April 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Organizations around the world have commemorated the occasion by participating in the global Earth Optimism movement — an initiative spearheaded by the Smithsonian to “turn the conservation conversation from doom and gloom to optimism and opportunity”.

Throughout 2020, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and our partners are joining the movement by sharing conservation success stories from and made possible by the BHL collection. Follow our blog for conservation stories — past and present — and visit our website for more information and to explore our Earth Optimism book collection.

———————

“Nature, nevertheless, is the great teacher to which the artist who would hope to imitate her, however crudely, must ever turn for instruction and for inspiration.”

-Frederick Law Olmsted, Editorial: “Foreign Plants and American Scenery” in Garden and Forest 1 (1888)

Considered the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted co-designed many of the most well-known urban parks and landscapes in the United States in partnership with Calvert Vaux (Wikipedia). As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker, “Was there a patch of grass in nineteenth-century America that he didn’t design? Stanford, Prospect Park, and the Biltmore Estate, in North Carolina; the space around the United States Capitol and preservation plans for Niagara Falls and Yosemite.” In addition to his impressive accomplishments in landscape architecture, including seventeen large urban parks across the United States — most notably Central Park, he was also a journalist, abolitionist, gentleman farmer, and conservationist (Ranney, 3).

Olmsted’s genius was perfectly matched to the age in which he lived: “Olmsted lived from 1822 to 1903, a life which spanned the transformation of America from an agricultural nation of ten million people to an industrial one of seventy-five million. At a time when the frontier was closing and Americans were moving to the cities, Olmsted believed that nature had a controlling effect on man’s behavior. So he undertook in the course of a long career to save nature or recreate it for new industrial conditions” (Ranney, 3).

Born in Hartford, Connecticut to a dry goods merchant, Olmsted attended Yale University for one semester before acquiring a farm on Staten Island, which he eventually referred to as Tosomock; the author Witold Rybczynski speculates, “I have been unable to identify the source of Tosomock. Perhaps it is a combination of ‘toss’ and ‘amok,’ which would mean ‘flinging oneself headlong,’ a good characterization of Olmsted’s frame of mind” (Rybczynski, 77).

Olmsted, Frederick Law. Forty Years of Landscape Architecture; being the Professional Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Senior. 1922-28. Contributed in BHL from the University of California Libraries.

In 1850, at the age of twenty-eight, Olmsted traveled to England and wrote a book about farming methods there entitled Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (Gopnik). In a letter to his father asking for permission to accompany his brothers on the trip, which would last months, he is both concerned with appearances — he’d been “accused of irresponsiblity” and instability in the past — as well as leaving the farm untended that long. In a lengthy, impassioned letter “that would be almost comical were it not also touching,” he confesses, “I exceedingly fear my dangerous liability to enthusiasm, and I mean to guard against it with my mind in the future” (Rybczynski, 84).  Ultimately, this tour of England’s parks shaped Olmsted’s vision of landscape design (Foderaro).

Farm implement from Frederick Law Olmsted’s Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. 1852. Contributed in BHL from the University of California Libraries.

Olmsted’s ideals and principles regarding nature and its benefits for the human condition were similarly applied in his plans for public lands, and he has been called “an early and important activist in the conservation movement” (Wikipedia). By the time he was tasked with creating Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865 for the U.S. Government, Olmsted, at age 43, had moved through four distinct periods of his professional career, all of which held in common, “His personal quest for fulfillment…characterized by immersion in some endeavor to which he devoted himself completely so long as he deemed it to be in the best interest of the nation” (Fein, 15).

As Victoria Post Ranney writes in the introduction to Olmsted’s report, “Olmsted saw the Yosemite region when it was new to all but Native Americans…and his description of its landscape gives us a standard by which to gauge its health today” (xx). The United States Government granted the State of California the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove on 30 June 1864, stipulating, “’the State shall accept this grant upon the expressed condition that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation, and shall be inalienable for all time.’ The valley and grove were to be administered by the governor through a group of commissioners appointed by him, and Olmsted acted as first President of the Commission” (Fein, 39).

Though his report of 1865 was adopted by the commission, due to costs identified by Olmsted, it wouldn’t be until 1890 that Yosemite became a national park. (Yellowstone National Park, established in 1872, was the very first.) Olmsted’s report was suppressed, never to be submitted to the legislature (Ranney, xix).

Costs to establish Yosemite National Park prepared by Olmsted as part of his preliminary report. “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865.”

