Rickson Outhet: Bringing the Olmsted legacy to Canada. A romantic view of nature in the metropolis and the hinterland

Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park and Montreal's Mount Royal Park and the firm he created completed a small number of projects in Canada, but his vision of landscape architecture profoundly influenced landscape design in this country, largely because of three men who trained with his firm and then practised in Canada. The least known of this trio is Rickson Albert Outhet (1876-1951), Canada's first native-born professional landscape architect. The recent discovery of Outhet's papers offers scholars, for the first time, an intimate picture of a Canadian design pioneer and an opportunity to assess Outhet's contribution to landscape architecture. This foundational article may assist future research in Canadian landscape architecture and urban design, but more importantly it helps place Outhet's work within the grander romantic tradition that influenced a broad range of Canadian creative expression in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.