Sheep Meadow is quiet on this Wednesday morning in June. The guitar-strummers and sunbathers who lounged on its lawn yesterday are gone, and now its only occupants are the elms and sycamores that cluster along its edge, where I now stand with the Central Park Conservancy’s historian of the past forty years, Sara Cedar Miller. I have come to the leafy center of Manhattan on a quest to find traces, however faint, of parkmaker Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1854 horseback ride across Texas. I may be 1,800 miles from the heart of Texas, but I’m drawn to the alluring, if unprovable, theory that this famous green sward—borrowing the word Olmsted and his partner Calvin Vaux used when they designed this park in 1858—could be inspired by the upper Guadalupe River and its surroundings in the Hill Country, the land that Olmsted loved most when traveling through Texas just a few years before he became the architect of the world’s most famous park.
Today, Olmsted is known as the father of landscape architecture, a pioneer who created some of the nation’s most beautiful green spaces—most famously Central Park and Prospect Park, but also the grounds of the U.S. Capitol; Boston’s Emerald Necklace chain of parks, and Asheville’s Biltmore Estate, alongside about one hundred others. He also designed a slew of the country’s prettiest college campuses, from Stanford to Cornell. None of his public works were in Texas, but he traveled across the state for four months in 1853 and 1854, and published three books about his adventures, so it’s clear that his time there left a mark. I’ve come to Central Park to find out, what, exactly, that mark looks like.
“What Olmsted wanted was for people to come into the park and immediately get a sense of the countryside,” says Miller. A brisk walker and talker, she appears far younger than her eighty years as she leads me through the park on one of her last days before retirement. She’s written four books, including Seeing Central Park, The Official Guide to the World’s Greatest Urban Park, and is quick to correct me when I say “Sheep’s Meadow” instead of “Sheep.” The park’s backstories flow from her: how Olmsted invited newspaper editors on a picnic by the lake to sway public opinion in favor of building the now-beloved cast-iron Bow Bridge, or how his first try at planting prized American elms on the grand mall went awry: the trees were too big to survive and died within a year. I am lucky—a tour with Miller is as close as anyone could get to walking these paths with Olmsted and Vaux themselves.
Sheep Meadow may feel like the countryside, but it was the park’s most expensive landscape to build. Olmsted and Vaux took a swampy field, filled it with four feet of dirt, and blasted out any ancient schist rock that got in the way—all to make it look so natural you’d think it’d always been here. And ever since I read A Journey Through Texas, Olmsted’s effusive and delightful account of his four months traveling in Texas as a reporter for the New York Daily Times, I’ve been fixated on the implausible notion that this sward could be a cousin, distant but still related, to the Texas Hill Country. And that connection goes even deeper considering that Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the woman who founded the Central Park Conservancy in 1980 and restored the overused and barren Sheep Meadow back to its former glory, grew up in San Antonio and was shaped by her early years exploring family land, the CL Browning Ranch, outside of Johnson City.
Olmsted had a love of vast, open spaces, which certainly feels very Texan. He was also interested in juxtapositions. “He had a vision to contrast the infinite with the intimate,” Miller says, diving right into the more sublime ideas that fill Olmsted’s writing. “The infinite are the large meadows like this one and the large bodies of water, with the whole idea being that you could see forever. And these contrast with the intimate spaces like the woodlands and streams. You would walk from one to the other, like an art gallery . . . The views were the thing that rang most deeply with him about Texas.”
Like the keen, observant traveler he was, Olmsted imprinted views of Texas in his mind, taking them with him. The infinite feel of Sheep Meadow, with its copse of trees in the distance, is not so unlike a Texas prairie dotted with live oaks, a vision which, when Olmsted saw it for the first time, impressed him so much he had to stop and immediately draw it, not knowing there would be many more such prairies and live oaks the further west he rode. As he writes in A Journey Through Texas: “The live-oaks, standing alone or in picturesque group near and far upon the clean sward, which rolled in long waves that took, on their various slopes bright light or half shadows from the afternoon sun, continued to make an effect which was very new and striking, though still natural, like a happy new melody.”
The budding architect must have internalized this happy new melody, tucking it away for future use. Miller reminds me that Olmsted was riveted by landscapes from the time he was three, when his father took him out on horseback near their home in Hartford, Connecticut, just to admire the views. “He remembered those mental pictures. So when he got to Texas, even before Central Park, it was all there. It was ready to be this creation.”
If this all still sounds like a bit of a stretch, consider that Olmsted spoke about his Texas inspiration directly in an 1868 address to the Prospect Park Scientific Association. In his inspired but rambling speech, he shared how his park design philosophies sprung in part from his days of camping in the Texas Hill Country. His criteria for selecting a good campsite, he told the crowd, are the same “governing circumstances” that make a beautiful, functional park, including water close by, pastures for his horse, and woodlands to provide firewood and privacy (in his traveling party’s case, protection from horse thieves and other marauders). And last but certainly not least, he always pitched his tent in a scenic spot: “We made it a point to secure as much beauty as possible in the view from our tent door,” he wrote.
