By the time landscape architect Bryant Fleming completed his first Nashville commission in 1923, he had already designed dozens of homes and gardens for some of the most prominent families of the era, from the Andrew Carnegies to the Everitt Macys. Unlike most landscape architects, Fleming was also a registered architect, and while he was certainly skillful at developing public projects like parks and campuses, his real passion lay in estate design. Nashvillians offered him plenty of opportunities to do what he liked to do best, and he returned their favor by executing some of the most significant designs of his career in Belle Meade.

Among Fleming’s 11 projects in Nashville, Cheekwood is the best known—and one of the very few Fleming landscapes open to the public anywhere. Now home to a botanical garden and museum, Cheekwood was originally the private estate of Leslie and Mabel Cheek, of Maxwell Coffee House fame. In 1999, Cheekwood invited the Nashville-based landscape architect and Fleming expert Ben Page to revitalize substantial parts of its original Fleming landscape. With some 80 percent of its original gardens again in place, Fleming’s boxwood garden and reflection pool, located directly off the wisteria arbor, offer perhaps the most dramatic landscaped vista in the state. And it remains one of the most intact Fleming gardens in the world.

Then last year, the Friends of Warner Parks, a division of Nashville’s Metropolitan Board of Parks and Recreation, began a similar mission to restore the stone and turf allée designed by Fleming at the entry to Percy Warner Park. On Oct. 6, with the restoration virtually complete, speeches by Ben Page and Charles Birnbaum, coordinator of the Historic Landscape Initiative, kicked off dedication ceremonies at the foot of Belle Meade Boulevard. With this, the Friends of Warner Park joined Cheekwood in positioning Nashville in the national forefront of preserving Fleming’s legacy.

“For a long time, Nashville has assumed an ethic to preserve places of historic, cultural, and scenic values,” says Birnbaum, one of the most prominent voices in the emerging landscape preservation movement today. “If you look at Fleming’s work at Warner Park, it is about a cultural framework, about using natural materials and seeing those materials as a scenic resource. His sense of structural geometry and spatial relationships was very strong, and yet, as you can see in his estate work, he had a craftsman’s eye for detail. His designs move people through the landscape, and they were built to last.”

Since his 1992 appointment to establish the Historic Landscape Initiative under the National Park Service, Birnbaum has partnered with federal and state agencies and all sorts of professional organizations—from colleges and universities to grass-roots community groups—to promote the stewardship of America’s cultural and historic landscapes. Be it thousands of rural acres or a half-acre lot, these landscapes, like historic buildings and structures, reveal aspects of our country’s origins and development—and to lose or sully them is to toss out a part of our cultural heritage.

Among Birnbaum’s many accomplishments, perhaps the most significant are the guidelines he developed for historic landscape preservation—which are widely regarded as one of the most useful tools of the new movement. “Before the guidelines,” Birnbaum explains, “we only had period landscapes. We had some Main Street restorations, but they were about creating historic scenes. They weren’t about historic preservation because they were never really accurate to their specific locations.”

The big turnaround began in 1992, when the standards for the treatment of “Historic Buildings” were revised by the National Park Service and renamed “Historic Properties.” Now to nominate a historic property to the national register, the guidelines require a new series of questions to be answered: Why is this landscape important? Who designed it? How has it evolved over time? “Preservation,” explains Birnbaum, “is no longer just about buildings but about the space those buildings sit within.”

To elucidate the situation, Birnbaum offers an analogy: “If you are trying to preserve a building that originally had Ionic columns, you wouldn’t restore it with columns in the Corinthian style. But that’s exactly what has happened. In the early 1900s, for example, American elms lined main streets, scenic boulevards, and avenues all across the U.S. Then Dutch elm disease wiped out virtually every one of them, and zelkova trees were planted in their stead. But the zelkova has a very upright habit. It almost looks like a corkscrew with its arms up in the air, while the pendulous elm had placed a welcoming canopy over the American streetscape. Now that disease-resistant elms have been developed, we can finally return the original color, form, scale, and texture to Main Street—and put the Ionic column back on the building.”

Explains Birnbaum, “The intent, of course, is not to mothball these places. Instead, we are dealing with management and financial concerns and issues pertaining to contemporary usage. We want the landscape to evolve—to accommodate new parking lots, for example, or recreational amenities—while at the same time, remain respectful of its origins.”

Just as at the turn of the last century Nashville took a lead in the preservation of historic structures with the restoration of The Hermitage, the city has again set a precedent by acting to preserve the landscapes that Bryant Fleming designed in Belle Meade. If the city, like the nation, has been slow to answer this call, it is because of what Birnbaum refers to as the invisibility factor—“because no one could name the people who had shaped the American landscape, no one could honor the places they had created.”

As a necessary corrective, Birnbaum took on the massive task of writing and editing the text The Pioneers of American Landscape Design (McGraw Hill, 2000) with Robin S. Karson, director of the Library of American Landscape History. Conducting extensive original research, they compiled some 160 biographical and annotated entries on America’s foremost landscape architects—including, of course, one on Bryant Fleming.

In fact, efforts to preserve Fleming’s legacy are already underway in other regions of the country. The year 2004, for example, marks the centennial of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University, where as co-founder and first chair of the Department of Landscape Art, Fleming was among the first to promote the study of landscape architecture in the United States. The major role he played in the developmental stage of education in the field will be a highlight of the department’s celebratory proceedings.

Fleming’s work has also come under renewed attention in the Louisville, Ky., area. From 1910 into the 1930s, Fleming, along with other leading landscape architects of the time, including Marian Coffin, Arthur Cowell, and members of the Frederick Law Olmsted firm, designed a wealth of estates, gardens, and landscapes outside Louisville, in Glenview, Ky., along River Road. But in recent years, the rich cultural landscape of the area has increasingly come under threat of river development. As a result, in 1999, The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed River Road as one of the nation’s most endangered places.

So if the name Bryant Fleming didn’t ring a bell, that’s about to change. The efforts in Nashville and across the country to study and preserve his legacy promise to eventually compose an important missing chapter in the history of American landscape architecture. And as the movement to preserve America’s cultural landscapes takes on steam, landscape architects like Bryant Fleming are on the verge of becoming household names.