"Greensward"

Greensward

A red balloon tickles childhood fantasies,
floats within Long Meadow's embrace
of grand oaks and stately elms,
whispers "anything is possible".

White-throated sparrows serenade with age-old song,
thrushes industriously scratch leaf litter,
ravens wing their way over Payne Hill.

Exuberant fingers point, youthful laughter explodes,
and Olmsted's vision is realized.

by Margaret Bednar, July 10, 2015


I remember crying when I was about 7 years old over a balloon I had "befriended" for days and then seeing this short film in middle school years later.  The impression of this film has never left me.

I have been gone for over a week visiting my son in Brooklyn.  I thoroughly enjoy Prospect Park and am quite smitten with its creator, Frederick Law Olmsted.  Purchased a six volume set of his letters and it is quite a walk through the history of his time.  He was a man of many passions, the most known his "foresight of how large American cities would become and his designs for parks and suburbs to enhance the lives of their future inhabitants" (Central Park perhaps being his most famous - but arguably not his greatest achievement)  Niagara Falls, Capital Building, Boston's "Emerald Necklace" and so much more.  He was a journalist for the budding "New York (daily) Times and traveled to the South and became a leading writer against the institution of slavery in America.

PBS has an excellent series on him - Designing America - if you are so inclined to search it out.

This is linked with "Imaginary Garden with Real Toads - The Edge - what will we never outgrow?"  I hope I never outgrow a childlike wonder for nature and a belief that anything is possible.

An interesting article HERE, with an excerpt I snatched below. It explains the title "Greensward" a bit.

The "Pastoral" Style

Olmsted used the style of the Beautiful—or as he usually called it, the pastoral—to create a sense of the peacefulness of nature and to sooth and restore the spirit. The Pastoral style was the basic mode of his park designs, which he intended to serve as the setting for "unconscious or indirect recreation." The chief purpose of a park, he taught, was "an effect on the human organism by an action of what it presents to view, which action, like that of music, is of a kind that goes back of thought, and cannot be fully given the form of words."¹¹ In such designs there were broad spaces of greensward, broken occasionally by groves of trees. The boundary was indistinct, due to the "obscurity of detail further away" produced by the uneven line and intricate foliage of the trees on the edge of the open space. In other parts the reflection of foliage by bodies of water introduced another element of intricacy and indistinctness. The effect was reminiscent of parks on estates that Olmsted had seen in England, and it was the image of the rich turf of that country, which he described as "green, dripping, glistening, gorgeous," when he first saw it, that remained for him the model of the Pastoral style.