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 (continued)

THE WRITINGS OF FRANK WAUGH

In The Natural Style in Landscape Gardening of 1917, Frank Waugh, a professor of landscape gardening at Massachusetts Agricultural College, promoted a similar style based on an imitation of natural forms and the use of native vegetation. Born and educated in the Midwest, Waugh had close ties with Wilhelm Miller, Jens Jensen, and other advocates of the prairie spirit in landscape gardening. Although Waugh was strongly influenced by the ideas of Miller and Jensen, his own work and teaching followed a different course. Waugh became increasingly interested in the challenge of making parks and forests accessible to the public. At the same time he pursued developments in the emerging field of ecology. He advocated an approach in which the finest of natural features and scenic beauty were to be preserved, interpreted, shaped, and presented to enhance the visitor's enjoyment. [110]

Waugh called his approach the "natural style" to distinguish it from Downing and Repton's naturalistic style, which imitated nature's forms but not its vegetation. To Waugh, the natural style endeavored "to present its pictures in forms typical of the natural landscape and made vital by the landscape spirit." By landscape spirit, Waugh meant the informal order and feeling of vegetation and landscape features found in nature. He advocated a close study of nature for practitioners and adherence to the principles of composition followed by nature. This meant studying four principal types of native landscape—sea, mountains, plains, and forest—and several minor types including great rivers, little brooks, rolling hills, and lakes. "The ideas, motives, and methods must come mainly from nature," he told readers. Designers were to bring to this work "a critical understanding of nature's landscape and a love of the native landscape at once ardent, sane, discriminating, and balanced." [111]

Waugh claimed that the natural style was a fundamental garden form informal in character, that is, "unsymmetrical, not obviously balanced, not apparently enclosed and not marked by visible boundaries." Like Hubbard, Waugh recognized the style as one that resulted from conscious choice and adherence to the principles of composition followed by nature. [112]

Waugh admitted that in many cases the natural style was best described as "intelligently letting alone a natural landscape." When called upon to treat an attractive stretch of natural scenery. the landscape gardener needed to "first and foremost, endeavor to understand the spirit of his landscapes." The designer was then "to simplify and accentuate the characteristic natural forms (chiefly topography and flora), and to clarify and interpret the spirit of the place." Waugh believed that the classification and interpretation of spiritual values was the work of the true artist.

Waugh applauded the development of national parks and forests as a "magnificent enterprise . . . in the hands of the landscape gardeners" who were "best trained in the love of the landscape and in the technical methods by which it alone can be conserved, restored, improved, clarified, made available and spiritually effective in the hearts of men and women. The natural style of landscape gardening was most suitable for this work. He wrote,

Yes, indeed, the natural style of landscape gardening has before it the greatest opportunities ever offered to any art at any time in the world's history. It is high time that this old, yet ever new, natural style received a more thoroughgoing study at the hands of all thoughtful persons, but especially by those who call themselves professional landscape architects. [113]

Waugh's unique contribution to American literature was his introduction of an ecological approach to landscape gardening—an approach that called for the planting of trees, shrubs, and ground covers in accordance with their natural association in nature and according to natural conditions of soil and moisture. This was especially true of mass plantings. Waugh credited Willy Lange's German work, Die Garten-Gestaltung de Neuzit, with the best explanation of this ecological principle. He also recognized the work done by Dr. Engler and Dr. Peters, the curator and planting foreman at the botanical garden in Berlin, who apparently were the first to plant large masses of trees and shrubs in strict reference to soil and drainage conditions. [114]

Just gaining recognition as a science in the early twentieth century. ecology led to the general understanding that very few species of plants existed alone in nature. Waugh wrote, "Practically every one is associated habitually with certain other species. Thus they form set clubs or societies. And these friendly associations, based upon similarity of tastes and complementary habits of growth, should not be broken up. If we as landscape gardeners desire to preserve the whole aspect of nature, with all its forms intact, we will keep all plants in their proper social groupings." [115]

