A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
It was the summer of 1850, and Frederick Law Olmsted found himself transfixed.
Before him lay Birkenhead Park in Liverpool, England — 100 acres of greenery embellished with rock gardens, pools, and grassy knolls. Tidy lawns were busy with playful working-class children, gentleman cricketers, and members of the gentry out for a bit of fresh air. Winding pathways led across graceful bridges to ornamental cottages, flowering shrubs lined carriage roads, and a flock of sheep grazed in a nearby meadow. Most remarkable of all, the idyllic park was open to the public.
“The poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy [the park] in all its parts as the British queen,” wrote Olmsted with astonishment in his 1852 chronicle Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. “Five minutes of admiration … and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.”
It was an image that never escaped him, and one that would profoundly shape America’s pioneer of landscape design.
“We want a ground to which people may easily go after their day’s work is done, where they may stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets.” —Olmsted, 1870
