sky which is the most impressive phenomenon on the boundless plains. Also, I aimed to recreate the atmosphere of the prairie by restoring as high a proportion as possible of the trees, shrubs, and flowers native to Illinois. [72]

Jensen's work in the mass planting at the 300-acre Ford estate in Dearborn, Michigan, illustrated what Miller called "restoration." Here 80 acres were planted to create the effect of a thirty-year-old forest after one year. [73]

Miller's circular promoted "The Illinois Way," a statewide program of beautification based on public and private gardening. The program's original goal was to see that 90 percent of all planting statewide be composed of trees and shrubs native to Illinois. The program was supported to a large degree by the state's agricultural extension program and applied to urban design, suburban neighborhoods, farmsteads, estates, public parks, and roadsides.

Miller, who had been teaching horticulture at the University of Illinois since 1912, recommended planting trees, shrubs, and wild flowers for shade and beauty beside streams, rivers, waterfalls, and naturally occurring rockwork to restore the "ancient" feeling of primordial Illinois. Urban dwellers and farmers alike were urged to plant around foundations, to screen unsightly outbuildings, and to plant hedges instead of building fences. Property owners were urged to plant trees to frame their houses or to conceal them under a cover of vines and to plant irregular borders around their property. Farmers were urged to plant vegetation along creeks and in woodlots and unused areas. Miller recommended roadside planting in the form of trees and shrubbery to enframe views of farms, to beautify the roadside, and to create a parklike setting. [74]

Eight types of Illinois scenery, in Miller's opinion, had picturesque character and merited preservation and beautification. They were lake bluffs, ravines, riverbanks, ponds and lakes, rocks, dunes, woods, and roadsides. In describing how riverbanks can be restored, he noted the Prairie River in Humboldt Park, where Jens Jensen created the quintessential Illinois river. The river, 1,650 feet long and from 52 to 108 feet in width, had cascades and rockwork modeled after that of the Rock River." [75]

Miller noted the emergence of "a new type of rock gardening" to fit Illinois scenery and climate. Rock outcroppings were not a major characteristic of the midwestern landscape as they were in the Northeast. The dry, hot summers of Illinois and the scarcity of rocks made the fern rock gardens of the Northeast impossible. Beds of native limestone, however, were visible in the bluffs along rivers and lakes and in road cuts. This new technique, exemplified by the stratified rockwork of the Prairie River in Humboldt Park, called for embedding quarried stone, called tufa, to create ledgelike formations that could be planted with rock-loving plants that grew locally. He also recommended the use of a Wisconsin limestone that had become popular in northern Illinois for stepping-stones, ledges, springs, cascades, and other forms of naturalistic rockwork. Miller assured readers that removing vegetation to expose rugged and picturesque ledges was landscape "restoration" because it restored to the scenery a dramatic element otherwise hidden.

Miller's ideas on stratified rockwork were not unique. The Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station had published a circular on stratified rockwork several years before. Not only had Jens Jensen creatively used this natural form of limestone in creating naturalistic rockwork for swimming pools, dams, waterfalls, and springs, but the architects working in the Prairie style were also exploring its use as a construction material for buildings. To a large degree, the stratified materials reinforced the horizontality of the beloved prairie as well as the natural formation of native bedrock. [76]

Jensen was a pioneer in highway beautification and the roadside planting of native vegetation in the early 1920s, when he designed the "ideal section" of the coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway. Here, in a one and one-third mile stretch between Schererville and Dyer, Indiana, Jensen created a landscape that followed the area s natural character. He planted native grasses, flowers, and occasional clusters of hawthorn or crabapple where the road passed through the open prairie and groves of native bur oak where it passed through upland areas and crossed wooded ravines. Jensen viewed his work as a model not only for the Lincoln Highway but for other roads as well. Jensen urged the highway association to secure a wide right-of-way, 100 to 150 feet to each side of the roadway. especially in developed areas. Jensen's design for the highway included a forty-acre campground that provided parking areas, a council ring with a campfire, rest rooms, a gas station, and a store. [77]

