#GardenPreservation

#GardenPreservation

PRESERVING, SHARING, AND CELEBRATING AMERICA’S CULTURAL LEGACY

THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY

It all started with Ruth. In 1988, Frank and Anne Cabot’s visit to Ruth Bancroft’s garden in Walnut Creek, CA, inspired the formation of the Garden Conservancy and guiding the complex transition of Ruth’s private garden into a public resource became the Conservancy’s first project. Ahead of her time, Ruth was a pioneer of drought-tolerant gardening. Today, her innovative use of water-wise plants is increasingly relevant. Her relentless passion in creating and stewarding her nationally recognized horticultural masterpiece until her death in 2017 at age 109 is a model of creativity and commitment. Now a thriving public garden, the Ruth Bancroft Garden demonstrates the power of garden preservation to inspire and educate its local community (and beyond) for generations to come.

It all started with Ruth. In 1988, Frank and Anne Cabot’s visit to Ruth Bancroft’s garden in Walnut Creek, CA, inspired the formation of the Garden Conservancy and guiding the complex transition of Ruth’s private garden into a public resource became the Conservancy’s first project. Ahead of her time, Ruth was a pioneer of drought-tolerant gardening. Today, her innovative use of water-wise plants is increasingly relevant. Her relentless passion in creating and stewarding her nationally recognized horticultural masterpiece until her death in 2017 at age 109 is a model of creativity and commitment. Now a thriving public garden, the Ruth Bancroft Garden demonstrates the power of garden preservation to inspire and educate its local community (and beyond) for generations to come.

PRESERVING, SHARING, AND CELEBRATING AMERICA’S CULTURAL LEGACY

THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY

Copyright © 2021 The Garden Conservancy, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

#GardenPreservation: Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating America’s Cultural Legacy

ISBN: 978-0-578-91754-2

Published and distributed by The Garden Conservancy, P.O. Box 608, Garrison, NY 10524 www.gardenconservancy.org

The Garden Conservancy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in New York State.

Illustrations by Dana Westring

Essays contributed by Donnamarie Barnes, Lucinda Brockway, Lawana Holland-Moore, Walter Hood, Brent Leggs, Shaun Spencer-Hester, Judith B. Tankard, and Thomas L. Woltz, plus an interview with Barbara and Rick Romeo. Editing and project management by Garden Conservancy communications and preservation staff members Pamela Governale, Lori Moss, George Shakespear, and Anne Welles, with writing and photography contributed by Carlo Balistrieri.

Design by Kat Nemec, studiokatinc.com

Printing by Recycled Paper Printing, Inc., in Waltham, MA

THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY STAFF

James Brayton Hall

President and Chief Executive Officer

Donna Mortensen

Chief Operating Officer

Arie Bram

Database Manager

Claire Briguglio

Development Associate

Phillip Carruthers

Open Days Program Associate

Bridget Connors

Director of Membership & Annual Giving

Pamela Governale

Director of Preservation

Alyssa Helmon

Database Administrator

Patrick MacRae

Director of Public Programs & Education

Lorraine Mahon

Fellows Tours Coordinator

Lori Moss

Associate Director of Communications

Amy Murray

Open Days Program Manager

Sarah Parker

Director of Development

Kimberly Poons

Administrative Assistant

George Shakespear

Director of Communications

Pruda Vingoe

Senior Executive Assistant to the President

Anne Welles

Associate Director of Preservation

Elaine Zanck

Business Manager

Preserving Gardens in America

The founding impulse of the Garden Conservancy was preservation—the need for, and belief in, the possibility of garden preservation. The notion of preserving a private garden was foreign to Americans, even to most American gardeners, although there were certainly very well-known examples abroad—think Great Dixter, the Villa Gamberaia, or Vaux-le-Vicomte.

Certain American gardens, both public and private, had indeed been preserved by 1988, when Frank Cabot, with encouragement from his wife, Anne Perkins Cabot, decided to create the Garden Conservancy. Cabot, a dedicated and brilliant plantsman, was inspired by what he feared might be the imminent demise of an unusual garden in Walnut Creek, CA. For the most part, however, garden preservation came as a collateral effort to architectural preservation. In saving a great house, like Monticello, Vizcaya, or San Simeon, the garden was part of the package, rather than the central focus of the preservation efforts.

Why gardens came as late arrivals to the conversations around preserving other examples of American culture deserves further investigation and study. I believe part of the answer lies in the relative “newness” of this nation. As a culture, we are still too eager to obliterate examples of our history in favor of “the new.” The idea of preserving gardens has also suffered because of the notion that gardens might be fundamentally ephemeral and that ornamental gardens, and the act of gardening itself, might even be frivolous. This was especially true in a post-WWII American culture that wholly embraced the lawn and that may have seen large gardens as belonging to an old world order. We also have to come to terms with the strong possibility that misogyny may have played a part in the dismissal of the cultural importance of gardens, as in this country gardens (correctly or not) were often seen as the realm of women. There was a perception that men built houses and women created gardens around them. Thankfully, however, some gardens survived, though many significant ones remained at risk. Frank Cabot and a core group of his friends, many of whom were the same

women who created and sustained the Garden Club of America, were important visionaries. This interconnected national community of gardeners knew that gardens were underappreciated as cultural objects and that garden design had, for too long, been overlooked as a significant art form. They saw that the stories these gardens told contributed significantly to the history of the nation and that gardens deserved to be understood and appreciated in their own right. Indeed, America’s gardens, as our mission statement now asserts, must be “preserved, shared, and celebrated.”

I believe wholeheartedly that America is entering a new “golden age” of gardening. Gardens can be agents of positive change—for individuals, as well as for communities as a whole. Since its founding in 1989, the Conservancy’s preservation work has led the way, and will continue to do so, in both deed and word.

Many thanks to the important voices who have generously agreed to address the multi-faceted and nuanced aspects of this growing field through their essays for this publication. We also appreciate the generous contribution of artist and Garden Conservancy board member Dana Westring; his beautiful illustrations capture both the variety and the joy that gardens offer to all. My thanks also to all members of our national board for their leadership and support of our efforts and to our members, Fellows, and friends whose generous financial contributions made this project possible. Thanks to Carlo Balistrieri for writing eight project profiles for this book. The staff of the Garden Conservancy has also worked mightily to see this book to completion.

I hope you will join us in our mission and continue to find inspiration in America’s gardens.

What Are We Preserving?

Gardens, in one way or another, have always been an expression of our values, culture, and the enduring connection we have to the land. They are portraits of place, imagination, and infinite opportunities; sometimes capturing wildness, always capturing our spirit. In their public iteration, gardens are community resources—sharing intangible heritage and engaging diverse perspectives. When we preserve a garden, we are preserving something essential to what it means to be human.

