Contemporary landscape design practices in the Middle East and their roots into XIX Century California

A short anecdote, which may trigger some discussion:

• Early photo of landscaped Victoria Avenue, 1919 circa

It all apparently started with the infamous Gold Rush and -even perhaps earlier- with the Spanish missionaries settled into Southern California during the 1700s, who had discovered that the land, not far from the Pacific Ocean, was particularly apt for the cultivation of oranges and citrus at large. 

In any event, in the 1840’s, a frontiersman, William Wolfskill had created the state’s first commercial citrus farm, exploiting the huge demand for oranges in the Gold Country because it was well established that fresh citrus was useful in combating scurvy, very common among those early settlers.

It is just a few decades later, with the introduction of a new and specific species, the navel orange, that the production of citrus had moved up to another level to become so widespread and successful in California to represent the state’s most iconic and prolific feature. 

The cultivation of citrus was soon so common, that in Southern California large portions of its own typical landscape had become a synonym of orange grove. As much as -and this is where this story is leading to- the palm tree had done to the oasis of the traditional Arab desert settlements and cities. Throughout history, very often a single plant and its extensive cultivation has meant radical and peculiar changes in the original biosphere, and many of what today are considered cultural landscapes are in fact the successful and long-lasting work of man in modifying nature for the production of food and nutriment. But this is another story.

Back to California: as much as palm trees, which certainly require water to successfully thrive, the citrus was no different. Some infrastructures were necessary to water and export the product of the orange groves: not only the Gage Canal, built by Irish entrepreneur Mathew Gage after 1881, but also a road network capable of supporting the horse and buggy crowd and -nonetheless- a very significant newcomer: the automobile. 

Certainly after 1892, and following probably the steps of the much more celebrated Olmsted and Vaux, who by now had completed major architecture and landscape works even in California, Riverside landscaper designer Franz Hosp was called in by Gage. During the spring of 1892, the grading of Victoria Avenue began and, following Hosp’s masterplan the first trees were planted. 

Such masterplan foresaw extensive use of orange trees, who were in fact the symbol, the foundation, the unmistakeable visual representation of the wealth and a lifestyle derived from an economy based on the exploitation of the citrus: Victoria Avenue probably inherited some of its features from other well established urban infrastructures, notably Olmstead's 1870 Eastern Parkway, or maybe the even some earlier Italian promenades or passeggi such as 1865 Florence viale dei Colli by Giuseppe Poggi: Victoria Avenue presents suburban features similar to those of Brooklyn, while retaining the taste of a mediterranean panoramic countryside road, finally maintaining nonetheless its original scope, that of allowing crops to be easily transported for sale.

Pepper trees from Peru and eucalyptus trees from Australia were planted to give Victoria Avenue a year-round elegance. Shortly after, palm and silk oak trees were added. Riverside history books claim that this was the first use of a palm as a street tree.

I find this last statement, found on the Victoria Avenue dedicated site, victoriaavenueforever.org, an organization devoted to its current restoration and preservation, of some interest, although it somehow unfortunately still lacks some further analysis. It denotes nonetheless how by the end of Nineteenth Century, otherwise utilitarian trees (orange trees included) were being used as fully integrated landscape elements, not just in traditional urban parks, but also as an ornament to major streetscape design projects. Palms were, evidently, added later as the tree seemed to serve the purposes of the avenue itself, a year-round elegance.

Although one of the interesting aspects of the design of Victoria Street is the (still maybe disputable) original use of palm trees as a landscape element, which were to later become one of the most unmistakable brands of Southern California cities, it testifies nonetheless a crucial moment when palms were being somehow promoted from mere fruit producing trees, typical of specific cultural and geographic areas of the world (from the Mediterranean to the Middle East), to protagonists of the image of modern urban landscapes.

It would probably be hard to trace the historic origins of our current street design practices in the Arab world at large or in the Gulf Region, and how much western culture influences have left more or less significant traces in the process, but it is certainly true that anyone just driving around the Arab cities of today does not even notice that palm trees are in fact the most celebrated landscape feature along tree-lined roads. As much as the orange trees were extracted from their traditional groves to ornate the streets of Riverside, also because of their mere symbolic value, palms have long been exported from their traditional oasis of the Arab desert, losing mostly of their original utilitarian roles, to symbolize the image of the Arab contemporary landscaped environment.