When is comes to gardening many people don’t think there can be anyone famous for doing something that is seen as a hobby. However Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. is a famous gardener and has done many amazing things when he was alive. Olmsted was an American landscape architect and helped design many national parks. He has helped create much of the landscape for many different places such as Yosemite National Park. He has many different places named after due to the big impact, there is a park in Yosemite named after him as well as in Olmsted Island at Great Falls.

Olmsted received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, afterwards he partnered with his father in his landscaping architecture firm. He created Harvard’s first training program in landscape architecture, he taught there as well. President Theodore Roosevelt hand picked Olmsted to work on the Senate Park Improvement Commission for the Washington DC, this became known as the McMillan Commission. Their goal was the “restore and develop the century-old plans of Major L’Enfant for Washington and to fit them to the conditions of today.”

Olmsted saw something in gardening than most people were able to see, he wanted to create something that would last for years to come he states as “To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”

Gardening is something that has been part of history since the beginning. For thousands of years people have been growing their own food and has been the only way of survival for many people and is something that still applies today. While most people don’t garden today in order for their food it is something that many people find themselves doing. The reason why people garden is not the only that has changed over the years but how they garden as well. The tools that have been made today help people all over the garden easier than it was before. Machines also play a big roll in the way that gardening has changed over the years, the tasks that were once done with the use of horses are now done with big industrial machines. I have mentioned before most people who used to garden did so in order to had food to eat, however most people who do it today garden for fun and as a hobby. Gardening was different in each country and the crops that were grown were once only able to grow in that area due to the climate. The crops that were grown in South America were not the same crops that were able to grow in parts of North America. The climate was something that many farms had to think about when is came to gardening, since whatever they were planting would be one of their only food source. Today thanks to science it is very easy to grow any crops no matter where you live as long as you grow it in a controlled environment.

As people started to garden as a hobby it quickly became seen as an art. The placement of the flowers are something that takes a long time to arrange and is not something that can be done light heartedly.

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Gardening was something that I never thought I would be interested in as well looking forward to doing it as much as I do today. It started in my last year of high school in the biotech class I was taking. The task that we had to do was to clone African Violet Plants. This project took most of the school year to finish and after we were done I had a new love for gardening. Cloning these plants and making sure I watered them everyday taught me a new form of responsibility. Once the school year was over we had to take our plants home and take care of them ourselves without the help of our teacher, making sure that they got enough sunlight and water. During the summer watering and taking care of my plants was something that I enjoyed and helped me relax when things in life would become too stressful. Once summer was over and I started college I had to leave the well being of my plants to my mom and dad who took care of them very well, however I missed gardening myself. That is when I decided I would help my aunt that I am living with in her garden. My aunt, like me, has a passion for gardening and has enjoyed it since she was a kid as well. She taught the same techniques that her father taught her and has showed me the many different ways you could help grow healthier plants. Gardening has not only helped me relax but it has made me closer to my aunt and now we share anything in common. I have also felt a sense of reward with gardening when eating the fresh vegetables that have taken months and a lot of hard work to grow.

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