The influence of Jensen's ideas extended to the national parks. Mather saw the Lincoln Highway as an important link in the park-to-park highway he envisioned for the nation, and it is likely his own concern about approach roads to parks was influenced by Jensen's ideas. Jensen's rule of a 200-foot right-of-way was later adopted by Illinois's highway department and used by the National Park Service in its development of parkways and approach roads. Although never constructed, his plan for the camping area with a loop road, crescent-shaped tier, and component features was probably the prototype for the waysides of national parks and parkways in the 1930s. [79]

Landscape architects working in the prairie landscape style shared the same appreciation and idealization of the Midwest landscape as the architects of the Prairie style of architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin, Dwight H. Perkins, Marion Mahoney, and Robert Spencer. Jensen worked with these designers through his office at Steinway Hall in Chicago and through his membership in the Cliff Dwellers, a club of prominent Chicago men. Jensen and Wright collaborated on a number of projects in the early twentieth century. including the Avery Coonley House in Riverside, Illinois. In addition to echoing the horizontal planes of the prairie landscape in their work through low-lying and overhanging eaves, Prairie style architects respected the contours of the land and let their designs follow the natural topography. Wright and Griffin, who was trained as a landscape architect, also used terraces, pools, walls, and planting boxes to extend their work into the surrounding site. These characteristics were also adopted by practitioners of the Arts and Crafts movement. Through the work of various practitioners and publications such as The Craftsman and Simond's Landscape-Gardening of 1920, the ideas of the Prairie style about the unity of architecture and landscape were diffused to other parts of the country. The architect Myron Hunt, for example, had shared offices with Jensen at Steinway Hall and in 1903 moved to Southern California where his practice flourished. Hunt had a great understanding of the relationship of landscape and architecture and an ability to integrate landscape elements in his work. In the early 1920s, he was called upon to help plan a new village for Yosemite and design the park's administration building. [80]

CALIFORNIA GARDENING

The Midwest was not the only region of the country to develop a characteristic style of native gardening. In California, a style emerged that used plants native to specific climatic zones within the state. This style was generally called California gardening after Eugene O. Murmann, who laid out designs for the yards of bungalow homeowners and popularized the style in 1914 through an illustrated book of plans and photographs entitled California Gardening. Murmann said of California gardening,

California gardens are classed among the most beautiful in the world. Many of the best gardens in Southern California and, in fact, the whole state are remarkably unusual, not simply because palms and semi-tropical plant life thrive in California, but because the general arrangement was taken into consideration and each tree and plant set in its proper place. [81]

Subtitled "How to Plan and Beautify the City Lot, Suburban Grounds and Country Estate, including 50 Garden Plans and 103 Illustrations of Actual Gardens from Photographs by the Author," Murmann's book was both a portfolio of California gardens and a mail-order catalog from which homeowners could order plans and planting lists according to their tastes and local conditions. The photographs, illustrating various views and details of gardens and grounds, appeared to be taken at homes, estates, and parks in southern California. Some were recognizable as city parks or estates designed by Pasadena architects Charles and Henry Greene. Murmann's plans covered a variety of garden types popular in the United States and abroad that, he claimed, could be adapted to California's local conditions by substituting plants. There were alpine gardens, bog gardens, Japanese gardens, natural gardens, rock and water gardens, perennial borders, Old English gardens, and semiformal gardens. The idea behind Murmann's book was that each home should have a garden of "surprising beauty and color harmony." [82]

Plans for "natural gardens" dominated Murmann's catalog. These drew heavily from the nineteenth-century English gardening tradition espoused by Downing and Robinson. They incorporated curving paths, rustic stone stairways, curvilinear expanses of lawn bordered by shrubbery and trees, rustic seats and shelters, and naturalistic rock walls. The grounds of California homes were often considered outdoor living spaces. One of Murmann's plans featured a backyard lawn enveloped by borders of shrubs laid out in an irregular line; a curvilinear path of stepping-stones led to an octagonal rustic pavilion for outdoor dining and recreation. There were rockeries in front of the pavilion and near the path leading to the kitchen entrance. Flowers were scattered across the lawn in little colonies and allowed to grow "in a natural way." Although California gardens used many exotic plants, native species were commonly preferred because they were well suited to the local climate and soil conditions. They were also inexpensive and readily accessible. [83]

