(FORTUNE Magazine) – A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century by Witold Rybczynski Scribner, 480 pages

Calling someone the most influential landscape architect in American history may seem like one of those compliments that aren't--like calling someone the greatest mapmaker at the CIA or the finest power forward in the history of the New Jersey Nets. Anyone who has toured the outer reaches of our country's exurbia, with their barren lawns and scattered, halfhearted shrubbery, will notice that landscaping is a sadly devalued art form. But it really was an art form once, and the life of the man who made it so deserves to be remembered, for our own sake and for his. Frederick Law Olmsted gave us Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina, and the Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C.--the list is long and inspiring. They don't, alas, make them like that anymore.

They don't much write biographies like this anymore either. Witold Rybczynski's A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century is a model of the well-told life: humane, lively, learned but not pedantic, brief but comprehensive. A professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Home: The Short History of an Idea, Rybczynski means to tell us not only about the artist but also about the country he transformed and elevated with his art. Olmsted's life is a fine prism through which to scan America in the late 1800s, from the impoverishing ravages of the Civil War to the confidence and wealth of the century's end.

Born in 1822, Olmsted was the son of a well-to-do merchant in Hartford. From early on he had a love of the outdoors, combined with a mental restlessness that made him an indifferent student. He declined to go to college, which his indulgent father could have afforded, and embarked instead on a series of dead-end careers as a surveyor, a dry-goods clerk, a merchant seaman, and a farmer, all of which cost his father more money than college would have. By his mid-20s, Olmsted was an undisciplined young man with a wandering curiosity and no marketable skills. So he became, of course, a journalist.

Traveling through the antebellum South filing dispatches for the New York Times, Olmsted saw his interests coalesce: politics, public service, writing, and a love of the natural world. The dispatches were republished in a trio of well-received books. They made him famous, and they survive as some of the most astute and prescient writings about the slave economy. And they show something else: a subtle intuition for the ways the land shapes its human inhabitants. "Olmsted," writes Rybzcynski, "did not only look at his natural surroundings, he studied them and scrutinized their composition with as much attention as another might examine a great painting or listen to a work of music."

Olmsted became a landscape designer through a series of happy accidents. His journalism led him into antislavery activism, which in turn led him to government service. He was a friend of Longfellow's and Melville's and Oliver Wendell Holmes', and he moved easily among the aristocracy that controlled New York. He became an administrator of the greatest public-works project of the day, the "People's Park" in Manhattan, soon to become known as Central Park. With the architect Calvert Vaux, he submitted a plan for a vast democratic pleasure ground at the island's center, and thereby found the calling that would occupy the rest of his life.

Despite having a fine eye and exquisite taste, "Olmsted was no aesthete," says Rybczynski. In landscaping he had discovered the most practical of arts, fashioning from nature an experience that would "civilize" the common man as it refined his sense of beauty. "Artistry there was, certainly," Rybczynski writes, "but it was combined with city planning, urban management, public education, and public health." After Central Park, commissions poured in, and Olmsted brought the same pragmatic ideal to the planning of towns, suburban subdivisions, private gardens, and, at the end of his career, Chicago's legendary Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Some of his masterpieces survive, but much has been lost. The "creative destruction" of capitalism, which churned up the wealth that made Olmsted's planning possible, also obliterated many of his achievements in ensuing generations, as parks were paved over and suburbs rezoned. There's a lovely poignancy to Rybczynski's book--an underlying sense that, in our zest for private pursuits, we have lost our appreciation for the public spaces that Olmsted made his life's work. And there's a timeliness too, now that the political air is thick with talk of "sprawl" and "livability." What better time to rediscover Olmsted and reclaim the patrimony he hoped to leave us?

--Andrew Ferguson

ANDREW FERGUSON is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard