Even though Olmsted never deliberately prepared for what was to be a great career as a landscape architect, his restless drifting in his youth and early manhood from one endeavor to another proves in retrospect to have been the ideal training for his later work. Throughout this text, it is interesting to watch the cumulative development of his career over the early decades of his life. Although he was what today would be described as a late bloomer, very little of what he experienced was lost on him. Thus his earliest career as a scientific farmer laid a solid foundation, for example, for his later interest in scientific social planning. Olmsted had, in fact, a remarkable talent for putting all his previous experiences to work in any new enterprise. Todd shares his fascination in discovering and attempting to sort out Olmsted's various careers and examining the interrelated threads running throughout his life, including those of his classic journalism in chronicling the slave-powered plantations of the antebellum South and of his interlude as head of the Sanitary Commission for the Union Army during the Civil War. Threads like these continually strengthened the whole fabric of his life while adding color and variety to the individual undertakings. (Preface).