Romantic Gardens: Nature Art and Landscape Design

“Rus in Urbe” (countryside within the city)? People’s Park? Lovers’ Retreat? Birdwatchers Paradise? Central Park wears all of these labels. Its building and rebuilding as a scenic recreational amenity par excellence is an ongoing story that does not grow old since its administration under the aegis of the public-private partnership of the New York City Department of Parks and the Central Park Conservancy, moves in an ongoing line of success stories. For Edith Wharton, author of The Age of Innocence, the Central Park Mall is what its designers intended: a promenade for an engaged upper-class couple’s Sunday afternoon walk. For Henry James, the quintessential literary expatriate, it is an eye-opener on the success of New York City as an example of American democracy seen in its best light.

Wayfinding can become a pleasant recreational activity, if one is confident of being in a safe environment in which legible signage, familiar landmarks, or simply an innate sense of orientation make movement throughout a landscape with a logically designed infrastructure of interwoven vehicular, equestrian, and pedestrian modes of mobility, as is the case in Central Park. To experience in words and illustrations the close-up views afforded the visitor in 1869 when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1858 Greensward Plan was continuing to unfold as the great green heart of New York City join me in perusing an unknown author’s book titled A Description of the New York Central Park, which I picked off of my bookshelf earlier today, together with Bridges of Central Park, an elegantly illustrated work of architectural history by Henry Hope Reed et al, published by the Greensward Foundation in 1990. To understand Central Park’s circulation infrastructure of interwoven modes of mobility as the essential purveyor of the artistry embedded in its offering up of sequential series of views to visitors throughout the length and breadth of its 830 acres.