If there was ever a turning point for gardens in our lifetime, it has been the past year and a half. Across the country and throughout the world, there has been a collective awakening and collective need to connect with nature and to be in gardens. We know intuitively, nature is a great source of stress relief. It is where we originated. The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed just how important gardens are to us.

As playwright Lorraine Hansberry observed, “This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn’t seem to give an answer, we create one.”

Historically, and certainly during this pandemic, public gardens and home gardens alike have been the answer for many of us, providing joy and solace, refuge and inspiration, connection with the past and present, and dreams of the future. In 2020, our garden partners from coast-to-coast saw an increase in visitation, in some cases by more than 300%! We have seen a blossoming of victory and community gardens, home vegetable gardens, and immersion into the wilderness, as we have sought out meaningful ways to experience the garden.

For more than 30 years, the Garden Conservancy has been championing gardens and broadening the preservation narrative. Each season has brought new lessons and insights that have inspired our evolving methods for protecting and stewarding these ephemeral cultural beacons. It is through this expanding lens that we view each garden as a whole system. Preserving a garden is the stewardship of botanical diversity, design intent, and architecture. It also gives voice to important stories, seen and unseen. Preserving a garden fosters its growth into a viable and transformative resource, ensuring that it will last into the future.

Preservation is a process, and as with all things that are important, it takes time. “Gardening is the slowest of the performing arts,” observed cultural landscape historian Mac Griswold. We would argue that preservation is even more so.

Our strategic, multidisciplinary approach to preserving gardens weaves together the practical and the intangible. We facilitate on-the-ground restoration of historic gardens and also document gardens, capturing their history and spirit through film, photography, interviews, and archives filled with plans and maps. We hold conservation easements that permanently protect “conservation values”—the most significant features of gardens, such as their plant collections, design, hardscape, and/or vistas. We advocate for gardens at risk, taking a public stand to raise awareness and encourage action. And, as preservation is not possible without education, we engage the community and provide professional development to garden leaders, board members, and staff, and provide mentorship and resources as well.

Preservation is also not possible without community. It is driven by an intricate web of partnerships united in understanding the “why” of gardens, gardens as cultural legacy, and the importance of preserving them. We are grateful to our community, which shares our mission to ensure these important places will be lasting and connect generations over time.

In the following pages, you will hear from many of our friends: leading voices in preservation, landscape architecture, garden history, conservation, and documentation. Their essays are followed by case studies featuring a number of the Garden Conservancy’s partners. They all reveal the garden as a cultural bridge, a site for scientific study and ecological conservation, a path to equity and social justice, a catalyst for design innovation and stimulus for spiritual expansion. It is the stories interwoven through these gardens that reveal what we are really preserving: the human spirit.

A Users Guide to Preservation: One Contemporary Designer’s Perspective on History

I propose that a possible definition of landscape design could be the process of shaping the human experience in nature through the creation of form and space infused with narrative intent. This simple definition captures the universal human instinct to influence and configure our environment and to tell stories. For me, the process of design begins with endeavoring to see land and nature with deep clarity and to ask the land its own history before attempting to write the next chapter. This is why, as a contemporary landscape architect, I firmly believe in the importance of garden and landscape preservation as an essential resource – knowing our past in order to responsibly design our future. I will assert from the start that there is no blank slate, no tabula rasa, no “empty land” in the Anthropocene Landscape. Every site is filled with underlying ecological processes and cultural history, often erased or occluded over time, and the most authentic contemporary design instincts are rooted in an understanding of the continuum of culture and ecology. Without assiduous garden preservation and conservation, we lose entire chapters of self-awareness and knowledge of the human condition in relationship to the complexity of nature.

To begin a design is to enter into a personal dialogue, a partnership with the natural and cultural processes that shape land. Having designed projects over twenty-five years on several continents, I am convinced of the importance

of learning the unique geology, soils, climate, plant communities, and hydrology of every site. Mapping the geologic evolution of a landscape from prehistoric time to the present reveals the origin of landforms, sources of mineral deposits, and hydrodynamics, and helps one decipher the unique conditions that exist today. In sites around the world, understanding this deep “lineage” of land offers clues to the resulting cultural responses to these natural assets. The migratory patterns of wildlife, the settlement patterns of First Nations Peoples, insights into the motivations for Colonial Expansion, agriculture, the enslavement of humans, the rise of industrialization, and essential factors shaping the modern city all find themselves rooted to some aspect of the ecologies that have shaped the landscape over time. I think of this as a continuum of ecology and culture, where a pre-existing ecosystem attracts a human response which then alters that ecosystem. The altered ecosystem then exerts changes on the culture, which, in turn, reshapes the environment, and so on in perpetuity. A continuum of unstoppable flows.

History is one of the most valuable resources in the initiation of a design, but as one works to understand a site’s true history, one must be mindful of the lenses of the narrators of the past. Who told what story and why, and from what vantage point? Quite often, we discover dark and

uncomfortable history in landscapes, the traces of which have been intentionally erased to serve a more convenient narrative by those who have the privilege to tell the story. Historic maps, deeds, tax records, and even insurance maps are helpful clues to the biography of a site that gain color and texture when augmented with oral histories and personal letters. Learning the many layers of human experience on the landscape evokes the richness of context and leads to authentic inspiration for designed interventions. The resources for this research are essential to understanding our cultures and offer a strong argument for the preservation and conservation of landscapes and their associated documentation. Archivists, librarians, gardeners, and historians are an essential coterie diligently tending the documentation of our existence. Initiation of design without this process of environmental and cultural research feels tantamount to trespassing, in my mind.

With the body of research in progress, my attention turns to the land itself. Whether the commission is for a botanic garden, arboretum, farm, preserve, park, or urban square, the next step is to experience the site itself. Sensing and documenting the flows of energy in a landscape along with absorbing the topographic features are essential steps in knowing the site. In many cases the formal structure of a landscape design, the parti, emerges from observing the existing landform and bringing those forms into a coherent design relationship. Outcrops, mounds, ridges, and plateaus inspire the geometry of both path and place in the landscape. Groves, woodlands, meadows, and discernible plant communities reveal soil and moisture conditions and inspire a horticultural design response in harmony with the ecological context. This development of essential form is an exercise rooted in the application of all senses: sight, smell, sound, touch, and even taste, as the minerals in soils tell us so much information. This approach of seeing form as emerging from a site stands in direct opposition to the frequent application of pattern or alien forms in a landscape that is ill-suited to accept them. In contrast, this approach builds on long-standing theories of the human response to certain archetypal landscapes that offer prospect and refuge, and earth forms including theater, mound, grove, and allée.

