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A Photo Essay
UPLANDS IS RECOGNIZED AS one of Canada's most exclusive residential areas. Its social makeup, built environment, and landscape history are similar to Shaughnessy Heights in Vancouver, Calgary's Mount Royal, Tuxedo Park Estates in Winnipeg, Rosedale and Lawrence Park in Toronto, and parts of Montreal's Westmount. These elite, well-planned suburbs have been called "bourgeois Utopias" by the planning historian Robert Fishman, but Uplands rightfully claims more. Uplands was first imagined and given form during 1907 by the Boston landscape architect John Charles Olmsted (1852-1920). Dubbed "JC" and "JCO" by employees and friends, John Olmsted was the nephew and later stepson of Frederick Law Olmsted (FLO), the renowned maker of New York's Central Park. John was five years old when his father died; two years later, the widow Mary Olmsted married her husband's older brother, Frederick. Rejecting expectations that he follow in the footsteps of his doctor father, John apprenticed as a landscape architect under the close supervision of FLO. After thirty-two years of practice, and arguably at the height of his creative powers, he was persuaded, reluctantly, to design and plan Uplands.
By 1907, John Olmsted was the overworked head of Olmsted Brothers, the most sought-after landscape design and planning firm in North America. Seemingly indefatigable, John was often away from home for months at a time, criss-crossing the continent to evaluate prospective jobs and to personally guide, after 1903, scores of projects in western Canada and throughout the US Pacific Northwest and California. These included park systems for Seattle, Portland, and Spokane; and residential subdivisions in Winnipeg, Prince Albert, Calgary, and Victoria. Of many subdivisions on both sides of the border, John Olmsted singled-out Uplands as his residential masterwork. For over a century, Uplands has embellished the Municipality of Oak Bay (inc. 1906). Oak Bay is a middle-class, suburban community of eighteen thousand people situated along the southeastern, seaside rim of Victoria's Capital Regional District.
On first "going to the ground" at Uplands - once part of the Hudson's Bay Company's 1,120-acre (450 hectares) Uplands Farm-John recorded that the site was "virtually a natural park" and would be a "pleasure to plan." He likened the property's Garry oak and meadow landscape to the deer parks of English country estates. The...