More than any other person of his time, Frederick Law Olmsted influenced the way in which people and nature came together. From New York City’s iconic Central Park to the much smaller and now significantly modernized Morton Park in Newport, Rhode Island, Olmsted’s designs for areas of recreation and nature-inspired rejuvenation in the rapidly urbanizing Nineteenth Century America – and to a lesser degree Canada – are still with us in a host of ways beyond our everyday awareness. Which is why I was so excited to learn of the publication by Johns Hopkins University Press of Frederick Law Olmsted; Plans and Views of Public Parks in May of 2015 as an addition to their Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted series.

With its four-hundred-seventy images ad explanations of Olmsted’s original designs for some of the most note-worthy public parks to be found in the U. S. and Canada, I am very much looking forward to the opportunity the book will present to peer into the mind of a man who was not just one of the most prolific of landscape designers and civil engineers the world has yet known but also one of the Nineteenth Century’s true polymaths.

For those who might not be particularly familiar with the life and work of Mr. Olmsted, and who would like perhaps to acquire a bit more understanding of him, his work, and his times in order better to appreciate this forthcoming publication, I can highly recommend Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing In The Distance; Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century as a very worthwhile book to read between now and May.