Often, we incorporate discovered artifacts of human occupation that offer intriguing elements of inspiration for designed form. Historic occupation can be read through persistent traces such as roadbeds, abandoned rail lines, foundations, ruins, stone walls, fence lines, trenches, and terracing. Plant communities also reveal clues to past land management practices: forests of a singular species age can indicate the date of the last cutting; intense, invasive plant pressure might reflect the abandonment of former grazing land; the presence of a particular species could point toward historical settlement patterns. These remnants can offer the opportunity to hold hands with history by engaging with the actual artifact or plant community of the site’s past. We embrace the disruptions to an idealized form that artifacts and historic traces provide in contemporary design and see our work as just the most recent layer of the evolution of the site in a dialogue with both past and future.

At this point in the design process, we have become familiar with the land’s particular history and ecologies, land forms have been identified, and unique artifacts have been discovered. Here the contemporary programming of the design project begins to find its place within a site. New uses and patterns are adapted to the site’s narratives and conditions in ways that offer compelling tensions between

past and present, continuity and disruption, and adaptation and preservation, providing context and depth to new interventions. This is a design philosophy that becomes difficult to classify into common stylistic categories, trends, or fashions. A design philosophy free of stylistics and so tailored to a given landscape that the resultant forms cannot be replicated elsewhere… rather than imposing a vision disconnected from what the land itself reveals, we have the honor of adding the next chapter to the fascinating continuum of culture and ecology.

To illustrate the design process I have outlined, I would like to share elements of projects we have designed that rely on landscape history and preservation to inspire new landscapes and engage people in deep narratives of the contexts in which they operate.

COCKRILL SPRING, CENTENNIAL PARK, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

When engaged by Metro Parks Department of Nashville to construct new program elements within the boundary of historic Centennial Park, we suggested a period of historic research that might expand the Park’s stated “period of significance” of only six months, during the 1897 Centennial Exposition of Tennessee. We suggested that it was worth knowing what the site had been prior to the Exposition. What groups of Native Americans might have occupied the region and what was the footprint of Colonial Expansion? The research process led us on a fascinating journey into the ecological and cultural history of Nashville in general and Centennial Park specifically.

We learned that the park had originally belonged to Anne Cockrill, the first colonial woman west of the Appalachian Mountains to own free title and deed of land, and a pioneer with the Donaldson Party that founded Nashville along the Cumberland River in 1797. Through letters from the early nineteenth century, we learned that a spring on her farm, then known as Cockrill Spring, was renowned for its water quality and for its location at the terminus of the heavily trafficked Natchez Trace.

After three major outbreaks of cholera in the nineteenth century, Nashville enclosed many of its urban streams and creeks in brick galleries to prevent the spread of the waterborne disease. What if Cockrill Spring still surged below the Park? What if we could daylight this ancient water flowing for thousands of years and bring it back to the people of 21st-century Nashville in this public landscape setting? Through investigation into historic sanitation maps,

photographs, and oral accounts, we closed in on what might be the location of the spring, and began exploration of the piping and subterranean waterways beneath the park. With great excitement, the original limestone wellhead was hit about six feet below the surface and a surge of fresh cold water came to the light of day for the first time in a century. The resulting landscape design was a simple terrace built of local limestone that holds a basin in which the original wellhead stone is submerged. The water flows up through the basin and into a limestone channel of water that meanders through a meadow of native Tennessee shrubs and perennials, evocative of the plants Anne Cockrill would have seen on this site in 1789. Today, thousands of annual visitors learn the story of this pioneer woman, her role in establishing the first frontier school, and the historic connection to the Natchez Trace. Children and adults splash in the cool fresh water of the ancient spring that has supplied drinking water to passing humans from the Woodland Era of Native Peoples to the modern citizens of Nashville.

The millions of gallons of water produced by the spring annually, previously piped to the sewage treatment plant, are now captured into cisterns and a lake. The abundant spring water is used to irrigate the contemporary park, dramatically reducing the park’s consumption of potable City water. In the case of Cockrill Springs, we see proactive historic landscape research uncovering and preserving unique histories of a site, that in turn inspired authentic new amenities that contribute to improved long-term sustainability of the park and its water usage. The comingling of ecology and culture that had been erased was brought back to light through creativity and a research-based design process.

BOK TOWER GARDENS, LAKE WALES, FLORIDA

Tasked with doubling the size of the public landscape at the famous Bok Tower Gardens, we recognized the first step was to study the dialogue between the founder, Edward Bok, and his designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to understand the original vision and how the expansion could best harmonize with that vision. The original design

brief envisaged by Bok in 1921 was to create a bell tower at the highest point on the Lake Wales Ridge, nearly 300 feet above sea level, surrounded by meandering paths, a reflecting pool, and collections of native trees and shrubs designed to attract native wildlife. From the start, the garden was created as a public landscape, intended to immerse people in nature and inspire gratitude. Over many years of dialogue and evolution, that native plant mandate was occluded by exotic and tropical introductions that were not native to the region but that were now well established, spectacular, and beloved nearly a century later. We concurred with the garden directors that rather than didactically restoring the original concept, we would apply that vision to the many new gardens while making careful insertions in the existing gardens that would allow universal accessibility for the first time.

One important observation was that the original spatial sequence of the Olmsted project had been entirely lost, given the location of a visitor’s center and parking lot within eyeshot of the tower. We learned that many visitors entirely missed the experience of hide-and-reveal of the tower, the topographic drama, and the sinuous paths curving along carefully calibrated geometries through groves of oaks, palms, azaleas, and camellias. The brief our firm received was to expand the gardens to regain more of the original concept of wildlife stewardship and native ecosystems, so we worked to use those gardens to seamlessly convey the visitor to the origin point of the Olmsted landscape. It was like writing the seamless prequel to a novel by another author and was an exciting exercise in harmonic thought and posthumous “collaborative design.”

With our new gardens completed in 2016, the visitor arrives to a massive elliptical green, scaled to the greater landscape, and dotted with iconic longleaf pines. This central green serves as an intuitive guide to the distributed experience of newly built native landscapes radiating outward. The visitor winds through pollinator gardens, bog and pond gardens, oak hammocks, and a wiregrass palmetto meadow that is the rare habitat of gopher tortoises. To order these experiences, we used the spiral curve geometry for the

path design, a signature of the Olmsted firm. The large geometric forms of ellipse and axial relationships is augmented by meandering secondary paths, offering both a sense of orientation in a vast landscape and immersion in the distinct ecologies we were establishing from zero. The circulation seamlessly delivers the visitor to the sequential approach to the tower designed by Olmsted, Jr. To mark this important location, we relocated a large stone marker that served the purpose of a cornerstone for the garden upon opening in 1929.

There were other exciting gardens included in this design that further expanded the contemporary appeal to audiences of all ages. A vegetable garden, outdoor cooking and teaching facility, and a children’s garden inspired by the habitats of animals native to the Lake Wales ecosystem. Children can develop an empathetic relationship to animals by crawling through a Gopher Tortoise tunnel, occupying a giant globe spider nest, and playing in sand surrounded by an installation referencing Indigo Snakes. In summary, the contemporary landscape interventions made in this historic garden work to increase relevance to issues of climate resilience, food security and biodiversity, while preserving the historic experience and artfully inserting universal accessibility into the nearly century-old gardens of Bok Tower.