To Waugh, vegetation was the most critical aspect of creating the form and spirit of the natural style:

Unquestionably the selection and management of the plant material does play a major role in practical landscape gardening, and especially in the natural style. We must be able to use plants as nature uses them, to found our selections and our groupings on the same fundamental laws which govern these matters in the wild and native landscape. [116]

Mass planting was a comparatively recent innovation in landscape gardening in 1917. Waugh believed it marked one of the greatest advances in the evolution of a genuinely naturalistic style. It included planting trees by the thousands for screens or backgrounds, the introduction of rhododendrons "by carloads" for underplanting, and the development of considerable forest tracts as elements of scenic beauty. Mass plantings were of two kinds: pure masses, which were composed of a single species or variety. and mixed masses, which contained several different ones. Mixed mass plantings were composed of social groups, which included trees, shrubs, and ground covers that grew naturally together under the same conditions of soil, moisture, and climate. [117]

The art of grouping trees and shrubs was fundamental to the natural style. Waugh identified seven patterns: (1) the single specimen, which was a rarity in nature"; (2) the group of two, which according to Waugh was to be avoided in common practice; (3) the group of three, arranged in an irregular row; (4) the larger group of five or more; (5) the row, which was never used in naturalistic planting; (6) the mass planting; and (7) the social group. Although the group of three was particularly favored by designers, Waugh preferred the group of five or more. He wrote, "With anywhere from five to twelve, according to species, we have individuals enough to make a genuine and effective group. At this stage grouping comes to its real meaning; and it must be allowed that most plantings are more successful in groups of this size than in any other scale. . . . This unit gives the most advantageous effect." Waugh cited several simple rules for grouping five or more trees: The law of simplicity cautioned against using too many species; the law of dominance called for one species to dominate the group; the law of harmony said that species must harmonize in color, form, and habit of growth; the law of ecology required that plants "be socially compatible"; and the law of adaptation meant that all plants were to be adapted to the local conditions such as soil, drainage, and light. [118]

Waugh, like Hubbard, recognized the value of vistas in developing natural areas for public use and enjoyment. Waugh advanced Downing's principles on vista through his work on roads and recreational areas in national forests. Developing views required at least three things: "First, the line of the best view must be determined and kept open; second, this view must be framed by suitable plantings; third, inferior views must be blocked out or reduced to more promissory glimpses." Vistas were to be focused on a definite object of interest or beauty such as a hill, mountain, or lake. [119]

Every scenic feature, whether a natural pond, cliff, outcrop of rock, glacier-placed boulder, or old plantation of pine or oak, was to be "seized upon and developed with skill and imagination." On the unlimited possibilities of brooks and streams, Waugh wrote,

If there is only a trickle of water in it one can set back certain stretches so as to make reaches of flat water on which shadows lie and on the margin of which all manner of aquatic plants will thrive. Then there will be alternating stretches of water singing over stones or flashing in the sun. Foot bridges or stepping stones at suitable places add to the picture. There may be seats in shady nooks from which one can watch the panorama of life upon the brook; while at other points there will be sunny, grassy glades opening back into neighboring meadows or looking out to adjoining lawns. [120]

The sequence of scenes and views was particularly important in Waugh's opinion. On the design of roads or trails, Waugh said that at each climax of view the byway should turn and proceed upward to the next climax. Waugh called these places "paragraphic" points and described the ways in which a series of scenes could unfold through the careful location of trails, roads, and overlooks. Designers were to draw attention to special views by placing "at the optimum point of observation" a seat, carriage turn, or rest house so that the stranger was "directed unmistakably to the main feature, the desirable vista or the glorious outlook." [121]

