On my recent visit to New York and Central Park, I was able to explore some of the northern Park, including the Ravine, the Loch, Huddlestone Arch, and Montanye's Rivulet, which flows beneath the Arch. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, creators of Central Park, were deeply influenced by the Picturesque style, increasingly popular since the 18th century, which emphasized the pastoral, the rural, and the humble. Vaux and Olmsted intended the Park to create a "surrogate for rural beauty", according to Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, author of Romantic Gardens: Nature, Art and Landscape Design. Olmsted was also enamored of the lushness of the tropics, and how it conveyed the bounty of nature, like the Hudson River painter Frederick Church, and many of the plantings in Central Park reflect that. He wrote in a letter to the Park's head gardener that he "sought the effect produced by the superabundant creative power, infinite resource, and liberality of Nature--the childish playfulness and profuse careless utterance of Nature." 
To the right is Huddlestone Arch--Vaux instructed the men building the Arch to only select boulders from within the Park. The huge rocks are held together solely by gravity and friction-- there is no mortar, nails or support beams. Walking through this area, I heard the sound of the stream as it descended the Ravine--on a weekday there were few people around. I could have been out on a forest walk in the countryside--I experienced everything that Vaux and Olmsted intended!
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