Background
He was born on June 27, 1820 at St. Agatha, Austria.
He was born on June 27, 1820 at St. Agatha, Austria.
He received a general education of collegiate rank at the University of Vienna, studied at the botanical gardens connected with the university and also at the Imperial Botanical Gardens at Schönbrunn, and for some years subsequently remained connected with the latter garden.
Political troubles induced him to come to America in 1848, and the years immediately following he spent largely in the South, where his name is connected with the laying out of the grounds of several estates in Georgia, including the garden of the Cumming-Langdon house at Augusta.
During this period he also made a brief visit to Vienna, where he was appointed director of the Botanical Gardens, but he resigned in either 1856 or 1857 at the call of the commissioners of Central Park, New York City. Pilat's botanical survey of the Central Park site, made in collaboration with Charles Rawolle, resulted in the publication of a Catalogue of Plants Gathered in August and September 1857 in the Ground of the Central Park (1857), a thirty-four-page pamphlet. A later survey entitled "Catalogue of Trees, Shrubs, and Herbaceous Plants on the Central Park, December 31, 1861, with the Months of Flowering and Fruiting of Such As Have Conspicuous Blossoms or Fruits, " was published in the Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park, covering the year 1863. These surveys and a book on elementary botany, issued in Austria, were his only publications.
His lasting memorial is his work on Central Park. Pilat submitted an unofficial entry to the competition for design of Central Park. This gained him the attention of Frederick Law Olmsted, who called him to New York as foreman of the gardeners. Although the overall plans of Central Park were prepared by the architects, Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, credit has been given to Ignaz Pilat for the choice of plants, their distribution.
In 1870 the Board of Commissioners of Central Park was dissolved and its work was taken over by the newly organized Department of Public Parks whose first annual report (1870 - 71) contains Pilat's plans for the improvement of several of the smaller parks and squares of the city, among them the plan for the development of Mount Morris Park. At the time of his death in 1870 preliminary planting sketches of most of the parks under improvement had been completed.
During the last years of his life he also engaged in private practice, doing professional work for William Cullen Bryant, the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Cyrus W. Field, and others.
He died at his home in New York City.
Ignatz Anton Pilát was a well-known gardener in the Imperial Botanical Gardens of the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, but was forced to migrate to the United States. His most important commission, and probably his greatest Austrian work in the United Stats, was design and planting of New York City's Central Park. The much admired landscaped vistas owed the design and use of a wide variety of plants to his knowledge. Pilát’s characteristic style is found in many areas of the park. Pilat also redesigned Washington Square Park in New York.
He married Clara L. (Rittler) Pilat, they had five children.
