JOHN HULL OLMSTED’S DEATH had left Mary with the responsibility for three children—John, Charlotte, and baby Owen, born three months before his father’s death. She might have lived in Hartford, where John Olmsted would have taken her under his wing, as he had the widowed Sophia Hitchcock. Instead, in the summer of 1858, Mary and the children moved to Tosomock Farm, recently vacated by George Waring. They stayed only a few months. Perhaps she sought comforting memories and found only loneliness; the prospect of spending a winter on the isolated farm could not have been appealing. She rented a house in Manhattan. Her new home was near Olmsted’s office, which was in an old farmhouse on the edge of Central Park. They saw each other often. She naturally turned to her late husband’s dearest friend and her closest relative for support. The children soon grew accustomed to Uncle Frederick’s visits.
On Monday, June 13, 1859, Frederick and Mary were married. The quiet civil ceremony, performed by Daniel Tiemann, the mayor of New York, took place in a house that stood in Central Park, on Bogardus Hill (now called the Great Hill). No record of their courtship survives. Some biographers have speculated that a sense of duty, not romance, led him to marry. After all, John’s last letter to Frederick closed with “Don’t let Mary suffer while you are alive.” But it is not far-fetched to presume that Frederick and Mary, drawn together by the death of a person they both cherished, fell in love. It was not a spring romance—she was twenty-nine, he was thirty-seven. They had known each other for almost eleven years. Childbearing had removed the bloom of Mary’s early youth, but she was still as “comfortably pretty” as he had found her when they first met. He was an attractive man—he now cut a dashing figure, with a handlebar mustache and long, wavy hair.
Olmsted knew that he was assuming responsibility for a family; she understood that she was marrying someone with a demanding position. After years of solitary life he sought domesticity; she offered it. Like all marriages it was a contract, and it proved remarkably durable. They weathered some difficult times. They had four children together, and they successfully raised their combined families. Frequently apart, they corresponded regularly on a variety of subjects. Tiny Mary (she was less than five feet), with her bright mind and lively disposition, was more than a match for Olmsted’s energetic intelligence. He shared with her not only the family life he craved but also his professional concerns. It was a fortunate union.
There was no time for a honeymoon. Olmsted, who had been working all-out for the last year, could not get away. The board demanded visible evidence of progress. The skating pond was completed in only six months, in time for the winter of 1858; the Ramble was finished by the following summer. To maintain public order, Olmsted organized a force of twenty-four park keepers—one of the first uniformed and well-disciplined police forces in the nation. He devised a panoply of regulations: commercial vehicles were prohibited from using the drives, for example; speed limits discouraged racing; animals were forbidden to graze in the meadows; gambling and prostitution were energetically excluded; the park was closed after nightfall.
Opening parts of the park to the public was politically expedient, but quickening construction raised costs. So did the changes to the original plan, such as the many new bridges. Much of his time was spent explaining and justifying these rising costs to the commissioners. The two years that he had spent working on the park since becoming superintendent, adding to the sudden duties of parenthood, proved too much even for the indefatigable Olmsted. His energies flagged. He and Mary went to Saratoga Springs for a few days, but the waters failed to work a cure. “I feel just thoroughly worn-out, used up, fatigued beyond recovery, an older man than you,” he wrote his father. In September the board voted him a six-week leave of absence. He was to go on a tour of European parks. To facilitate matters, the grateful commissioners also voted him the princely sum of five hundred dollars for his expenses. On September 28, 1859, three months after his wedding, he sailed from New York; Mary and the children did not accompany him.
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Olmsted wasted no time. The very day that he landed in Liverpool he revisited Birkenhead Park and obtained “full particulars of its construction, maintenance, and management.” Two days later he was in Birmingham looking at the sewage works. He met the mayor and interviewed him about Aston Park, the newly opened city park. He dropped in at Chatsworth, hoping to meet Paxton, but the famous gardener was not at home. He visited the Derby Arboretum, designed by the Scottish horticulturist John Claudius Loudon.
And so it went. He toured country estates and the great parks of London. He was taken around the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew by their superintendent, the famous botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker. In Paris he met Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand, the chief aide of Baron Haussmann, who was then rebuilding Paris for Emperor Napoleon III. Alphand, an engineer, was responsible for the Bois de Boulogne, a vast two-thousand-acre public park in the suburbs of Paris. Olmsted also found time to tour parks in Brussels and Lille. He talked to engineers, gardeners, administrators, and police commissioners. The personal contacts he made would prove invaluable. The firsthand information he gathered was likewise priceless: he collected books, plans, and technical information, and hired a photographer to document some of the parks. He purchased trees and shrubs to be sent back to New York.
