彭蒙惠英语：America’s First Landscape Architect（在线收听）

America’s First Landscape Architect

By Karen Lingo and Steve Bender © 2004 Southern Living Inc.

Distributed by Tribune Media Services International

Living legacies: His landscapes remain as vibrant today as when he created them more than a century ago

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Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first landscape architect and co-designer of New York City’s Central Park, was a visionary. While most people see only moments ahead, Olmsted could plant a landscape and know what it would look like 100 years later.

During his distinguished career, Olmsted designed everything from parks to private gardens. Two places that bear his mark are Biltmore Estate in North Carolina and the U.S. Capitol Grounds in Washington, D.C.

Biltmore Estate

Spread across 8,000 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Biltmore Estate reflects one man’s wealth and another man’s genius. In 1889, George Washington Vanderbilt began constructing a 250-room mountain retreat near Asheville, North Carolina. If the structure seemed immense, the grounds were colossal. Buying up forests and farmland in every direction, Vanderbilt acquired 125,000 acres. He then hired Olmsted to turn them into a proper setting for his home.

Olmsted envisioned a series of small pleasure gardens around the mansion. He also designed the 250-acre Deer Park, a wooded game preserve like those found on English country estates. Most of the remaining land, some 100,000 acres, was planted as timberland. He recommended that bottomland along the French Broad River, which flows through the property, be used to raise cattle for manure to be spread as fertilizer.

The gardens at Biltmore are spectacular, especially in spring, but the 3-mile approach road to the mansion provides an unforgettable experience. “Olmsted worked in concert with nature,” says Bill Alexander, landscape and forest historian at Biltmore. “His great strength was his mastery of grading and the landform, the subtle positioning of roads and paths so that you don’t notice them when you’re looking across the landscape. It’s this grasp of scale and the earth that is the fundamental canvas of Olmsted.”