Samuel Parsons, Jr.
B. 1845 New Bedford, MA
D. 1923 New York, NY

Samuel Parsons Jr. was one of the most well known names in the field of landscape design in the early twentieth century. The son of a well-known Flushing, Long Island nurseryman, Parsons came to study landscape architecture with Vaux after graduating from Yale in 1862 and having worked for a time in his father’s business.  A protege of Calvert Vaux, Parsons worked with the architect until Vaux's death in 1895. As superintendent of planting in Central Park and landscape architect to the City of New York for nearly thirty years, Parsons was, until his resignation in 1911, the last direct link in the city to the ideals of Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted. The most widely read of Parsons's several books, The Art of Landscape Architecture (1915) was an affectionate summing up of the theories and built work that had inspired America's first generation of landscape architects.

 

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