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Adriane Fowler • Program	Rather than literally revisiting Olmsted's original plans for the Fens, this proposal embraces the park's current urban context and activities while considering Olmsted's intentions for the park's function and use. The intention is to bring the city, with its people, institutions, and water, to meet the Muddy River in selected locations and ways along the watercourse. • allow people to access the water in structured ways (in the traditions of Olmsted's "beaches"), • incorporate a system of stormwater filtering through planted and structured gardens, considering management and maintenance regimes in the larger stormwater system, • reclaim the Fens as a productive landscape (continuing the lineage of the site's vanished salt hay farms and the historic victory gardens), considering education as a part of productivity, • create spaces for active expression, both through the designed opportunities created for people and institutions to occupy the space, and through the kinds of plants chosen to shape the space. The first landscape area to be addressed is the MFA reflecting basin. The entire landscape between the stadium, rose garden, and Museum is reconfigured as a wetland garden, with stormwater diverted from nearby streets and filtered through the wet plant beds. A path brings urban dwellers and visitors into the garden, where they can experience for a moment the feeling of being alone in an open wetland, or enclosed within a stand of tall reeds. The wetland garden also eases the connections between the urban grid and the places of activity within and beside the park (stadium, rose garden, MFA). Plants are collected from endangered freshwater wetlands: their textures and colors create a painterly composition.

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