Contact
Joan Hockaday
Joan Hockaday
Joan Hockaday is the author of Greenscapes: Olmsted’s Pacific Northwest, published by Washington State University Press in 2009. Hockaday has explored and written on landscape history elsewhere on the West Coast with her first book The Gardens of San Francisco, an exploration of the natural history — including histories of its parks and gardens — of San Francisco. She has given numerous lectures on topics related to her books at the Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane, the Seattle Public Library, and the Rainier Club, among others.
Olmsted in the Pacific Northwest: Parks, Gardens, and Campus Designs
Among the most influential landscape designers in history, the Olmsted Brothers travelled west around the turn of the 20th century to assist with the creation of parks and campuses throughout the Pacific Northwest. Each park, they advised, should reflect its natural surroundings and be different than parks across town. Olmsted greatly admired the Pacific Northwest’s native vegetation and urged public and private clients to retain as much of the underlying shrubbery — and the treescape — as possible. Today, we see the value of preserving native plants in our landscape, but are we a century too late? Or was Olmsted a century too soon?
Contact Joan at (206) 780-4655 or by email. She currently lives in Bainbridge Island, WA.