Murmann drew on the landscape work of Greene and Greene, especially that inspired by Japanese landscape traditions. Several views appear to be details of the six-acre grounds of Greene and Greene's Robert R. Blacker house in Pasadena, where a meandering stone-edged pool and rock garden graced the foot of the sloping knoll where the house was situated. Curving paths led from the house to the garden. The Japanese landscape style, commonly practiced in California in the early twentieth century, featured miniaturized gardens with tightly curving walks, small ponds and streams edged with irregular borders of boulders and cobbles, miniature hills called "hillocks," stepping stones, and rockwork in the form of stairways, walls, and water fountains. Plants included lotuses, lilies, grasses, evergreens, and other plants that thrived in or near the water or on rocky slopes. Structural elements included pergolas, rustic bridges, templelike shelters, and lanterns.

A distinctive movement was also emerging in favor of arid and semiarid gardens using desert plants and local sand and stones. Murmann depicted scenes in what appeared to be urban parks, estate grounds, and yards in residential developments. Many of these displayed plants such as yucca, agave, and cactus set on the banks of curving rock-edged drives and paths. Drives were also lined with irregular meandering walls of boulders and rocks embedded gently into the dry soil. There were masses of junipers and other evergreens capable of growing in semiarid conditions. The desert gardens, too, had rustic pergolas and garden seats often constructed of juniper trunks. Dry-laid boulder walls and meandering paths studded with boulders and rustic stone stairways provided rich accents to displays of perennial, alpine, and even desert plants. [84]

Today Murmann's book is a revealing index of the common landscape designs intended for the yards of California homes. It shows how Downing and Robinson's principles were adapted to different climatic conditions and how these principles were combined with the compatible influence of Japanese landscape gardening. Thomas Vint, Daniel Hull, Herbert Maier, and other National Park Service designers were familiar with this style if not with Murmann's book. Murmann's designs also fulfilled the tenets of the Arts and Crafts movement, with their use of native materials and unity of structures and natural setting. California gardens, many of the earliest of which were at the arboretum at the University of California, Berkeley. provided ready models for grading and planting the grounds of park buildings and for developing interpretive wild gardens in national parks and monuments, particularly in the Southwest.

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS MOVEMENT

The Arts and Crafts movement, which espoused the early twentieth-century back-to-nature philosophy, claimed California gardening as one of several styles appropriate for homes that sought to blend dwelling and nature and to create a flowing sense of space that linked the interior with views and passageways to the out-of-doors. The porte-cochères and pergolas so popular in California gardening were intermediary structures that could be adorned with vines and hanging plants. They belonged both to the house and to the garden, to the work of the architect and to that of the landscape architect.

Through his journal The Craftsman, Gustav Stickley was perhaps one of the strongest influences on the general acceptance of the natural style of gardening in the early twentieth century. Stickley advocated a philosophy of harmony between home and nature that called for the siting of buildings in harmony with nature. Homes were to be built so that they became a part of the natural surroundings and blended with the general contour of the site and the surrounding country. This was achieved by designing buildings to fit the existing terrain and by using local materials and natural colors.

The 1909 article "The Natural Garden: Some Things That Can Be Done When Nature is Followed Instead of Thwarted" in The Craftsman advised gardeners, "It is best to let Nature alone just as far as possible, following her suggestions and helping her to carry out her plans by adjusting our own to them, rather than attempting to introduce a conventional element into the landscape." Nature could be followed in several ways. The designer could "allow the paths to take the directions that would naturally be given to footpaths across the meadows or through the woods,—paths which invariably follow the line of the least resistance and so adapt themselves perfectly to the contour of the ground." A curving flight of steps conforming to the contour of a hillside with rustic railings and steps of heavy rounded boards could be draped with vines and natural undergrowth to create an effect of "rare and compelling charm." Vines could be made to grow over the walls of the house and around foundations, "where they naturally belong," and fast-growing vines could give "a leafy shade" to the porch that served as an outdoor living room and was more a part of the garden than the house. Such drapery was necessary to bring cobblestone and rough cement walls into a closer relationship with their surroundings. [85]