NAVAL CEMETERY LANDSCAPE, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

The Naval Cemetery Landscape is an example of a site whose cultural history was entirely erased from the land and from memory, from which historical research was uncovered to create a meditative and immersive garden experience in New York City. The original Naval Yard Hospital was built in 1895 and by the very nature of hospitals, included a site for burial of the dead. Over the coming century, the cemetery accumulated an estimated two thousand bodies, many of which remained unidentified. In 1926, nearly one thousand bodies were exhumed and reinterred in Cypress Hills National Cemetery, and the Navy installed recreational ball fields on the site. The bodies, and the memory of them, were erased until the property was given to the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which hired our firm in 2010 to design a park for repose and contemplation along their eighteen-mile bike lane. Through our research we learned that prior to being a hospital, the site was home to Wallabout Creek, a meandering coastal wetland and stream complex. Early maps show the sinuous nature of the water body making its way to the bay through land behind the hospital that was later filled to expand the cemetery. We also learned about the thriving agricultural communities here in the nineteenth century, managed by European immigrant communities and

focused on the production of cherries and other stone fruits. Given these ecological and cultural histories of the site, and the likelihood of further remains on site, regrading or disturbing the soil at any significant depth was considered off limits.

So how do you memorialize the history of the site and create a thriving park for repose and meditation along the shadow of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway? The narrative for the park and the resulting design scheme drew from the diverse factors contained in the land to create a cohesive experience for the user, allowing them to see a layered past and a resilient future at once. The narrative is rooted in an embrace of the collective human condition of life and death, celebrated through the establishment of a rich meadow of pollinator-attracting plants drawing an abundance of life into the site. This meadow ecology is installed by scraping away existing invasive vegetation but not tilling or excavating the soil. To move people through the meadow while respecting the ground plane that once held human remains, we designed an elevated boardwalk that meanders, like Wallabout Creek once did, as a wooden river through a sea of native grasses and perennials reminding people of the fecundity of life and the cycle of death. A circular grove of cherry trees inspired meditation and recalls the historic orchards. A bench installed by Nature Sacred Foundation, a major funder of the project, holds an all-weather journal where people write their most private reflections on the mental and physical benefits of the space. The entries in this book are amongst the most moving and gratifying results of my professional career.

Each of these examples describes a contemporary landscape that resulted from a research-based process reliant on the discoveries history can offer us. Our human history is embedded in the soil beneath our feet and we must attune our instincts and attention to listen carefully. I hope that what I have shared here supports an impassioned argument for the preservation of landscapes and their histories, so that future generations may come to see the Earth that we tend as a continuum of flows, a thrilling dance of culture and ecology.

Thomas L. Woltz, ASLA, PLA, is the owner of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects in Charlottesville, VA, and New York City. He was named the Design Innovator of the Year by the Wall Street Journal Magazine in 2013 and is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects Council of Fellows.

Preserving Traces and Remnants of a Gardening Past

African Americans have always gardened.

Our cultural identity was once inextricably tied to soil, to earth, and to designing and manicuring agricultural landscapes stamped with the marks we made upon them. Blackness was born in the South to feed and sustain a nation’s thirst for power and independence. It manifested in the form of Black hands and bodies forced to toil in the land. Black hands coaxed seeds reaching for sunlight, and as the seeds bloomed into colorful new life, so did our ancestors’ creativity and innovation. You will find traces and remnants of this cultural memory in unexpected ways and places.

Our memories are real and personal. Memories of Kentucky and being six years old in grandmother’s lush garden with towering and haunting sunflowers. In another moment and garden, the smell of Dad’s organic herb, pepper, and tomato blossoms, which mesmerized honey bee and person alike. Memory travels north where rose bushes cultivate deeper admiration of a beloved relative lost. Then, a flash of great-great uncle’s smile while at family land in Virginia where magnificent cherry, apple, and walnut trees planted by ancestors over 100 years ago still bear fruit for their descendants and dark, sweet, muscadine grapes grow plump on their vine. These places and stories might not be historic, but the legacies they represent contain profound value and signify countless other examples of this nature and heritage relationship. As professionals working in the historic preservation field for some time, we have found that the recognition and preservation of historic African American places is often linked to legacies and memories such as these.

Through the work that we do at the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, we preserve and protect American legacies—landscapes and buildings that tell overlooked stories of a culture fundamental to the nation itself. Too often, the historic imprint of Black people has been rendered invisible in urban and rural communities, but that is not to say important Black sites have been totally ignored. To be sure, significant sites associated with African American history are formally recognized and serve as permanent reminders about our ancestors and their journey in America.

For instance, God’s Little Acre, an African American Colonial-era cemetery in Newport, RI; public parks such as Stuart Nelson Park in Paducah, KY; and private ones, like  the three-acre park currently being designed at the John and Alice Coltrane home in Dix Hills, NY, will showcase what happens when creativity and nature harmonize. In Chicago, the Sweet Water Foundation has reactivated and transformed once vacant city blocks into The Commonwealth—a community gathering space and campus embodying the concept of “regenerative community development.” The Commonwealth creates employment and educational opportunities to learn more about urban agriculture and

includes a two-acre community garden that nourishes more than 200 residents a week. In Bishopville, SC, a 400-plant topiary garden showcases the artistry and creativity of its African American creator, Pearl Fryar. All of these places exemplify how African American spaces—whether commemorative, public, or personal—are important to our shared past, present, and future, compelling us to reflect upon what more those spaces can be.

We must think about and redefine what it means to garden and who contributes to it. Whether it’s an individual nurturing lush houseplants in an urban apartment, communities coming together in neighborhood gardens, or a family taking pride in well-tended flowerbeds and carefully trimmed shrubbery, gardens and the land connect us to a part of our culture and nature that passes forward memory and traditions. Agricultural gardening, especially, represents a through-line spanning centuries of tangible and intangible heritage. Cultural heritage sites that bring forward this African American narrative serve a crucial role in telling the country’s overlooked garden history. These are connections to our past, and it is our responsibility to ensure that those sites—and the natural elements and landscapes that are so intrinsically a part of them—are celebrated for generations to come, so all Americans can share in their inspiration and joy.

Holland-Moore

Nothing is more beautiful than the loveliness of woods before sunrise.

—George Washington Carver

I am here.

Gardens are created from dreams and I am here following three generations of visionaries and gardeners.

