|
|
|
Book Review
| Forest and Garden, Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897–1949. By Melanie L. Simo. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. vi + 296 pp., black and white illustrations. $29.25.
|
| Melanie Simo's Forest and Garden explores wildness as a theme in literature (and also in some art) and landscape design and management during the first half of the twentieth century. She derived the title from Garden and Forest, a late nineteenth-century journal edited by Charles Sprague Sargent, which ceased publication in 1897, the beginning of the era Simo examines. The book comprises ten chapters divided into two equal parts titled "Across the Continent" and "Over Time." |
1
|
|
In "Across the Continent" Simo offers vantages on desert environments of the Southwest, the great prairie landscapes of America, and mountain landscapes west and east. In the final two chapters of part 1, Simo discusses San Francisco Bay, New York, and Boston. In this section Simo intertwines ideas gleaned from writers such as John Van Dyke (The Desert, 1901), Mary Austin (Land of Little Rain, 1903), Willa Cather (O Pioneers!, 1913), Emerson Hough (Passing of the Frontier, 1918), Walter Prichard Eaton (Skyline Camps, 1922), Charles Keeler (The Simple Home, 1904), and Mariana Griswald Van Rensselaer (Art Out-of-Doors, 1893, 1925). Those literary perspectives also are linked to the evolving vantage of Aldo Leopold, the landscape architecture of Jens Jensen, the large-scale planning of Benton MacKay, and the professional writing of New York Landscape Architect Charles Downing Lay, among others. |
2
|
|
In part 2, Simo's last five chapters provide a thematic (somewhat chronological) jaunt through a series of environmentally related topics: place makers and forest managers, layers of human habitation, roadside ecology, spirit of the landscape, and a land ethic. Here again, Simo melds discussions of literary works with her view of those who preserved or intervened in the landscape. In those chapters, Simo relates work by the Olmsted Brothers and discusses Lewis Mumford's writing, Edith Roberts and Elsa Rehmann's American Plants for American Gardens, Frank Waugh's musings on landscape design, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, and many literary works. |
3
|
|
The book is filled with interesting facts with a few revelations about the human/nature relationship and the evolving meaning of wildness. However, as one might discern from the description of the book's content, Forest and Garden is a disjointed read—much like a novel in search of a plot. The book's subtitle, Traces of Wildness in a Modernizing Land, 1897–1949, leaves the reader with the impression that the book will be a tour de force on the period between the nineteenth century and a more mature era of modernism and ecology after World War II. That expectation collides head on with the author's stated purpose that the book is "a selective and personal study." Even when the book is judged against the author's intent of providing a series of free- floating narratives on wildness, its merit can be questioned because of unevenness in the way individual chapters are written. In some cases, chapters read like works of literature inspired by the authors under discussion and, in other cases such as the Appalachian Trail discussion in chapter 3, Simo slugs through more mundane historical narratives. |
4
|
|
A "personal approach" also allows the author to rationalize her choice of subjects deemed important, the level of context, and the depth of explanation. The rationalization, however, does not diffuse a sense of frustration felt by anyone who knows the era and subject. For example, perspectives on wildness of the late nineteenth century were not really all that different from the period under consideration. Similar thoughts abound in the poetry of Walt Whitman, the musings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and design explanations by Frederick Law Olmsted and Horace Cleveland. What changed was a developing Progressive era populism, in which greater numbers of people embraced those ideas. |
5
|
|
The author generally ignores the amount of influence that various authors might have had on either the designers and managers she mentions or on the population at large. For example, in discussing John Van Dyke's writing on desert landscapes, Simo suggests that he should be better known. That opinion causes one to ask who read him during his own time? The reader also longs for greater explanation of other movements clearly connected to the evolution of thought on wildness during the first half of the twentieth century. In chapter 10, for example, a discussion of the Country Life Movement initiated by Theodore Roosevelt would have provided useful and important context to the political and contextual discussion already underway. |
6
|
|
In the introduction to Forest and Garden, Melanie Simo likens her book to layers built in a watercolor. While there are traces of richness, in a literary sense, along with many scattered insights, the book appears more like a random array of pleasing colors and patterns than an expressive and coherent painting depicting an important era in American landscape history. |
7
|
|
Daniel Nadenicek is a professor and chair of the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at Clemson University. His research on landscape architectural history and theory has been published in numerous journals. He also has published the introduction to an ASLA reprinting of Horace Cleveland's, Landscape Architecture as Applied to the Wants of the West. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|