ABSTRACT
Just three months after Mr Jack Gardner of Boston, Massachusetts, passed away unexpectedly in December of 1898, his widow purchased a plot of land adjacent to the Boston Fens a few miles outside the urban city centre. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew that the ‘Emerald Necklace’, a chain of parkland established by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1880s, would remain green and peaceful despite whatever the industrial growth of the future might bring. Her parcel, facing the Fenway and the larger Emerald Necklace behind it, must have seemed the perfect site for the project that she and her recently deceased husband had long imagined. 1