I was born and lived in San Bernardino, CA, until age 10. My backyard, near Route 66, had palms, sandy beaches, and bordered the San Bernardino National Forest. Dad and Mom retire from the United States Army Air Force at Norton Air Force Base and are busy with eight children and new careers. Dad made chore time, fun time. We sweep the neighborhood curbs, clean out the garage, or, better yet, clean up and treasure hunt in the palm-lined alley. As Dad kept law and order, I escape into the alley jungle and imagine thrilling adventures of survival in the urban jungle. I scout for natural and man-made artifacts, sweep the alleyway free of debris. Pre-siesta, I treat myself to sun-warmed pomegranate juice squeezed directly into my mouth.

In 1934, Dad realized his dream to fly and became a pilot at the Coffee School of Aviation, where Cornelius Coffee offered flight lessons for Blacks at the Harlem Airport in Chicago. Two years earlier, Oscar DePriest, the Black Chicago congressional representative, visited my grandfather Edward (Pop), a businessman and postal worker with an artist’s eye and a love of architectural recycling. These finds were later upcycled into garden structures and a writer’s cottage named “EDANKRAAL,” a haven for my grandmother Anne Spencer (Dranny), his beloved wife and American poet, librarian, and avid gardener.

The Spencers’ mecca hosted the leading Black voices of the time. James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Marion Anderson, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Martin Luther King, and George Washington Carver were

among many others who came to talk about cultural issues, race relations, politics, poetry, education, landscapes, and gardening. Family cookouts and parties and weddings, including mine, continued in the garden.

Two events in 1938 brought further changes to Blacks in aviation: Charles Lindbergh published an article in Readers Digest calling flying “a tool specifically shaped for Western Hands,” and the formation in Chicago, IL, of the National Airmen’s Association (NAA). Shortly thereafter approximately twenty Negro Flyers produced an air show viewed by 25,000 spectators at Chicago’s Harlem Airport.

Dad and his friend Dale White could not be stopped. Supported by the NAA and the Chicago Defender, they rented an airplane for a goodwill tour of ten cities to demonstrate the dream to Americans that “Negros Can Fly.”

The tenth city on the tour was Washington, DC. There, in an underground tunnel, the flyers met Senator Harry S. Truman, who kept his promise to put through legislation ensuring that Negro flyers would be trained along with whites under the Civilian Pilot Training Program.

Dad said, “When I am flying is when I feel the freest!” He touched the sky while Dranny touched the garden soil.

Dad’s dream, and the dream of the Challengers Air Pilots Association, National Airmen’s Association, and the Tuskegee Airmen came true in 1941, when the segregated branch of the US Army Corps offered training to African Americans to become pilots and mechanics. Dad and Mom were assigned to Moton Field [in Tuskegee, GA] for the training program of the Black air personnel.

My cultural landscape changes when we move to Michigan. Dad’s Tuskegee buddies, including Highland Park mayor Robert Blackwell, Wardell Polk, and Godfrey Franklin, joined forces to rebuild cities burned out after the 1967 Detroit riots. Coleman Young, former Tuskegee Airman and then mayor of Detroit, joined them. For the first time, I attend a predominantly Black school. I am too young to participate in news or social movements, but keep up with the music coming out of Motown. I walk up McLean to Woodward Avenue for gallons of milk from Ivanhoe Grocery, take the bus uptown to S.S. Kresge and eat lunch with Mom at the counter. On the way to Belle Isle, I cruise by the monument to Joe Lewis and escape to the McGregor Library to check out the books. I become fascinated with the architecture and culture of my Black heritage.

At age fifteen, Dad and Mom declared yet another landscape change, this time south to Lynchburg, where at least four generations of our black and white ancestors inhabited the lush fertile land of Virginia and where my paternal grandparents were the first in their generation to be born free of slavery. Pop died in 1964 and Dranny in 1975, two years later their beloved home and garden became the nonprofit Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum.

I did not expect to become the museum’s overseer in 2008, when I return to Lynchburg, but find my path there followed by many volunteers devoted to preserving her legacy, including family, residents, and the Friends of Anne Spencer. They all contributed to the listing on the National Register as a Virginia Historic Landmark. In 2020, Anne Spencer was honored with a Voices of Harlem Forever

Earth, I thank you

U.S. Postal Stamp. Anne Spencer’s dreams and visions are thus still alive, making room for our own, in this serene and historic public space. Noted authors and scholars are adding volumes to her legacy, even inspiring my own non-fiction family history book, which is in progress.

The diverse cultures and landscapes of California, Michigan, and Virginia are all part of my feeling, seeing, smelling, and touching. Reflecting on these sensory impressions helps me understand and incubate my own dreams and visions.

Since 1977, the Anne Spencer House and Garden has attracted visitors from 23 countries and now averages five thousand visitors per year. It is the only known intact house museum and restored garden of an African American in the United States.

In 1983, the Hillside Garden Club unveil their first restoration of Anne Spencer’s garden and receive two Commonwealth Awards for their ongoing preservation work. Thirty-eight years later, the club continues to restore, maintain, and volunteer in the public gardens. Edankraal, 25 x 45 feet, is divided into four rooms; the rose, cottage, arbor, and water garden are open seven days a week, sunrise to sunset. We want you to come to keep the shrine alive; we want families, schools, businesses, and neighbors to come and share their own stories and visions in this fertile garden.

Earth, I thank you for the pleasure of your language You’ve had a hard time bringing it to me from the ground to grunt thru the noun

To all the way feeling seeing smelling touching —awareness

I am here!

Interview with the Stewards of Rocky Hills, Barbara and Rick Romeo

The finest gardens in the world will wither and slowly transmogrify into a semblance of what was—until Nature recovers completely what was hers. Decades, if not generations of effort, can and will be lost. Fortunately, in the case of a garden, loss can be avoided if the right people and the right measures are in place.

Rocky Hills is well-known and appreciated by friends of the Garden Conservancy. Lovingly tended for decades by its equally well-regarded owner, Henriette Granville Suhr, and her husband, William, the garden sits in Westchester County, NY, north of New York City. It was a living, layered, multi-dimensional representation of a mid-twentieth century design ethic.

Sometimes gardens age better than people. We all get to a point in life where things we used to do become difficult and complicated. When that happens, the “What’s next for this place?” question gets asked about the spaces we create. So it was with Henriette.

The Garden Conservancy, dedicated fans of Rocky Hills, and the parks department of Westchester County were not about to let this work of horticultural art be lost. A conservation easement, one of the Conservancy’s signature preservation tools, was arranged to protect the property and its future. The easement was transferred from the Conservancy to the Westchester Land Trust after Henriette’s passing, and a short time later, the property, with the easement in place, was sold to Barbara and Rick Romeo, long-time friends of Rocky Hills and nearby homeowners.

For many years, the Romeos had volunteered at Rocky Hills to help Henriette manage Garden Conservancy Open Days. Now they have owned the property for more than four years and are actively involved in garden preservation and garden stewardship. Garden Conservancy President

James Brayton Hall and Director of Preservation Pamela Governale spoke with the Romeos about stepping into a property with a long history, and with legal restrictions that impose certain responsibilities.