Waugh recognized the value of natural areas for recreational activities and felt that structures for golf, skating, bathing, boating, and fishing belonged in the informal landscape. On shelters compatible with the natural style, he wrote, "Instead of the pergola and the classical 'temple' or 'gazebo' or 'music house,' there may be an 'arbor,' the 'summerhouse,' the 'log cabin, the boat house or the fishing lodge.'" He reiterated Downing's advice for developing scenic viewpoints: "Wherever there are shelters there will nearly always be places to sit, but there ought to be ample temptation to linger and rest at other points in the park. Especially at those stations where good views are to be enjoyed, should there be ample provision of seats." He disapproved (as would national park designers a decade later) of Downing's use of saplings in woven furniture and the latticework of pavilions in areas calling for furniture of "more or less rustic design." He wrote, "The extreme rustic fad of the 'fifties—twisted and contorted tree stems grotesquely woven into settees or chairs—should be forgotten; but the plain rough-sawed or hewn planks of modern times, stained or weathered, are both appropriate in the picture and comfortable in the using." [122]

While Henry Hubbard gave the park designer the practical tools for identifying landscape characteristics and the design principles for achieving an informal or natural style of landscape, Waugh laid a philosophical and practical basis for landscape naturalization, particularly the creation of mass plantings along ponds, roads, and streams and at the edges of forests that followed the natural patterns of growth and plant associations. Both men continued to be involved in the issues of developing natural areas for public use and enjoyment during the next twenty-five years. Both would substantially influence the landscape practices of national and state park designers.

In 1917, Waugh began consulting on the recreational development of national forests, writing for the U.S. Forest Service, Recreation Uses on the National Forests. A year later he developed A Plan for Grand Canyon Village. Waugh brought together the concerns for developing natural scenic areas through subsequent work in Bryce, Kings Canyon, and Mount Hood national forests. It was no surprise that Conrad Wirth, the assistant director of the National Park Service during the New Deal era and Waugh's former student, called upon Waugh to write a handbook, Landscape Conservation, for Emergency Conservation Work in state parks; the book was published first in 1935 and several years later in the Civilian Conservation Corps's Project Training series. He applied his style of natural gardening to the work of recreational development in national forests and later state parks. He wrote extensively on a variety of subjects, including outdoor theaters, roadside ecology. and the recreational uses of national forest lands. In addition to Conrad Wirth, P.H. Elwood and Albert Taylor were among his students at Massachusetts Agricultural College whose careers would in some way affect national and state park design.

OTHER WRITINGS

Two other books that appeared in the same period also provided practical advice that was reflected in the work of park designers. In 1915, Samuel Parsons, Jr., published principles of naturalistic gardening, including descriptive details of designs from Central Park such as the arch and cave in the Ramble and the Boulder Bridge, in The Art of Landscape Architecture. In 1920, O. C. Simonds published Landscape-Gardening as part of a rural science series directed at farmers, civil engineers, and others outside the landscape profession.

Drawing on his strong horticultural knowledge, Samuel Parsons, Jr., enlightened American readers with instructions and advice on creating effects with natural vegetation. Parsons very much reflected Robinson's appreciation of native plants and promoted the creation of vegetation features from pine plantations, called "pintums," to water gardens with ferns and other low-growing, moisture-seeking plants and stone walls covered with randomly climbing vines. His Art of Landscape Gardening was also strongly influenced by Central Park, where he had been superintendent for many years, and by the writings and work of Prince Puckler-Muskau. Parsons would, in fact, edit an English translation of the prince's 1834 treatise for American audiences in 1917.

