In addition to expertise and imagination, anyone who decides to create a park needs one thing above all: patience.

A lot of patience!

"We agreed," Frederick Law Olmsted summarized the work on one of his designs, "that you can't get any results before four decades have elapsed." And he modestly added that his plans are always designed for later impact , thereby sacrificing immediate success and applause for the future.

Freddie Langer

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Reiseblatt”.

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But what a success that wasn't!

In the second half of the nineteenth century he designed the Emerald Necklace in Boston and the Parc du Mont Royal in Montreal.

For Brooklyn, Prospect Park and Ocean Parkway.

And for Manhattan, Riverside Park, Morningside Park and, as the highlight of his career, Central Park, for which he turned swamps into lakes, lowered streets so that pedestrians would not see them, laid out a network of winding paths and avenues complete with numerous bridges over rivers and ponds, but also some roads, even had huge stones delivered for rocky landscapes, modeled the terrain and planted three hundred thousand bushes and trees,

The Trees: Frederick Law Olmsted will not have lacked the imagination to surmise how they will evolve and look like some distant day.

But vice versa, anyone leafing through Stanley Greenberg's photo book "Olmsted Trees" can hardly imagine that a hundred and fifty years ago these giants stood around as slender, delicate creatures in empty enclosures, presumably with considerably less space around them than they do now take with their mighty crowns.

However, Stanley Greenberg shows little interest in them and concentrates primarily on the tribes in his black-and-white photographs of more than two dozen parks designed by Olmsted between Wisconsin, Kentucky and Massachusetts.

Mighty pillars, so wide that no one can hug them, but at best they serve as a support, like a wall to lean against.

The bark is torn and fissured like no ancient face will ever be.

Nevertheless, the pictures are much less like nature shots than portraits - with nothing but likenesses in which one hundred and fifty years of wind and weather have left their imprints.

Olmsted Trees

by Stanley Greenberg.

With lyrics by Kevin Baker, Mindy Thompson Fullilove and Tom Avermaete.

Hirmer Verlag, Munich 2022. 160 pages, numerous black and white photographs.

Bound, 34.90 euros.