Making Nature More Natural

Nathaniel Rich reviews the Library of America edition of the works of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park, inventor of landscape gardening, inspirer of the national park system. Rich discerns an “unmistakable irony” in Olmsted’s theory of landscape:

“It takes a lot of artifice to create convincing ‘natural’ scenery. Everything in Central Park is man-made; the same is true of most of Olmsted’s designs. They are not imitations of nature so much as idealizations, like the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. Each Olmsted creation was the product of painstaking sleight of hand, requiring enormous amounts of labor and expense. In his notes on Central Park, Olmsted called for thinning forests, creating artificially winding and uneven paths, and clearing away ‘indifferent plants,’ ugly rocks, and inconvenient hillocks and depressions—all in order to ‘induce the formation … of natural landscape scenery.’”

Olmsted objected when his parks were “too gardenlike” and wanted them “made more natural.” That is, he hoped to make nature more natural than nature: “he hoped to create something of even higher value than nature itself. “Nature acts both happily and unhappily,” Olmsted writes in an entry on landscape gardening in Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia (1878). “A man may take measures to secure the happy action and to guard against the unhappy action.” Olmsted was at pains, throughout his career, to make the public understand that landscape architecture was a form of art. Yes, public parks have utilitarian benefits. They enhance public safety, are a boon to public health, raise real-estate prices, create jobs, and even promote democracy by bringing together members of different classes, age groups, and religions. Parks have a “civilizing and refining influence” that encourages “courtesy, self-control, and temperance.” But at the highest level, they also do what all great art does. They humanize. They invite reflection and self-knowledge. They awaken the imagination. A landscape architect achieves this not by striving for verisimilitude but by reconfiguring nature in surprising combinations that “cannot be directly associated with any former experience.” These landscapes are unique creations. Olmsted’s highest goal was beauty.

The irony isn’t only Olmsted’s. As soon as we say to some area of our world “this is nature,” we are bounding it off. It takes the distinctively human action of setting boundaries to create a segment of the world as “nature.” Besides, the irony arises, it seems, only if we assume that human interventions in nature are somehow un-(or super?)natural. That is: We (post-Romantics) define “nature” as what exists without us. Then we preserve or improve it, and it seems as if we are coming in from “outside.” But were were there from the beginning, creating “nature” as nature by drawing lines and naming it.