UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "Landscape-Gardening" by O.C. Simonds

O. C. Simonds
Introduction by Robert E. Grese

A new edition of a classic work on the art of landscape design

Ossian Cole Simonds (1855–1931) was one of the country's earliest and most important landscape architects, the progenitor of the "middle-western movement" of landscape design. He laid out college campuses, arboreta, estates, parks, and the much admired Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. He was also an influential teacher, author, and founder of university programs in landscape architecture, and the only midwesterner among the eleven charter members of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

First published in 1920, Landscape-Gardening presents Simonds's carefully conceived and still timely ideas about an approach to landscape design in which nature is both partner and model. In eighteen well-illustrated chapters, he addresses the design of many different types of landscapes—from residences to parks to school grounds—and recommends an approach based on respect for natural systems and acceptance of stewardship responsibility.

Many of Simonds's ideas were remarkably prescient. He encouraged the use of native plants; he called for the protection of land for aesthetic as well as utilitarian reasons; he championed interconnected park and boulevard systems or "greenways"; he encouraged the planting of "nature gardens"; and he proposed thoughtful solutions to the increasingly ragged edges of early twentieth-century cities, warning of sprawl long before the word was invented.

Simonds wrote his book in response to what he saw as alarming changes in the American landscape. Through it, he hoped to teach both professional and general audiences how to read the natural landscape, and to respect and protect its beauty while creating ever more harmonious places in which to live.

This facsimile edition includes a new introduction by Robert E. Grese, which places Simonds's gracefully written text in historical perspective, elucidating many of the broad themes of the profession's early years.

Robert E. Grese is associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and director of the Nichols Arboretum.

Landscape Architecture / Gardening
368 pp., 60 illustrations
LC 00-028215
$29.95t cloth, ISBN 1-55849-258-5
2000

A volume in the ASLA Centennial Reprint Series

Published in association with the Library of American Landscape History

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