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As significant as the mansion of a great Gilded Age estate like Florham, the New Jersey country home of Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, was its landscape. This book explores how that greatest of all landscape architects, Frederick Law Olmsted,visualized 1,200 acres of woodlands and scrub growth and swamps and transformed them into a magical country retreat for a family which could afford, and demanded, "the best of the best." The book includes planning drawings that illustrate specific concepts for the development of the estate and many paste and present photographs that show what was and what is.This historical record describes the origins of the estate and the people involved--from the landscape architects of Olmsted's firm to the men who dug and planted.
About the author
Walter Cummins has published seven short story collections-Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism, Telling Stories: Old and New. He also has two collections of essays and reviews-Knowing Writers and Death Cancer Madness and Meaning. More than one hundred of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Con- necticut Review, in book collections, and on the Web. With Thomas E. Kennedy, he is founding co-publisher of Serving House Books, an outlet for novels, mnd eamoirs, and story, poetry, and essay collections. For more than twenty years, he was editor of The Literary Review.