Parsons expanded Downing's advice on rockwork to the creation of rock structures such as walls and gate piers that could be planted with ferns and vines. Parsons offered some of the most detailed instructions for rockwork published at the time. These instructions would be particularly useful for park designers in the twentieth century. Parsons wrote,

No chisel should be allowed to touch the stones except to break off chunks. The stone or rock masses should be laid lengthwise in the wall, not with the narrow parts up and down, and naturally the larger pieces should rest on the ground. Where the stones rest on the ground, the point of junction of the stone and soil should be at least two or three inches above the actual rock base. There is a principle involved in the idea. Concealment serves to suggest that the rocks have not been brought to the spot, but have grown there, and the soil gradually gathered around them. [123]

Stones, whether for bridges or walls, were to be collected in nearby fields or taken from quarries where the rock had the same cleavage or lamination, color, and grain, as that found in the area where it is was to be used. Parsons recommended the use of rough-grained stone that was likely to weather, such as limestone, granite, or sandstone. Any concrete necessary in the core of the wall was to remain out of sight, with the crevices left exposed and open to allow pockets of soil to form for planting. At the base of walls ferns, irises, saxifrage, and other medium-sized herbaceous plants were to be planted. [124]

O. C. Simonds's Landscape-Gardening conveyed his ideas on the use of native vegetation. Although this was a practical guide directed at an audience of farmers, highway engineers, and residents of rural areas nationwide, it reflected the ideas of the Prairie style of landscaping. He, too, urged readers to use the trees, shrubs, and native flowers that were "close at hand" to develop a restful retreat that could be called "an American garden" and increase one's interest in the vegetation that grew along roadsides, margins of woodland streams, and other out-of-the-way places. Simonds included native wild flowers, mosses, lichens, ferns, and climbing vines as well as trees and shrubs among the gardener's materials. [125]

Calling for the beautification of roadways and noting the progress being made in New York and Massachusetts, Simonds urged planting roads with naturally arranged groups of trees and shrubbery of several different species. This approach allowed designers freedom to leave wide spaces between groups where views were scenic or to bunch trees closely together where views were not desirable. Native species were to be planted because they matched the landscape and were hardy and dependable. The sequence of scenic views along a river road could be enhanced by planting screens in certain places and by preserving openings in others. [126]

On the construction of artificial lakes and ponds, Simonds urged his readers to follow nature and to locate buildings far back from the shoreline so they would be unobtrusive yet still allow delightful views over the water. He advised sloping and planting steep banks to prevent erosion and creating borders along streams with cattails, pickerelweed, and sedges. He cautioned against concrete edges for ponds and suggested that boulders be laid in a naturalistic fashion where reinforcement was needed. He suggested that the cement aprons of dams be concealed by inserting boulders while the cement was soft, by using cobble stones and gravel to roughen the appearance, and by planting bushes that would provide overhanging foliage. He also described the development of earthen dams. [127]

Simonds suggested a wide range of native plants, shrubs, and trees for planting the various slopes of a lake according to moisture and exposure to sun. Virginia creepers and other vines, violets, marsh marigolds, bluets, forget-me-nots, white clover, and ground ivy were suggested for the lower banks. Hemlocks and birches with a ground covering of yews and ferns were suitable for southern banks. For sunny north slopes in the Northeast and upper Midwest, he recommended sugar maples. Elsewhere, he recommended trees noted for autumn colors: sassafras, white ash, sweet gum, tulip trees, dogwood, pepperidge, blue beech, pin cherries, and some oaks. Appropriate for lakes were mountain laurels, rhododendrons, azaleas, sweet pepper bushes, bayberries, andromeda, wild roses, and hollies. Among the spring-flowering woody plants, he included juneberry. redbud, crabapples, thorn apples, and elderberries. He suggested herbaceous plants that could be planted in moist areas for sequence of bloom; these included marigolds, iris, marshmallows, lilies, ironweed, lobelias, gentians, asters, and grass of Parnassus. He recommended columbines, saxifrage, harebells, butterfly weeds, goldenrods, and asters for steep gravelly banks and trilliums, hepaticas, wild ginger, adder's-tongues, bloodroots, squirrel corn, maidenhair ferns, mosses, and liverworts for steep but moist and shady banks. [128]

Simond's knowledge of planting practices was, of course, limited by his regional knowledge of the Midwest. He did, however, include a chapter on landscape gardening for arid and semiarid regions, where the usual gardening practices were impossible to carry out. He pointed out the beauty of mountain views and natural rock formations in the Southwest, which were indigenous elements of landscape design. For arid areas, he suggested cactus gardens in combination with rocks and urged the planting of herbaceous plants that bloomed at certain seasons and were attractive as ground covers even in dry periods. He wrote,