Stickley recommended thatch for the roofing of a summerhouse for a "picturesque" effect, reviving Downing's romantic practice. Use of thatch would also find application in warmer climates where it had been used indigenously. Its use on ramadas in Mexico and the Southwest, for example, inspired the use of thatching on shelters in Phoenix's South Mountain Park. Juniper bark thatching was used to cover the shelters along Bright Angel Trail in Grand Canyon. Its most elaborate expression came in the use of fronds of local palmetto (Sabal minor) for the roof of the refectory at Palmetto State Park in Texas. [86]

The advice of The Craftsman reflected the English landscape gardening practices espoused by William Robinson. Robinson's ideas on naturalizing the wild species of many nations into the English garden found an avid following in the English Arts and Crafts movement. This movement called for exuberant displays of wild grapevines and other foliage and the use of native trees and shrubbery. often in combination with rockwork or bodies of water. These landscape effects were well suited to the concept of harmony held by the Arts and Crafts movement in America. They added to the picturesque quality of the bungalow home and enabled designers to merge indoor and outdoor elements.

The influence of Japanese design was especially strong in the landscape architecture and residential landscaping on the West Coast in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In The Craftsman, Stickley drew attention to the West Coast work and popularized Japanese techniques and designs. An article entitled "What May be Done with Water and Rocks in a Little Garden," published in 1909 with illustrations from Wilhelm Miller's Country Life in America, applied the principles and features of Japanese gardens to the American home. The article illustrated a small garden, about one hundred feet in diameter, with a small stream of water running over a pile of rocks that produced the effect of a "mountain glen [where] so perfect are the proportions and so harmonious the arrangement that there is no sense of incongruity in the fact that the whole thing is on such a small scale." Although the example was intended for the gardener of small residential grounds, the author enjoined the reader to imagine "what could be done with large and naturally irregular grounds, say on a hillside or where a natural brook wound its way through the garden, giving every opportunity for picturesque effects that could be created by very simple treatment of the banks, by a bridge or a pool here and there and by a little adjustment of the rocks lying around." [87]

An essential part of the Japanese tradition was the interplay of rocks, waterfalls, meandering streams, and curvilinear ponds. In the Japanese garden, rocks were placed in groups or singly to display the inherent beauty of their shape, texture, form, color, and contrast of light and shadow. Stickley attributed the popularity of cobblestone in western design to the influence of Japanese design. Rock-edged pools and streams, commonplace in Japanese gardens, were one of the major characteristics through which these gardens, often on a miniaturized scale, created an illusionary and symbolic representation of nature.

Many of the designs and ideas popularized by The Craftsman in the early twentieth century were rediscovered and used as naturalistic prototypes by the landscape designers of state and national parks several decades later. The water fountain built in front of the Paradise community house at Mount Rainier in 1933 displayed a tall assemblage of boulders that strongly resembled a backyard rock fountain published in 1904 and 1909 in The Craftsman. Park designers consciously imitated the rockwork and the planting of streambeds of Japanese gardens in the swimming pool at Grand Canyon's Phantom Ranch, in a series of rock-edged pools and ponds in Minnesota's Camden State Park, and in the cleanup of streams and springs at Palmetto State Park in Texas. [88]

Another much-emulated characteristic of Japanese gardens was the picturesque wooden bridge. Henry Tyrrell, in his treatise and portfolio Artistic Bridge Design, recognized the rustic effect of bridges in the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco and illustrated designs for both drum and bow types of bridges found in Japanese gardens. Both types were single arched forms, the first based on a semicircular radial curve, the other on a chord. The rustic arched bridge fashioned of wood constructed in a number of state parks, including Parvin in New Jersey and Ludington in Michigan, shows this influence. At Ludington, a series of bridges along the meandering Lost Lake Trail reflected the Japanese tradition on a larger scale. [89]

Clover Creek Bridge on the General's Highway, Sequoia National Park, shortly after construction (September 1933) illustrates the simple arch and irregular stone-faced masonry prototype derived from the Scarborough bridges at Franklin Park. The wall and arch rings of native rock were perfectly designed to increase the irregularity and random character of the surface so that the bridge blended into and harmonized with the natural setting, a deeply cut rock creek amidst a towering forest. (National Park Service Historic Photography collection)

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