He brought a critical eye to these visits. He was not impressed by the current English fashion for gardening. The taste for elaborate flower beds and specimen gardening, which he termed “botanic beauty,” seemed to him misguided. Writing to Sir William Hooker, who had sent him documentation of Kew Gardens, Olmsted confessed: “I find that the simplicity without refinement of art, if indeed not without art, of Stoneleigh and Charlecourt, and the fine artistic simplicity of Trentham, give me a much greater pleasure, and that it seems to me far more worthy to be striven for than the beauty for which certainly much greater study, skill and labor has been expended.” Olmsted was telling Hooker that he preferred the old to the new. The grounds of Stoneleigh Abbey had been redesigned by Humphry Repton in 1808; Charlecourt (Charlecote) Park and Trentham were older than that—they had been laid out by Repton’s predecessor, the eighteenth-century gardener and architect Lancelot “Capability” Brown.
The prolific Brown built more than 170 private parks and gardens in his long career. His work is simple, large scale, and sublimely beautiful. Brown wrote no treatises or books, and he was not well-known to Olmsted. The landscape writers who had influenced the youthful Olmsted—William Gilpin and Uvedale Price—considered Brown old-fashioned. Price, who wrote in the 1790s, criticized both Brown and Repton for their lack of variety and intricacy. He argued the merits of an accidental picturesque landscape: “In hollow lanes and bye roads a thousand circumstances of detail promote the natural intricacy of the ground: the turns are sudden and unprepared; the banks sometimes broken and abrupt; sometimes smooth, and gently, but not uniformly sloping; now wildly over-hung with thickets of trees and bushes; now loosely skirted with wood: no regular verge of grass, no cut edges, no distinct lines of separation.” This is the precise opposite of Brown’s carefully composed groups of trees, and undulating swathes of lawn sweeping down to the smooth curvature of the lakeside.
Trentham, which Olmsted visited in November, has all these ingredients: turf, trees, water. The centerpiece of the Staffordshire estate is a man-made, three-quarter-mile-long lake, complete with several islands and bordered by a large wood. Brown, who “improved” the estate for Lord Gower between 1775 and 1779, also rebuilt the house, although the building that Olmsted saw in 1859 was constructed later, as were the formal parterre and a terrace overlooking the lake. At the head of the terrace stood a bronze statue—erected by Gower’s grandson—a replica of Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa.
The statue is still there, its back turned to the beautiful lake, gazing across the parterre to an empty square of lawn where the grand house once stood. The estate is now a campground. It appears a rather down-at-heel operation that has, thankfully, not greatly impinged on Brown’s park. The overcast September morning I was there, my only companions were several fishermen. Except for the disfigurement of a water-ski ramp, the lake was pretty much as Olmsted had seen it. The artful curve of the shoreline and the positioning of the islands create a sense of limitless expanse. The beauty of this landscape is natural, but it is not an imitation of nature. It is a work of art. As a young man Olmsted had imbibed Gilpin and Price’s romantic notions of country scenery, and the Brown-designed parks that he later visited during his English walking tour—Chatsworth, Eaton Park, and Wynstay Park—made only a slight impression on him. As a practitioner, he was now in a better position to appreciate Brown’s achievement. He called Trentham “the best private garden in England.”
The country estates that Brown worked on were large. At three or four hundred acres Trentham is relatively modest; the park of Blenheim Palace, Brown’s masterpiece, covers more than two thousand acres. A modern landscape scholar has characterized Capability Brown’s method as a “standard formula of artificial water, clumps and belts of trees . . . stretched over a landscape as far as funds and property would allow, and clearly at a lower cost of planting and maintenance than a formal style.” That makes it all sound a little too easy, but it is true that Brown, who was responsible for building—and not simply designing—the parks, was concerned with maximizing his clients’ budgets. He invariably adjusted his ideas to the “capabilities” of the topography—hence his nickname. He was an experienced plantsman, but his interest was the landscape, not the garden. He was concerned with creating a unified experience, just like Olmsted and Vaux in Greensward. Like them, he built on the natural advantages of a site but did not hesitate to radically rearrange nature. He referred to this as “place-making.” Greensward was not directly influenced by Brown, but in the work of this great gardener, Olmsted—likewise a park-builder—discovered a precedent for the soundness of his own views.
Olmsted was broadening his tastes. He was impressed by Brown, but in France he admired the late-seventeenth-century formal gardens of Versailles and Saint-Cloud, both the work of the celebrated André Le Nôtre. He examined the great boulevards and rond-points that Haussmann was then building in Paris. He visited the Bois de Boulogne eight times. All in all, it was an intense journey. Olmsted’s itinerary, which he later dutifully reported to the board, listed more than thirty individual parks, estates, arboretums, and zoological gardens; he also saw many “public and private grounds of lesser importance.” The six-week tour stretched to three months. There was little time for rest, and the cold, damp fall weather was not ideal. Yet, on his return, Olmsted assured the board that he felt himself in “greatly improved health.” As would happen again in years to come, he was invigorated by a European visit. No doubt, the absence of day-to-day responsibilities and decisions lifted a heavy burden. More than that, he was enjoying himself. Central Park was known to British and European landscape gardeners, and he was received as an equal by the small fraternity of park-builders. When he started to work with Vaux on Greensward, he had been a novice. Now he was becoming a recognized expert.