Project Details Page

synopsis

Young George Vanderbilt hired 66-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to design the grounds of the 125,000-acre Biltmore Estate. Olmsted ensured the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountain setting was captured and celebrated. In designing his last and largest project, Olmsted demonstrated his wide-ranging skills from forestry management and civil engineering to the details of horticulture and garden design.

Young George Vanderbilt hired 66-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to design the grounds of the 125,000-acre Biltmore Estate. Olmsted ensured the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountain setting was captured and celebrated. In designing his last and largest project, Olmsted demonstrated his wide-ranging skills from forestry management and civil engineering to the details of horticulture and garden design.

Olmsted personally staked the lines and grades of much of the the three-mile approach road. His goal was to create a "striking and pleasing approach" with "natural and comparitively wild and secluded character... all consistent with the sensation of passing through the remore depths of a natural forests. Such scenery to be maintained with no distant outlook and no open spaces spreading from the road; with nothing showing obvious art, until the visitor passes with an abrupt transition into the enclorsure of the trim, level, open, airy, spacious, thoroughly artificial Court, and the Residence, with its orderly dependencies, breaks suddenly and fully upon him." [FLO to Vanderbilt_1889-07-12_LOC-FLOP-SF-Vanderbilt-im.35-36]

Olmsted approached the work on such an important project from a scientific perspective, and thus more than two-thirds of the estate would become the country's first scientifically managed forest. As an initial undertaking the Biltmore Herbarium was established to record all plants on the estate and all the new ones new ones added. The scientific collection grew to more than 100,000 specimums from throughout the south and southeast United States. The surrounding working farm and forest provided the setting for the formal residence where Olmsted designed the four-acre Walled Garden as a flower and vegetable garden with many varieties of fruit, but Vanderbilt wanted "ornament, not utlity" so it is filled with colorful plants that change seasonally. Other formal landscapes include a 16th-century Italian garden with three reflecting pools and a dramatic rampe douce and esplanade with an avenue of trees creating the forecourt of the 250-room Biltmore House, designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Olmsted also planned a shrub garden, ramble with pools and a lagoon. After Vanderbilt died in 1914, his wife sold to the government 86,700 acres of the estate's forestland, now known as Pisgah National Forest, which includes the site of the first school of scientific study of forestry in the country. The school (1898-1913) educated more than 300 students who would become the first generation of American foresters.

Olmsted was aware of the signifigance of the work he and Vanderbilt were undertaking. He described it as "the most permanently important public work and the most critical with reference to the future of our profession..." In 1894, Olmsted wrote to the Biltmore Estate construction managers, saying: "Let every man to whom this comes read it over two or three times during the summer and keep his best wits at work to bring about what is wanted. It is a great work of Peace we are engaged in and one of these days we shall all be proud of our parts in it."

(Also see Exhibition plan 02921a-010)

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