How did you come to be involved with Rocky Hills?

Barbara Romeo: We’d lived down the street for 30 years. I was walking by one day and Henriette was standing at the gate. She waved to me and I waved back. She invited me in.

I just thought it was so stunning. It was like a fairyland in here. It was spring; the forget-me-nots were all over the place and the azaleas were just opening. To me, it was incredibly beautiful. There is something about this place with so much depth and texture.

I was invited to be on the board of the Friends of Rocky Hills when the garden was headed toward becoming a Westchester County park. We aimed at preparing it to become a public garden. During the garden’s Open Days, 200 to 300 people would come through at times, talking about what they got out of seeing a garden like this and the ideas that they were taking home with them. It was just a wonderful, wonderful introduction to the garden.

Rick Romeo: The garden became so loved and wellregarded by so many people that there was some sense of relief while it was in a “pre-park” situation. Henriette was in her 90s when the county had to back out of that idea. Then there was a lot of concern until her death at age 98: what’s going to happen with Rocky Hills without the cushion of a large institution, a county organization, to keep it as a park. What’s going to happen to the garden? It’s not everybody’s cup of tea to come into a preexisting garden with a conservation easement that inhibits one’s freedom to do whatever you want to do.

It is not a typical thing to handle [a property] with a view toward preserving, maintaining, and continuing.

Speaking of easements… what have you learned about conservation easements that you wish you had known before purchasing the property?

BR: The easement is held by the Westchester Land Trust and they have been absolutely wonderful to work with. They come out once a year to monitor the easement and they have given us some good tips. We understood that we would never be able to divide the property. The Land Trust also has to be very careful about the watershed; water flows through this garden and into a public reservoir. That’s their second priority. Number three is removing invasive plants as much as possible. And number four was not to cut new paths through the area. We walked into ownership with eyes wide open. We knew exactly what was expected.

RR: A lot of people might view an easement as a burden or a restriction. I view it as consistent with what we would have done here anyway. It’s kind of a guide, rather than an enormous burden that I might feel constrained by. An easement may bother people in the abstract, but, as a practical matter for us, and in terms of the way we approach this place, it’s seamless.

The easement requires a certain number of opportunities for the public to experience Rocky Hills. How has that worked out?

BR: We participate in the Conservancy’s Open Days program. When we opened for our first Open Day, it rained all day. The people who came were hardy gardeners, many of them Master Gardeners themselves, and had wonderful questions. We loved doing it; what a nice group. They identified some things for me that I did not know and I tagged along to hear their observations and got a little better educated.

What have your biggest challenges been?

BR: It’s very, very different and it’s pretty daunting to take over somebody’s 60-plus year old garden, one that’s been beautifully planted by people who had a very creative way of planting, and of looking at plants and at design.

RR: A whole lot of gardening that has nothing to do with plants. Structural things, especially when dealing with an older garden. Fencing, for example. They call it “deer fencing” because it’s supposed to keep the deer out. Well, in the last couple of weeks we’ve had a number of incidents where they figured out ways to either jump over or squirm under it. An extensive sprinkler system is now old; when you turn it on in the springtime after winter, there are geysers here and there. A lot of non-plant maintenance is needed to preserve infrastructure, which leads to preserving plants because you don’t want the deer to eat them and you want plants to be irrigated.

BR: One plant challenge is dealing with invasive plants. Another is “native versus non-native,” which we could debate for the next three hours. Invasives are sometimes a problem with plants that were purposely planted here 20 or 30 years ago. There are barberries (Berberis) down in the woods, which we’ve been removing. An even bigger problem is burning bush (Euonymus alatus), which was once planted and maintained, but now is all over this place. They are beautiful, but I spent last summer digging them out of the fern garden, digging them out of the perennial garden, digging them out of the woods. 2021 is the year; we’re just getting them out of here. There’s no halfway with them. And then there are pachysandras, English ivy, and vinca all over. We’re going to replace some of these aggressive non-natives with native plants. Henriette was aiming in that direction when she was still here and that’s important to us.

How are you handling the design of the garden, its look and feel?

BR: Another challenge of being an owner maintaining this property is that the color palette was meant to span the aesthetic between the manicured landscape and the naturalistic. There was a naturalistic bent; for the most part, there are no straight lines here; it definitely wanders. You have to pick your spots because there’s certainly a lot to do without trying to create new places to work on.

RR: We also wound up moving lots of things around. Some plants were meant to be small, but they have grown quite large and overwhelming.

BR: Everything Henriette planted, she wanted to look full immediately, especially when garden groups were coming through. With our prior land, our idea was that you put something in and we’d wait. Henriette couldn’t do that. She would put in what she considered to be dwarf plants. But in fact, they had nothing to do with dwarf plants! Her idea was that, in a year or two, you pull them up and move them somewhere else. She really wanted the garden to always look full and ready. So, yes, we’ve moved a lot of plants around.

Now that you know this garden so intimately, what do you consider its most important elements?

BR: There are a lot of structural elements to the trees and plants. It’s not just about flowers; it’s about the whole look of the place. When you’re looking out, you’ll see a palette of

color, but I also went out and took black and white pictures of the garden because I love the interplay of so many of the plantings. It’s all about the ones that aren’t just unusual, but lend shape to the landscape and take your eye places that you really want to go.

RR: There is such a splash here in spring. No question, prime time here is May into early June. We are here in the summertime, so we have invested in having that splash of color continue into summer and early fall.

BR: Watching the seasons change is wonderful. We came back in March and the winter aconites were everywhere— seas of yellow flowers as soon as the snow melted a bit. And then you roll on to the spring bulbs, forget-me–nots and the azaleas. It’s one thing after another to the point where I walk out the door only to rush back and tell Rick, “Look! This just opened. Look at these. These have just come.” It is an unfolding that goes on. The fall is just gorgeous. There are so many trees here that turn color. I like the Camperdown elm (Ulmus glabra ‘Camperdownii’) in the front better in the winter because you see incredible shapes that are usually hidden under the leaves. I have a friend who is an artist down the street and I have asked her to sketch it for me.

What makes you happiest here in this garden?

BR: Walking out every single day and seeing something different. Constant change, seeing something new spring up. I grow a lot from seed. I love doing that. Rick and I also love

the vegetable garden. Just being outside every day. It is a healthy lifestyle and I think it is good for you. Even on rainy days, we are still out here doing things.

Do you have any advice to others?

BR: To me, it’s all about keeping the spirit of Rocky Hills and its past. We knew the garden. I mean, you think you know it until you actually own it, but we did know what we were walking into. If someone had taken over without having known the garden and wanted to continue it, the learning curve might have been steep. Make sure you really, truly understand, that you know what the spirit of the place is BUT, if you have the spirit to do it, for heaven’s sake, do it!

