Leaves of Hardy Oaks and Maples.

New York, 1880. 8vo, half pebbled brown leather with brown cloth, gilt-title label at front-cover, mottled green and red endpapers. Manuscript title on stiff leaf, ms. table of contents (2 pp.) on stiff leaves, 20 leaf specimens on 20 stiff leaves, with ms. captions and tissue guards.

A fine herbarium comprising leaves from various ornamental maple and oak trees, compiled by the eminent New York City landscape architect Samuel Parsons Jr. one year before he commenced his decades-long work on Central Park.

This handsomely assembled volume consists of a manuscript title-page, table of contents, and the mounted leaves of twelve varieties of Japanese Maple (Purple Leaf, Blood Leaf, etc.); two varieties of Sycamore Maple as well as the Ash-leaved Maple and the Red Colchicum Maple; and four Oaks (Golden, Silver, Purple, and Cut-leaved). Each leaf or frond is carefully mounted for the most illustrative effect and neatly identified in manuscript by its common name in the lower margin. The Latin names for each appear in the table of contents.

While Parsons doubtless created this volume for professional reference purposes, one senses in it as well his passion for the forms of foliage, and, in his statement of his profession on the title-page, a certain degree of pride in his work in an emerging field that did much to improve the health and quality of life of urban Americans.

Born in New Bedford, Mass., Samuel Parsons Jr. (1844–1923) was a leading landscape architect during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, his thirty-year career of designing public parks and private gardens spanning twenty states. After studying at Yale, he joined his family’s business, Parsons & Sons Co., for which he designed the gardens of country estates. Through this work, he came into contact with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, joining Vaux’s firm, Vaux & Co. as an apprentice from 1879 to 1884, and later becoming a partner (1887–95).

In 1881, the New York City Dept. of Parks contracted with Vaux & Co., and Parsons was made Superintendent of Planting. Along with Vaux and Olmsted—the original designers of Central Park—Parsons undertook work on the Park that set the standards for public parks in America during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. After Vaux's death in 1895, Parsons became the new head Landscape Architect to the City of New York, and in 1901 was appointed Landscape Architect for Greater New York—a position that included overseeing Central Park. In the early 1900s, when he was selected to design San Diego’s City Park (later Balboa Park), Parsons was one of the country’s leading landscape architects. At the time of his resignation in 1911, he was the final ‘direct link’ in New York City to Vaux and Olmsted. During his career, he facilitated the shift of New York City’s parks from Picturesque to Beaux Arts designs. According to historian Charles Birnbaum, “What makes Parsons’ career unique is both its length and the fact that he practiced when the profession was emerging and defining its role during the Picturesque and Reform Eras” (Birnbaum quoted in Balboa Park Conservancy, Samuel Parsons Jr…). In his private practice, Parsons’s work also embraced playgrounds, cemeteries, campus plans, housing developments, and various other landscapes. He was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, serving as its president in 1902 and 1906.

A lovely artifact of one of the great careers in American landscape architecture.

REFERENCES: Balboa Park Conservancy. Samuel Parsons Jr… (2018) at balboaparkconservancy.org; Samuel Parsons, Jr. at tclf.org; The Art of Landscape Architecture, Samuel Parsons Jr. at lalh.org

CONDITION: Good, extremities rubbed; a few small losses to leaf specimens; some pages moderately foxed; one stiff leaf detaching; some insect damage to lower inside corners of two endpapers and title leaf.