• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2115 0

and soon Olmsted was receiving commissions from all over America. This is slightly surprising because Olmsted was not much good at building the kind of parks that people actually wanted—and the more parks he built, the more evident this became. Olmsted was convinced that all the ills of urban life were owing to bad air and a lack of exercise, producing “a premature failure of the vigor of the brain.” Quiet walks and tranquil reflection were what was needed to restore health, energy, and even moral tone to a jaded citizenry. So Olmsted was absolutely against anything that was noisy, vigorous, or fun. He especially didn’t want diversions like zoos and boating lakes—the very sorts of amusements park users craved. At Franklin Park in Boston he had baseball playing banned, along with all other “active recreations,” as he disdainfully called them, for anyone except children under sixteen. Fourth of July celebrations were flatly forbidden.

People responded by ignoring the rules, and park authorities obliged them by turning a blind eye, so that everywhere Olmsted’s parks ended up as much more pleasurable places than he wanted them to be, though still considerably more restrictive than the parks of Europe with their lively beer gardens and bright-lit rides.

Although he didn’t start landscaping until he was well on the way to middle age, Olmsted’s career was breathtakingly productive. He built over a hundred municipal parks across North America—in Detroit, Albany, Buffalo, Chicago, Newark, Hartford, and Montreal. Though Central Park is his most famous creation, many think Prospect Park in Brooklyn his masterpiece. He also executed more than two hundred private commissions for estates and institutions of every kind, including some fifty university campuses. Biltmore was Olmsted’s last project—and in fact one of his last rational acts. Very soon afterward he slid into a helpless and progressive dementia. He spent the last five years of his life at the McLean Asylum in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, it almost goes without saying, he had designed the grounds.

III

Though there are obvious dangers in speculating too freely about the style of life adopted by the good Reverend Mr. Marsham in his rectory, something he will very probably have dreamed about, if not actually owned, was a greenhouse, for greenhouses were the great new toy of the age. Inspired by Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace in London, and neatly coinciding with the timely abolition of duties on glass, greenhouses soon were popping up all over and being filled with all the exciting new specimens of plant that were pouring into Britain from around the globe. This widespread transfer of living things between continents was not without consequences, however. In the summer of 1863, a keen gardener in Hammersmith, in West London, found a prize vine in his greenhouse sickening. He was unable to identify the malady, but he saw that the leaves were covered with galls from which sprang insects of a kind he had not seen before. He collected a few and sent them to John Obadiah Westwood, professor of zoology at Oxford and an international authority on insects.

The identity of the vine owner is now lost, which is unfortunate as he was a significant human being: the first in Europe to suffer from an infestation of grape phylloxera, a tiny aphid, that would shortly devastate the European wine industry. About Professor Westwood we know a great deal, however. He had been born in modest circumstances—his father was a diemaker in Sheffield—and was entirely self-taught. He became the leading authority in Britain not only on insects—and really no one could come near him for entomological expertise—but also on Anglo-Saxon writings. In 1849, he was appointed the first professor of zoology at Oxford.

Almost exactly three years after the grape phylloxera’s discovery in Hammersmith, wine growers in the Bouches-du-Rhône region near Arles in southern France found that their vines were withering and dying. Soon vineyard death was spreading across France. Vineyard owners were impotent. Because the