You do have to pick your spot. Mother Nature is going to do things. You know you’re going to have storms, perhaps more and more. You’re going to see insect invasions and fungus and things like that. And we do have climate change happening. So you have to pick your battles to some extent.

I also want to thank the Garden Conservancy immensely for its help, for your documentation of the garden, and for the historical information you gave us. Because of you and Henriette we have a history of everything, everything she bought, including all the tree peonies. We know when they were bought, where they were from, and all their names. It’s been a huge help.

The Importance of Preserving Gardens

Gardens document untold histories. In Michael Laurie’s Introduction to Landscape Architecture, a featured section describes early United States colonial gardens. There is no description of the social or cultural context other than mention of the “landed gentry,” a British social class of colonial landowners. He writes that “the South, with its tradition of landed gentry and a different type of society and government, was more conducive to the development of extensive gardens. Their inspiration came from imported gardening literature and European travel.”1 Two gardens are illustrated as examples; the Palace Gardens of Williamsburg, VA, with its European formal influence, and Middleton Place in Charleston, SC, embodying the French garden influence. Enslaved labor is never mentioned in either description. Middleton Place is not described as a former plantation, but as a set of wonderful garden experiences.

These untold stories of our historic gardens and landscapes can be powerful tools to help understand how inextricably bound together we are in this country, even throughout our painful past. An ecological history exists in plain sight, one shaped by colonial institutions that transferred their patterns and practices onto the North American landscape through cultivation and city building. During the past three decades, a plethora of buried histories have been exhumed from an array of gardens and landscapes: garden landscapes designed by the country’s early founders, George

Washington and Thomas Jefferson, at Mount Vernon, VA, and Monticello, VA, respectively; national garden landscapes such as Dumbarton Oaks; and former Plantations such as Boone Hall, Charleston, SC, and Magnolia Plantation, Schriever, LA; to name a few. These histories tell a more complete and complex story of the labor, craft, and ideologies needed to manifest these canonized works.

The vernacular garden has always been a community and cultural resource in the United States. Cultural geographer Paul Groth writes, “When we call something a yard, it generally implies more value than something called a lot. In turn, we often treasure something called a garden.” Most Americans can identify with the yard, as the US was developed incorporating the single-family open lot plan. These collections of houses set in an open lot, not attached, provide diverse examples of how the yard and garden are synonymous but also different. In many communities, the yards are parks and playgrounds along with terrain vagues, unbuilt due to infrastructure and natural systems. This landscape is our vernacular: yards with beautiful lawn and foundation plantings adjacent to yards with no plantings, just dirt, subsistence gardens in the backyard, screened-in porches, and paved patios and driveways. Yards and gardens reflect economic status in the US as well. Cut lawns reflect a status of investment and in many places there was no disdain for those who chose to keep the

yard bare, with just dirt; it just got used in other ways, like a place to fix the car in full sight of the street, or a gathering place with improvised table and chair, or a place to barbecue. In a manner, the single-family open lot plan, gives us individuality and landscape spaces that reflect our idiosyncratic patterns and practices. But more importantly, they allow for diversity within a homogenous design context.

Vernacular yards and gardens remind us of the labor of diverse artisans. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden, Alice Walker writes: “For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release. They were Creators who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality, which is the basis of Art.” We find these artful expressions of the hands of unheralded gardeners in the vernacular. These are the everyday and mundane yards and displays you may find in every community. Akin to the validation of vernacular artist by the art community over the past few decades, from the quiltmakers of Gees Bend, to the documentation of African American domestics’ landscapes as featured in Grey Gundaker’s Keep Your Head to the Sky. William Westmacott’s African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South, published in 1992, produced cultural mappings of swept yards and images of fences, arbors, and decoration made from improvised materials. Also, the public’s interest in multiculturalism in the 1990s saw the emergence of African American vernacular arts, cultural anthropology, geography, and history looking to the garden as inspiration. I dwell on theses recollections of yards and gardens because, in addition to their significance to

my own life, they seem to be the one contribution by African Americans to landscape and geography scholars. The idiosyncratic treatment of landscape space is viewed as a cultural norm and not so much as circumstance. They were strangely similar to the yards of my grandmother and other relatives in rural North Carolina that I experienced while growing up.

Gardens reflect our attitudes and values for the world we want to live in. For the African American community, these attitudes and values shed light on our experience and contributions. John Michal Vlach elaborates on these important contributions using W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of two-ness, stating, “In terms of cultural history, we also note a certain duality. Black material culture can claim the heritage of a distant past reaching back to Africa and simultaneously a more recent historical source of inspiration—the response to America. The reservoirs of creativity were available to be tapped by Black artisans. Perhaps the same could be said of most craftsman in the new world, but Afro artisans worked within a set of circumstances that were special in the American experience. As slaves, they had new patterns of performance imposed upon them; the European world was thrust into their consciousness. The objects they made were, then, a result of dual historical influences, distant past and recent past, and two cultural influences, African and European. In the “two-ness of the Negro” we find duality doubled.”2 These gardens matter because they challenge us to see difference. Within this context of questioning and inspiration, the vernacular garden may seem overly romantic to understand the future contributions of Black people to the culture of garden design. If skill and labor were responsible for the construction of the designed world, and not just the

improvised vernacular, why is it hard to imagine that my ancestors, too, were artists, both male and female? And that the inherent creativity adapted through skill and labor, is knowledge transferred. These aspects of the vernacular garden need to be documented and preserved, validating the multidimensional and diverse contributions associated with American gardening traditions.

Two gardens illustrate the need to preserve and also expand the definition of gardens and their value to our lives and heritage. The first is a garden that commemorates a vernacular house and yard in the shadow of Jefferson’s academical village, the University of Virginia. A free Black household and its owner, Catherine “Kitty” Foster, had all been forgotten as her home and yard on a three-quarter acre lot had been erased over time. Living and working south of the campus, Kitty Foster, a seamstress, purchased the land in 1833 and the Foster family lived there until 1906. The home and yard were part of a small settlement called “Canada.” In 1993, as the University was performing preliminary excavations for its new South Lawn project, archeological features associated with the Foster family were found. The new garden features an archeological reveal that exhibits artistically improvised cobblestone walkways found during excavation. At the gardens center is a mythical sculpture, the “Shadow Catcher,” inspired by Afro-American traditions of inversion, which signifies perdurance. The home footprint is overhead and inverted so its inside is reflective. As light cast over the piece, a shadow is cast on the ground and above, in the inversion, light reflects from a stainless-steel surface, evoking the intimation of the flash of the departed spirit. In 2011, the State of Virginia added the garden to the Virginia Landmarks Register. The garden is part of a pre-Civil War history for the African American community in Charlottesville, but also tells the history of service-based commercial relationship between free Blacks and the University.

