Possumblog

But there are wacky treehuggers we can all look up to.

Frederick Law Olmsted,

nineteenth-century America's foremost landscape architect, was born on April 26, 1822. Son of a well-to-do Hartford, Connecticut merchant, Olmsted spent much of his childhood enjoying rural New England scenery. Weakened eyesight forced him to abandon plans to attend Yale. Instead, young Olmsted studied engineering and scientific farming, putting his agricultural and managerial theories into practice on his own Staten Island farm.

A tour of England and the Continent inspired Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852) and a new career in journalism. Later that year, New York Daily Times editor Henry J. Raymond engaged Olmsted to report on conditions in the slave-holding states. His articles, later published as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, undercut prevailing myths about Southern aristocratic refinement with keen observations about the plantation system and its effects on master and slave. [...]

And yep, this is the fellow who designed one of the world's greatest public spaces, New York's Central Park, a marvel of naturalistic design, created by

[...] shifting nearly 5 million cubic yards of dirt, blasting rock with 260 tons of gunpowder, and planting 270,000 trees and shrubs. [...]

Hey, sometimes Ma Nature needs a little...persuasion.

In any event, the fellow was a genius.

And he has a local tie for those of us in the Magic City. His son, F. L. Olmsted, Jr., and the Olmsted Brothers park planning firm created a sweeping greenspace plan in 1924 for Birmingham that was remarkable for its scope and technical sophistication. Unremarkable (given the other problems Birmingham dealt itself) is the fact that it was never fully implemented.

Posted by Terry Oglesby at April 26, 2007 11:30 AM