After Miller’s tour of Central Park through an Olmsted lens, I now want to see that beauty he secured through his tent door in the Hill Country. “Western Texas had charmed us,” he writes in A Journey Through Texas, “and of all Western Texas the upper Guadalupe seemed, all things considered, the most attractive point.” He gushes over the riverbank cypresses that “rise superbly from the very edge like ornamental columns,” and the wildflower-filled prairies, which he described as “radiant and delicious.” He was so enthusiastic about the upper Guadalupe, particularly the hilly limestone region surrounding Sisterdale, that he considered buying land there, making him an early forerunner to the cadre of out-of-state celebrities—Paul Simon, Sandra Bullock, James Marsden—who’ve ditched New York and L.A. for a piece of the Hill County. He writes, “To any friend of mine who has faith in pure air and pure water, and is obliged to run from a northern winter, I cannot recommend a pleasanter spot to pass his exile than this.”
Inspired by FLO, as his modern-day fans call him, I book the last tent site available at the Guadalupe River State Park on a Monday in mid-June: Wagon Ford Number 88. Upon arrival, I quickly realize that Number 88 will not be offering a view of the infinite or the intimate—instead I will be gazing upon elaborate family tent compounds with piles of pink plastic inner tubes, coolers, and jumbo-sized bottles of Sprite on metal picnic tables. Things have changed since 1854. Maybe securing a view of a bunch of Yeti coolers would have suited Olmsted just fine.
The sweet relief of the Guadalupe River, however, is just a stone’s throw from my campsite. “The water . . . has a delicate, cool, blue-green color,” Olmsted wrote. “The rocky banks are clean and inviting. . . . You want a silent canoe to penetrate it; yet would be loath to desecrate its deep beauty.” As I begin my fifteen-minute walk down to the river, I hear the squeals of happy children and speakers blasting Shania Twain. To find the quiet serenity that Olmsted described, I’ll need to venture a little farther.
Not too far, though. It’s a twenty-minute drive to the Bauer Unit, a much less popular section of the park that can only be accessed by driving to the other side of the river. After many turns down remote roads, I pull up to the parking lot where there is not a single vehicle, just a sign across a gate that says “Bauer Unit, Entrance Fee Required.”
There are several trails, all named after the German families who once lived here. I choose the most direct path to the river, hearing only the crunch of my boots and the cheerful sounds of late afternoon birdsong. A flicker of yellow and green in the cedar woods to my left tells me that the painted buntings that frequent this park every summer are here, too. I pass through sticky cobwebs strung across the road; their advanced designs tell me that no one has walked this path in a long time. I spot the old Bauer House, a traditional German “fachwerk” dwelling circa 1878 that is now under repair. A squeaky windmill still pumps water into its well. The road opens into an open meadow of purple thistles and sharp grasses that scratch my legs.
At last, the path turns into a narrow sloping trail, and I see the river, as quiet and breathtaking as it must have been for Olmsted and his brother when they saw it for the first time. The water, that delicate blue-green, sparkles over rocks in the late afternoon light. Cypresses, some likely older than Olmsted, tower over the bank in a perfect line, recalling those ornamental columns Olmsted described. The dangling moss he noted for its “weird” gray color and “pendulous motion” is there, still swaying on the cypress limbs. Aside from the army of cicadas shouting in end-of-day abandon, I’m the only one here. I lower myself into the knee-high water and float on my back.
I am worlds away from Central Park, but Sheep Meadow and my walk with Miller feel close at hand. As on our tour, I have just hiked through all of those qualities Olmsted sought when picking out his Texas campsite and in making a park: the woodlands, the pasturage, the water, the protection, and bliss-making beauty. There seems to be no better way to get a sliver of the infinite than floating on my back beneath the blue sky, or to zoom in on the intimate as sitting in the roots of an old cypress. As Miller had said, Olmsted became a recorder of landscapes as a young child. These Hill Country scenes were part of the rich inventory of views he would use in his parkmaking future.
That night back in my tent, dissatisfied with my view of other campers’ pool floats and coolers, I turn my door toward the moon. It ducks in and out of the clouds, flashing on the live oak branches overhead. Content that I, too, have now secured as much beauty as possible from my tent door, I remember Olmsted’s words about how the Texas sky seems nearer than in other places, and that “the firmament appears more effulgent than in any part of the northern or southern hemisphere in which I have been.” I see what he means. The infinite and the intimate are right here.
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