Theodore Roosevelt Island: A Designed Wilderness Explored by Touch, Smell and Taste

Theodore Roosevelt Island looks wild, but its wildness was designed, and its history includes a plantation, a Civil War training camp and an explosives test site. The National Park Service describes how multi-sensory walks let visitors, including blind and visually impaired ones, explore it through touch, sound, smell and taste.

Memorial plaza, statue and fountain among the trees of Theodore Roosevelt Island. NPS Photo.

A memorial in the shape of a woodland

President Roosevelt, who served from 1901 to 1909, was an early champion of public lands. He created the U.S. Forest Service, signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, and protected lands for five of today's national parks and 18 national monuments. To honor that legacy, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. designed the memorial landscape to evoke a sense of wilderness. Thirty years later, architect Eric Gugler designed a plaza flanked by two pools and surrounded by a moat, and sculptor Paul Manship made a larger-than-life statue of Roosevelt.

It was the first living presidential memorial in Washington, D.C. The 88.5-acre wooded sanctuary lies in the Potomac River between Georgetown and Rosslyn, Virginia, and is managed as part of the National Park Service's George Washington Memorial Parkway.

Stone footbridge, moat and willow oaks at the presidential memorial. NPS Photo.

Walking it with every sense

The park's multi-sensory nature walks make the naturalistically designed landscape accessible to the blind and visually impaired community, and sighted visitors take part too. One recent walk began on the Virginia side of the river with a touch table of Native American cultural and natural artifacts. The island has a long Native history: English settlers first called it Analostan Island after a local group, and an elder of the Piscataway Conoy tribe spoke about what it means to his people today.

The group crossed the footbridge, passing from sun into the shade, and gathered before the Roosevelt statue. Two miles of trails cross the island around the central plaza. Stepping from the plaza's stone paving onto the softer dirt of the trail, visitors felt the trunks of the willow oaks planted around the moat; the breadth of the 50-year-old trees gave them a sense of the memorial's age.

Farther in, airplanes overhead were the only reminder of the city. Much of the island is wooded with native hardwood trees and shrubs that the designers hoped would grow into a stable climax forest. English ivy and periwinkle are the only non-native species they included, for picturesque effect, but newer exotic plants also grow here, such as perilla mint, also called the beefsteak plant. Visitors smelled the fast-growing invasive mint, used in some Asian cuisines, and touched the roots of a fallen tree that opened a window of sunlight for it. They smelled spicebush leaves, passed around ripe and unripe fruits of the pawpaw tree, and tried a jam made from pawpaw and spicebush berries. They also traced names and initials that earlier visitors had carved in trees, a destructive practice not allowed in national parks that has become part of the landscape.

The island is meant to evoke wilderness, though it is just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., and Rosslyn, Virginia. NPS Photo.

A history under the trees

The rangers also told the island's layered history during the walk.

Today's forest is less than a century old.

The boardwalk through the island's landscape is a multi-sensory experience. NPS Photo.

Walks like these give new audiences a way into the landscape, its history and its natural processes, which the Park Service says fulfills Roosevelt's wish to preserve America's natural treasures for future generations.

Sources

• National Park Service, Sense of Wilderness: New Perspectives on Theodore Roosevelt Island; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs showing visitors are left out.