In the intervening years between his report and Yosemite’s official establishment as a national park, Olmsted moved on to many other projects, including his collaboration with Daniel Burnham to adapt his initial design for the South Park Commission site — now known as Jackson Park, Washington Park and the Midway Plaisance — for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

Government Building and Wooded Island. Large photographic print from The White City (As It Was), photographs by William Henry Jackson. World’s Columbian Exposition 1893. Digital Identifier: GN90799d_JWH_019w. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection at The Field Museum.

As the Chicago Architecture Foundation features on its website, “Now, Olmsted’s vision is the talk of the town again, as discussions continue regarding the design and construction of the new Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park. Michael Van Valkenburgh, who is leading the project’s landscape architecture, says he believes the center will provide an opportunity to bring the park into the 21st century, while restoring some of Olmsted’s plans.”

Whether a national park, city boulevard, or planned community, Frederick Law Olmsted was a visionary whose plans continue to expand, inform, and delight for the enjoyment of one and all.

References

Chicago Architecture Foundation. “Frederick Law Olmsted.” Accessed March 9, 2020. http://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/architecture-dictionary/entry/frederick-law-olmsted/

Fein, Albert. Frederick Law Olmsted and the American Environmental Tradition.

Foderaro, Lisa. “The Parks that Made the Man Who Made Central Park.” New York Times, October 30, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/travel/footsteps-frederick-law-olmsted-parks.html

Gopnik, Adam. “The Hero of Central Park.” The New Yorker, March 24, 1997. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/03/31/olmsteds-trip

Olmsted, Frederick Law. 1888. “Editorial: Foreign Plants and American Scenery” Arnoldia v. 60 (2000): 22-24.

Olmsted, Frederick Law; introduction by Victoria Post Ranney. 1995. “Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report, 1865.” Yosemite National Park, California, Association: Yosemite Association.

Ranney, Victoria Post. 1998. Olmsted in Chicago. Chicago: Field Museum.

Runte, Alfred. 2010. National Parks: The American Experience. Lanham, Maryland : Taylor Trade Publishing.

Rybczynksi, Witold. 2013. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century. New York: Scribner.

Wikipedia. 2020. “Frederick Law Olmsted.” Accessed March 9, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted

When Galen Clark’s The Big Trees of California, their History and Characteristics, was published, in 1907, he was 93 years old. It had been 50 years since he first came to live in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite Valley. He had spent most of those years in the midst of the giant sequoias, serving as a guide and educator, and fighting for the protection of these natural wonders.

“Guardian’s Cabin. Mariposa Grove.” Clark, Galen. The big trees of California, their history and characteristics. 1907. Contributed in BHL from Library of Congress.

The noted naturalist and conservationist John Muir met Galen Clark on his first visit to Yosemite, and later, in his writing on The Yosemite, called him “the best mountaineer I ever met, and one of the kindest and most amiable of all my mountain friends.” Along with Muir, Clark was instrumental in Yosemite’s preservation and development as a national park.

Born in Canada 1814, Galen Clark migrated westward at an early age. In 1857, suffering from severe lung illness, he moved to Wawona, California for the mountain air. Although he engaged in several modest business enterprises, including running a hotel and serving as a professional guide, Clark was never successful as an entrepreneur. During much of his life he was consistently short of funds, but his accomplishments as an explorer and mountaineer, as well as his influence as a champion of forest and wilderness conservation, were widely recognized.

Galen Clark was an influential contributor to the original movement for the protection of Yosemite as a park. When President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Grant in 1864, setting aside the Mariposa Grove and Yosemite Valley as protected areas “for public use, resort, and recreation,” Clark was named the first Guardian of Yosemite. He served as Guardian for the next 24 years and lived to see Yosemite National Park established—as the third national park—in 1890. His influence and contributions were acknowledged when an iconic mountain peak was re-named Mt. Galen Clark in his honor.

Photo of Galen Clark. Clark, Galen. The big trees of California, their history and characteristics. 1907. Contributed in BHL from Library of Congress.

The Big Trees of California has a generous number of full-page photographs, including some taken by the Yosemite photographer George Fiske. Many of the bigger named trees are included, and there are also images of the Guardian’s Cabin nestled in the Mariposa Grove, and of the Wawona hotel (now Big Trees Lodge).

Within the free-flowing border of green foliage and cones that decorates each page of text, Clark touches on most aspects of the history, biology, and geography of these fantastic trees. He discusses cones and seeds, and gives tips for testing seed viability.  He also provides an overview of the distribution of big trees in California’s other major sequoia groves—although his main focus is on the Mariposa Grove.

