The following is an excerpt from a recent interview with author Robin Karson discussing her new book A Genius for Place: American Landscapes of the Country Place Era.

Robin on her new book, A Genius for Place:

"I wanted to write a book about the entire Country Place period. But I had a lot of questions about how to structure this book because I didn't want it to be about an enormous number of different places. I wanted it to be a very thorough study of a certain limited number. In the beginning, it wasn't clear how many. At one point I thought it might be 50, but the more I looked and the harder I looked the more important it seemed to narrow the number and go into more detail.

Once you're inside a subject so deeply, it's very hard to see the big picture and to keep the whole in mind. So this became a major challenge, keeping the whole in focus. Even being so immersed and studying it in such detail, it remained clear that this was a cohesive movement and I wanted to write about it that way."

Her motivation for writing the book:

"The motivation for writing the book came from a desire to help the field, to provide scholarship that other historians could build on. And this was intimidating because I was making up the structure as I went along--you have to. I didn't know how all these different individuals would relate over the course of all these years until I had worked on the book for a very long time.

After I became immersed in the writing and the new ideas, it began to feel as though the new perspective was really going to turn certain assumptions upside down. And I think it did. People had been thinking about this period as being dominated by explorations of French and Italian ideas, imitative experiments that were undertaken to emulate European prototypes. But I began to see that Olmstedian principles remained very, very strong long after the turn of the century. I became convinced that the fundamental principles that Olmsted and others of his era had organized their work around were still very much in play during the Country Place Era and that these provided a great vitality to the new estates designs.

The book makes a strong case that soaring views, dramatic topography, great trees and other natural elements played primary roles in the design of these places, even as designers responded to fashionable European trends."

Robin on criteria used for selecting the designers and estates for A Genius for Place

"I wanted the survey to be somewhat representative, but my first criterion was quality. The book needed to include the practitioners that were the best. So I eliminated a number of fine landscape architects who just didn't seem of the same caliber.

I then aimed for a certain geographic distribution, to see how the core ideas developed over several regions.

Third, I wanted to focus on places that still exist because I wanted to include contemporary photographs as a major element of the book.

There were several additional reasons for this--for starters, describing gardens that no longer exist in this kind of detail is very frustrating for readers.

More important, histories like this one can be useful to the people, the stewards, who are responsible for important sites. If stewards don't have a sense of the principles behind the original design decisions, how do they know what's important? As a steward, you need to understand the meaning of a place. Put another way, unless you have a hold on the central significance of the design, you can't be a good steward."

Robin on some surprising discoveries during her research:

"The biggest surprise to me was the still strong Olmstedian notion of nature as a fundamental force in design. There's no question that this group of designers and their colleagues were still very much soaring on the wings of these great 19th century designers like Olmsted.

Like Olmsted, each of them also shared a deeply felt sense of stewardship and

responsibility. They really felt like it was their job to take care of the land. Individually and collectively, they were appalled by the rate at which open land was disappearing, even back in the 1910s and 1920s. The sense of vanishing land was inspiring conservation initiatives. These were springing up outside and from within the profession.

There were also so many very, very talented women landscape architects.

Surprisingly, in the 1890s there was actually less resistance to women achieving a strong professional presence in society and culture than there has been in other times in the 20th century.

Another surprising discovery is the very large role that clients played in the designs of the estates. Du Pont at Winterthur, Mabel Choate at Naumkeag, Edsel Ford were all very involved partners in the design process."

Robin on her favorite estate--Naumkeag by Fletcher Steele:

"It's just an amazing place. It has a kind of pungency to it, a specific tone. It's a very, very strong garden.

You really feel like you are transported to a completely different place. But at the same time you're very much of that place in the Berkshires looking west watching the sunset.

Steele's design is very responsive to the larger view. Every part of the garden relates to the views beyond, but at the same time there's an enormous amount going on internally that's interesting and stimulating.

Great gardens, like the ones in A Genius for Place, are constructed around both the big overarching ideas and the small details that charm and intrigue. Knowing how to balance these two dynamics in a design is the mark of a great landscape architect."