City Parks

Abstract

Many of today’s older parks originated as the private gardens of eighteenth and nineteenth century houses donated by philanthropic individuals to the town where they had made their fortune. The layout of these gardens was heavily influenced by current fashion which drew on the concepts of French landscape painters such as Claude, Poussin and Salvador Rosa who depicted harmonious scenes of man within nature. At that time nature was seen as beautiful, and the answer to the problems of the world were believed to lie in man’s harmony with nature. Many town parks still contain echoes of this design philosophy — the picturesque style of landscape gardening — in which an enlarged corrected refined and idealized portrayal of nature is presented at an aesthetic level. The wildlife component of the scene was introduced by the construction of aviaries, aquaria and sometimes a small zoological garden. So, in these early days the idea of nature in the park was seen as entirely appropriate, provided it was well under control.