In discussing the sequoia’s origins, Clark shares his awe for this “ancient order of forest trees … contemporaneous with such huge animals as the dinotherium, megatherium mammoth, and monster reptiles long since extinct.” Clark talks about the difficulties of determining the age of any particular sequoia—as even fallen trees, where the rings are easily examined, exhibit many irregularities and variations in ring growth. However,  he does speculate that some of the older trees may have been at least several thousands of years old.

Galen Clark’s love of the giant trees consistently shines through in this book. Despite the inclusion of a number of strictly factual portions—such as a detailed chemical analysis of the gum from a sequoia cone, along with a report supplied by supplied by Professor H. W. Wiley, Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry at the United States Department of Agriculture—this book comes across as an ode to the sequoias. In the section on “Habits and Characteristics,” for example, Clark sets out to provide some strictly factual botanical descriptions of branching and leaf types, but soon segues into a lyrical description:

The bright cinnamon color of their immense fluted trunks, in strong contrast to the green foliage, and dark hues of the surrounding forest makes them all the more conspicuous and impressive. In their sublime presence, a person is apt to be filled with a sense of awe and veneration as if treading on hallowed ground.

“Wawona Tree, Mariposa Grove.” Clark, Galen. The big trees of California, their history and characteristics. 1907. Contributed in BHL from Library of Congress.

A highlight of the book is the listing and description of some of the biggest of the big trees in California–and it is good to know that, more than 100 years later, many of his “celebrated specimens” are still standing.

The General Sherman Tree: This giant is still standing and has earned the title of World’s Largest Tree (by volume).  It stands 275 feet (83m) tall and is over 36 feet (11m) in diameter at its base. It is now estimated that this tree is somewhere around 2,000 years old.

The Grizzly Giant: Clark names this old sequoia “the Patriarch of the Mariposa Grove.” He speculates that, despite the extensive damage it has sustained, the Grizzly Giant may be “not just the oldest living tree, but also the oldest living thing on earth.”

The General Grant Tree: Named after Ulysses S. Grant, this tree is slightly smaller than the General Sherman.  In 1926, President Coolidge designated the General Grant as the Nation’s Christmas Tree, and annual ceremonies continue to be held at its base.  This tree is also notable for being designated as a National Shrine by President Eisenhower, in 1956.

The Boole Tree: This tree was left standing alone in the Sanger Lumber Company’s logging camp after surrounding trees were cut for lumber, in about 1895.  Clark predicted a swift death for this isolated and unprotected giant tree, but it still survives on what is now U.S. Forest Service land in Sequoia National Forest.

Sadly, another giant, the Mother of the Forest, in Calaveras Grove, was killed in the 1850s, when its bark was stripped and reassembled for display at various exhibitions in the United States and Europe. It was already dead, though not yet entirely destroyed by fire when The Big Trees of California was written.

Tunnel Trees: Clark writes that riding through the tunnel trees “in a six-horse stage, or any conveyance, is a great novelty and should not be missed.”  The famous Wawona Tunnel Tree of Mariposa Grove was a favorite until it fell under a heavy load of snow in February 1969. Another tunnel tree, Pioneer Cabin, which Clark mentions briefly, came down during a winter storm in 2017.

Further Reading

The Boole Tree, from the USDA Forest Service
https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/sequoia/recarea/?recid=79961

Forest atlas of the national forests of the United States. Sequoia folio. By United States. Forest Service. Pinchot, Gifford, Smith, George Otis. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1909. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.119298.

Mariposa grove of big trees: a short history of the Mariposa big trees & the Yosemite Valley.  By: Leitch, B. M. Wawona Calif: B.M. Leitch ?, 1910. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.30311.

Muir, John. South of Yosemite. Edited and with a foreword by Frederic R. Gunsky. Garden City, NY, Published for the American Museum of Natural History, by the Natural History Press, 1968.

Sequoia Research, Yosemite, from the National Park Service:
https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/sequoia-research.htm

Vischer’s views of California: the mammoth tree grove, Calaveras County, California, and its avenues. By: Vischer, Edward. San Francisco: Edward Vischer, 1862. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.50746.

Yosemite nature notes. United States. National Park Service. Yosemite Natural History Association, Yosemite Naturalist Department. Yosemite National Park Calif, Yosemite Natural History Association, 1922. Volume: 35 no.6. BHL:  item/70374.

As part of our regular BHL and Our Users series, we’re pleased to introduce Dr. Karen James, staff scientist at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory (MDIBL).

Karen holds a PhD in genetics and has worked in her field for 11 years since receiving her degree.  About seven years ago, her interests began shifting towards biodiversity and citizen science applications and she has graciously agreed to answer some questions about how BHL has impacted that work.

BHL and Our Users: Dr. Karen James

Live auction in support of an extension of the BioTrails project to include  the plants of Acadia National Park. Karen James is second from the left.  Photo by Michael York for MDIBL.

When did you first discover BHL?

I was a postdoc at the Natural History Museum in London from 2003-2010. The museum was one of the founding members, so I have known about it from the very beginning. I started using it more regularly in 2009, in relation to my interest in Charles Darwin.  At the time, I was the science coordinator for the NHM’s Darwin200 campaign, and I’ve found countless uses for it since then.

What is your opinion of BHL and how has it impacted your research?

Twinflower (Linnaea borealis) by Mary Vaux Walcott. 1925. North American Wild Flowers. Washington, D.C., 1925. (Photographed by Michael York for MDIBL at Thuya Garden library.)

The BHL provides a much-needed service – free access to a wide range of natural history publications including artwork. As I mentioned, I’ve used it in a number of different contexts to support and inform my work. One of these was a fundraising campaign is to support an extension of my NSF-funded project called BioTrails. BioTrails combines DNA-based species identification (‘DNA barcoding’) with citizen science in Acadia National Park. The project uses DNA barcoding to validate identifications of invertebrate animals collected by citizen scientists in support of research on the impacts of environmental change. I’d like expand the project to the plants of Acadia National Park, and have been exploring some nontraditional funding avenues for this including private donations and crowdfunding.

I needed some visually compelling images – ideally in the public domain – of some of Acadia’s plants to illustrate our fundraising materials. A colleague of mine at MDIBL discovered a wonderful five-volume book of botanical plates – North American Wild Flowers by Mary Vaux Walcott  – at a local botanical garden. There were a number of Acadia species in the book, and we hired a professional photographer to capture digital images of some of them, but I wanted more. I scoured BHL for high-resolution scans of illustrations not only by Walcott but also by others (Walcott didn’t paint every species I wanted to include). In the end, I had sourced beautiful, high-resolution, public-domain botanical illustrations of 25 of Acadia’s most iconic plant species. We had the white-balance adjusted so they all matched, and we added both common and scientific names to each. We held a live auction at MDIBL’s annual gala to support the project; each high-bidder received a large, framed print of one of the illustrations, and everyone went home with a package of notecards. We’ll be able to re-use these resources for the crowdfunding campaign I’m hoping to launch in the next few weeks, just in time for the holidays.

How often do you use BHL?

Twice a month, but occasionally much more intensively if I’m researching something.

Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) by J. H. Emerton and C. E. Faxon, C. E. in D. C. Eaton. 1879. The Ferns of North America. Salem. 1879. (Photographed by Michael York for MDIBL at Thuya Garden library.)

How do you usually use BHL?

For research I usually just read online, but when I want high-resolution images I select pages to download.

What are your favorite features/services on BHL?

Being able to search by taxonomic name is HUGE. I wouldn’t have been able to find the images for my project without this.

If you could change one thing about BHL, what would it be, or what developmental aspect would you like the BHL team to focus on next?

I’d like to be able to quickly and easily search for text in the volume I’m browsing.

If you had to choose one title/item in BHL that has most impacted your research, or one item that you prefer above any other in BHL, what would it be and why?

I already mentioned North American Wild Flowers by Mary Vaux Walcott.   Another important one for me has been The British Flora by William J. Hooker (4th edition); I used it extensively researching a book chapter I’m writing on repeating Charles Darwin’s 1855 survey of the plants in a meadow near his home.

Image from National Air and Space Museum Archive, Smithsonian Institution

Download the full plate of the Piping Plover on BHL Flickr

The Piping Plover (Charadrius melodus) can still be found along the North Carolina beaches, but is listed as “near threatened” by the IUCN. Their sandy white plumage makes them masters of camouflage and allows them to effortlessly blend in with the Hatteras seashore.  The two biggest threats to the plovers are habitat loss and disturbance of their nests.

Download the full plate of the Seaside Amaranth on the BHL

Amaranthus pumilus (commonly called the seaside amaranth, seabeach amaranth, dwarf amaranth, or coast amaranth) was also a likely silent witness to the Wright’s flight. This ground-hugging annual, which once ranged widely on the East Coast of United States and grew abundantly on the barrier island beaches of the Carolinas, is now threatened.