Maine Designed Landscapes Featured in National Database

New Entries to Free, Searchable, Illustrated Online database created in partnership with Maine Historical Society, with National Endowment for the Arts and Ames Family Funding

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announced today the completion of more than 150 Maine entries for the What’s Out There database of America’s designed landscapes.  The free, searchable, illustrated, and ever growing online database, launched in 2009, provides access to more than 1,300 designed landscapes nationwide.

What’s Out There has developed a huge following amongst heritage tourists, garden lovers, landscape architects, students, historians and others.  TCLF created the Maine entries working in partnership with the Maine Historical Society, and with funding from a National Endowment for the Arts Access to Artistic Excellence and Noni and Charlton Ames.

Page Terrace, Fairfield, ca. 1930. One of the images in the exhibit “Good-Will Hinckley: Building a Landscape,” much of which was designed by Carl Rust Parker.

From Augusta to York, along with Bangor, Bar Harbor, and Bath – and 35 sites in the Portland area – the Maine initiative has increased the What’s Out There database’s overall size by more than 10%.  Maine’s design legacy includes the nation’s first modernist landscape – the Camden Library Amphitheatre by Fletcher Steele – not to mention five commissions by Beatrix Farrand and the work of Carl Rust Parker, a member of the Olmsted firm who spent virtually his entire career in Maine.

Sites include 14 public and neighborhood parks, 22 gardens and estates, 7 campuses, 16 squares/greens/commons and more; and cover a diversity of styles including picturesque (Evergreen Cemetery, Portland), beaux arts (Capitol Park, Augusta), arts and crafts (Garland Farm, Bar Harbor), Japanese (Asticou Azalea Garden, Northeast Harbor), Colonial revival (Little Orchard, Mount Desert), Italianate (Hyde School, Bath), and Modernist (Camden Amphitheatre).

Camden Amphitheatre, ca. 1931

The What’s Out There database has also recently introduced several major improvements including a new mapping component and easier searches.  Users can now search by city and zip code, and the mapping component also shows nearby What’s Out There sites.  The new features also allow for greater use by hand-held devices.

“As visitors to What’s Out There will discover, Maine’s rich designed landscape legacy, which is so beautifully interwoven with it natural scenery, features work by many of the nation’s most gifted landscape architects and designers,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF founder and president.

“MHS is thrilled to partner with TCLF on this initiative. It recognizes the unique character of Maine’s landscape, and the state’s significant contributions to the field of landscape design. What’s Out There places the Maine experience in a national context, and makes it easy for visitors to explore regional similarities, differences, and influences,” says MHS Executive Director Steve Bromage.