Page 108

THE CRAFTSMAN
                       A WOODSIDE, FRANKLIN PARK
,Mainly, the value of a park depends on the disposition and quality of its
woods, and the relation
                  of its woods to other natural features. "-Olmsted
Toby's garden. Invariably will they be
encountered when the fundamental impor-
tance of utility is forgotten.
   All of Mr. Olmsted's work was designed
first of all with a view to utility. With
that principle as his starting point, his aim
was to reproduce the beauty of nature.
The materials of his art were primarily,
with only casual exceptions of minor sig-
nificance, physical rather than formal, and
his art itself was an adaptation and ar-
rangement, rather than a counterfeit or
modification of those elements. If the norm
of his workmanship did not exist in nature,
approximations to it were to be found
everywhere; not simply in the forests of
Maine or on the rock-girded shore of Cape
Anne, where nature retained much of her
primitive aspect, but on the charming hill-
sides of Lenox, and the broad farming lands
108
of Connecticut, where man had left the
marks of his husbandry. Open meadow,
even though at a remote period it may have
been produced by clearing away the prime-
val forest, supplied him with material not
less legitimate than the umbrageous dells
and ledge-capped highlands of the Adiron-
dack wilderness. He did not adopt a scien-
tific formula, and aim simply to reproduce
the normal processes of nature. So he did
not scruple to substitute a gentle slope for
the harsh contour of a moraine, or to re-
move stones from a gravelly field and re-
surface it with loam. The artificiality of
the town was mainly what he wished to
avoid.
  Remarkable as were the effects which
were secured in the treatment of forest, sea-
side, and stream, probably the most delight-
ful work of Olmsted-at all events that