The problem for a landscape gardener in any location is to make the most of available materials. It is wise always to work in harmony with what nature has done in the surrounding territory. In any locality, whether dry or moist, planting material should be used which is indigenous to the region or which grows in some other locality having similar soil and climate. [129]

Several other publications appeared that indicated the growing interest in gardening with native materials and a revival of the English landscape gardening tradition. Downing's essays from The Horticulturalist were compiled and published as one volume in 1894. The first American edition of Humphrey Repton's principles for landscape gardening was published with an introduction by John Nolen in 1907. Works by William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll celebrating the use of native plants in the garden were published in America in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1917, Parson's editing of an English translation of Prince Puckler-Muskau's 1834 treatise was issued. Waugh published a revised edition of Downing's Theory and Practice in 1921. In 1929, Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehman published American Plants for American Gardens, which further applied the principles of ecology to gardening with native plants.

While the appreciation for native plants was growing within the horticultural and landscape architectural circles, scientific literature on ecology and horticulture was emerging. Henry C. Cowles of the University of Chicago and a member of the Friends of Our Native Landscape had published studies of the plant ecology of the Indiana dunes on Lake Michigan. Frederic E. Clements of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., conducted research from his laboratories in the Rocky Mountains and southern California, and between 1916 and 1930 published a series of works entitled plant succession, plant indicators, and plant competition, which would have important applications in the development of the national parks. Willis Linn Jepson's Manual of the Flowering Plants of California, first published in 1925, and the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. would directly influence the pioneering educational programs of the National Park Service, which got underway in Yosemite National Park in the 1920s.

Also influential on park design was the publication in 1928 of a volume of the senior Olmsted's writings on Central Park. Editors Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Theodora Kimball Hubbard intended the volume, entitled Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, to be a history and case study of an urban park over several decades. It made available to large audiences information about Olmsted's philosophy and practices of park design. Olmsted's letters and reports covered a large number of subjects relating to the design and management of a public park, some of which applied to reservations of natural landscape as well. Subjects included choice and care of plantations, boundaries and entrances, public use and abuse, park buildings, and various encroachments.

Technical instructions and plans for the construction of many landscape features, including well-drained earthen paths, dry-laid walls and ha-has, swimming pools, and amphitheaters, that would influence the development of national and state parks appeared in the ASLA's journal, Landscape Architecture, in the 1920s and early 1930s. Many of these were written by Cleveland landscape architect Albert Taylor (a former student of Waugh's) and directly applied to design problems common to natural areas. Articles in Landscape Architecture by Stephen Hamblin and Frank Waugh drew attention to native plants and their use in the design of roadsides and gardens and on the shores of lakes and ponds.

The greatest practitioners of the American style of natural gardening were the designers of national and state parks in the 1920s and 1930s. These designers, commonly called landscape engineers or landscape architects, readily and confidently drew inspiration from a variety of sources, borrowing both principles and practices that were in keeping with their desire to harmonize and naturalize their construction work and preserve or enhance the inherent scenic beauty of each park. Their work was part of a continuing tradition that began in nineteenth-century urban parks and matured and flourished in the 1930s. Developments in the twentieth century that called for the planting of native plants and trees according to their natural associations and conditions for moisture and drainage opened up new opportunities for park designers. Results included the naturalistic planting of roadsides and the shores of artificial lakes and ponds, the channelization and beautification of streams, and the return of development sites to nature after construction. New demands for public recreation, an increasingly mobile society, and the challenges of managing public lands called for the application of these principles and practices to new uses and at greater scales than they had ever been intended. Designers of national and state parks responded with vigor and creative genius and, in the process, forged a coherent and advanced form of naturalistic landscape design.

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