This is the book mentioned in the article:Birkenhead Park was the UK's first publicly funded civic park in 1847. Three years later an American visitor was awestruck by what he saw.
"Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People's Garden," landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted later recalled in a book.
He took his experience away with him and built Central Park. Arguably the world's most famous, enshrined in a thousand films, it has British park DNA.
Frederick Law Olmsted, landscape architect, 1822-1903. Edited by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870-1957) and Theodora Kimball Hubbard (1887-1935). Published 1922.
http://archive.org/details/fredericklawolms00olm
About 39,000 words.
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