As the nation celebrates the 100-year history of its national parks, some alumni and professors at the University of Virginia are remembering a man who was central to the evolution of many parks – a landscape architect who shared his wisdom with hundreds of students.
Before coming to the University of Virginia, Ben Howland spent 30 years as a landscape architect for the National Park Service – designing lodges, entrances and information stations around Yellowstone and a fitting base for the Washington Monument.
“The access to the monument was quite ad hoc, and the obelisk just stood on top of that hill.”
Beth Meyer is a professor of landscape architecture at UVA.
“He is the person who defined that large circle of American flags around the base.”
She studied with Ben Howland and was inspired by his dedication to the environment at a time when the modern environmental movement was just getting started.
“Some designers would simply cut the hill and fill the valley and create a big earthen platform for a road, but you could also do something that might cost a little more like build a bridge that wildlife could walk under. He was constantly reminding us that we weren’t the only species that lived on this earth, and that we had an obligation, since they couldn’t speak for themselves, to understand their habitat and their needs.”
While civil engineers were building, flat, straight highways across the land, Howland took a different approach to the GW Parkway in Washington, D.C.
“That beautiful stretch from Key Bridge in Georgetown out to 495.”
He was also on the ground during the Kennedy administration, when the park service decided to preserve coastal areas in California, Virginia and Massachusetts.
“That forested sand dune landscape would be totally developed right now if it weren’t within the park system.”
Beth Meyer says he was a gifted landscape architect but also a devoted teacher.
“He and his wife Sue lived up on Rugby Road, and after dinner he’d walk back to the architecture studio to check in on us and to see how we were doing, and there were many times when his wife Susie would come back to the studio about 10:30 or 11, tap him on the shoulder and get him home. One super late night, some of my classmates talked about the fact that his wife came in in her trench coat with her nightgown underneath. “Ben Howland, you get home!’”
That was the man Eric Groft met when he was first thinking of a career in landscape architecture. Howland was a family friend.
“My father and Ben were foxhole buddies on Guadalcanal.”
So Groft went to see him.
“I drove down in my little VW, and I went up to Ben’s door, and when he shook my hand, and I looked in his eyes, I knew then I was going to follow this man. He just had a way of conveying this warmth and grace and love of what he did.”
He remembers a teacher who knew history and could read the land as he took students on a tour of the ruins at Barboursville.
“The way Ben could say, ‘See those lilacs over there? That’s where the privy was.’ Even in colonial times, they placed fragrant things around privies, and there was a depression where the privy would have stood.”
And he still recalls his professor’s eloquence in telling students where to put a hiking trail.
“His instructions were, ‘Put it where the bison would walk.” You think about this one ton beast on these hooves that are only about 8 inches diameter, walking down a rocky terrain, it helps you understand where to put the path, and the other expression Ben would say is, ‘When you’re done, no one should know you were ever here. We want to do things in a seamless, ageless, timeless way to make it feel like it was always there, so you’re really blending man and nature.’”
Unlike other academics, Howland spoke in plain English.
“You know, he wasn’t your typical professor. He talked in terms that you could understand. He was a bricks and mortar landscape architect. There was a no nonsense, no jargon, get to work, get it done, get it built.”
Like so many men and women of his generation, Howland loved to smoke, and he died of lung cancer.
“A pipe was only taken out of his mouth to sleep, which he only did a couple of hours a night, or to drink coffee, which he was also doing 24/7.”
He died at the age of 60, but in his relatively short life, he went far. At the height of his career with the National Park Service, Howland was master planner for the National Capital Parks Office of Design and Construction. He helped create gardens at the White House and the grounds of the Iwo Jima Memorial, and as a resident of Charlottesville he offered his talents to the community and the state, working with the Nature Conservancy, the Pumunkey Indians and the Ivy Creek Nature Center to plan and manage their lands.