The second garden, the Curtis 50 Cent Garden in Queens, NY, is part of the New York Restoration Garden’s (NYRP) history and legacy. In 1999, as then Mayor Giuliani announced plans to sell the 114 community gardens to developers, NYRP collaborated with the Trust for Public Land and others to raise funds to preserve these plots of land as permanent gardens in perpetuity. Through their preservation, the NYRP and its founder, Bette Midler, have advocated for the definition of community garden to exceed the typical paternalistic subsistence garden as seen historically in marginal communities. Instead, they advocate for different and diverse gardens that reflect garden history and the communities in which they are a part.

As an example, the Curtis 50 Cent Garden is improvisational, sampling a familiar garden design and reshaping it into something unique and contemporary. In this case, it riffs on the Château de Villandry’s Tender Love Garden with its heart-shaped parterres, one of four Gardens of Love. Here in Jamaica, Queens, in 2008, a garden is inspired by a French formal parterre garden, and is associated with its donor, an African American hip hop artist.

1 Michael Laurie, An Introduction to Landscape Architecture, (New York, NY: American Elsevier Publishing Co., 1975), p. 30

2 John Michael Vlach, By the Work of Their Hands, (Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 1991), p. 3

An Accidental Preservationist

As a young art historian, I was well aware of preservation issues with paintings, sculpture, objects, buildings, and monuments, but gardens—no! It wasn’t until the 1980s, when I was in hot pursuit of Arts & Crafts architects such as Edwin Lutyens, that I stumbled on some sorry examples of Gertrude Jekyll gardens that happened to be part of the grounds. Overgrown trees and shrubs, pitiful flower borders, missing ornaments, and modern-day water features were the name of the game. It wasn’t until the publication of books on “historic gardens” and monographs on Sissinghurst, Hidcote, and Great Dixter that I realized there was another layer called historic gardens. After that initial fire was lit, I’ve never looked back. Over the years I’ve had an opportunity to observe good and bad preservation attempts based on varying levels of expertise, willingness of the owners, and—most crucial— approaches to maintenance. The Garden Conservancy’s advisory role on preservation methodology for significant gardens as well as alerts by the Cultural Landscape Foundation for public spaces at risk have been invaluable in saving and managing important properties. Detailed cultural landscape reports have aided enormously in broadening our understanding of significant places that otherwise would be ignored.

While gaining expertise in the careers of landscape architects such as Ellen Shipman and Beatrix Farrand, I discovered that many of their gardens had disappeared, victims of readaptation or lethargy. Fortunately, the tables have turned in recent years and more sites are being rediscovered and resurrected. What has been consistently excellent is the quality and depth of research, in part thanks to the designers’ archives. The landmark restorations of the Beatrix Farrand Garden at Bellefield, as well as Eolia, the Harkness Estate,

were greatly facilitated by landscape architects trained in research procedures. Detailed planting plans, archival photographs, and correspondence brought a surfeit of information that had to be evaluated in terms of modern-day usage as public properties. In most cases, the installation and maintenance steps were done by trained volunteers, but only after crucial funding was raised. These are the good stories. There are also the cases where research and installation were impeccably completed, but the project failed due to lack of understanding the intricacies of maintenance. In their day, Shipman’s gardens, for example, were unusually maintenance-intensive, necessitating a plant replacement schedule that most budgets would not allow. One thinks of the tragic story of Beatrix Farrand at the end of her life having to close down Reef Point due to the lack of a fully trained gardener who could carry on her meticulous work.

When the National Park Service undertook the restoration of the small parterre garden at the Longfellow House in Cambridge, MA, designed by Martha Brookes Hutchinson in the early 1900s and revitalized by Ellen Shipman twenty years later, there were many challenges to face: a detailed history of the site necessitated archaeological digs, replacement of built features, and the search for substitutions for Shipman’s plant palette, most of which had long gone out of cultivation. Consideration for modern-day pests, irrigation issues, and foot traffic all figured in to the highly praised rehabilitation privately funded by a friends’ group who collaborated with the park service. Following along similar lines, a friends’ group has recently initiated a partial replanting of Shipman’s once-magnificent gardens at Chatham Manor (now Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park) in Fredericksburg, VA. The grandaddy of them all are the gardens and grounds at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, NH. All three properties, plus others, reflect solid research and rigorous maintenance.

In the case of institutions, such as Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, it goes without saying that research, routine maintenance, and plant replacements reflect the high level of a professionally trained staff. However, the case is rarely so with private gardens that have seen significant changes over time, as wings are added to the original house, swimming pools dropped in, and plantings simplified. When property transfers to new owners, the gardens generally suffer or are irretrievably lost. The outcome is generally doomed due to unavoidable changes to the landscape, uneducated owners, lack of rigorous research, questionable maintenance, and limited budgets. Exceptions, of course, include knowledgeable owner-gardeners who revitalize rather than obliterate.

There are a several stories for outstanding public gardens that have been rediscovered through research or recovered from disasters. The most famous is Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans, LA, the former home of philanthropists Edith and Edgar Stern. Designed by Ellen Shipman in the 1930s, the gardens were open to the

public in 1968 during Edith’s lifetime, but it took several major hurricanes to put the aging gardens in perspective. After the destruction by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, several groups, led by the Garden Conservancy, stepped in to assess the damage and commission a history of the grounds in order to implement an informed recovery and maintenance plan. Today, the gardens are once again one of Shipman’s finest achievements.

It took a book, rather than a storm, to resurrect a slumbering Shipman garden in Jacksonville, FL, designed in the early 1930s, but long forgotten in the tangle of overgrown shrubs. Shortly after the publication of my book Ellen Shipman and the American Garden in 1996, a garden advisory committee member spotted the name “Cummer” in the client list and promptly found plans in Shipman’s archive at Cornell. Fortunately, the bones of the garden lay undisturbed for decades, so the committee set to work to bring it back to life. A full-scale restoration was quickly spearheaded, but not before running into problems with some of the plants indicated on the plans. The committee learned that it’s one thing to plant-by-plan, but another to find substitutes that are better performing. It was a miraculous discovery, but just after completing the restoration, Hurricane Irma severely damaged the waterfront garden. The museum acted quickly to repair the damage and replant.

In recent years, a number of Farrand gardens have undergone restoration, but a little-known one in Maine deserves mention. While much is known about the demise of Farrand’s long-time home and garden at Reef Point, few people know about Garland Farm, where she spent the last three years of her life. Now the headquarters of the Beatrix Farrand Society, Garland Farm was once the home of her long-time caretakers at Reef Point. It was here that she designed her last garden—for herself—consisting of a sunny flower terrace at the back of the house and a small entrance garden shaded by her favorite trees and shrubs

that she brought with her from Reef Point. Although no plans have been found for the terrace garden, vintage color photos were useful for the Maine Master Gardeners volunteer team. A cultural landscape report unearthed information for a multiyear restoration strategy that included plant propagation and locating missing garden ornaments. Attention has now turned to the entrance garden, for which a few sketches have been located. Thanks to the volunteers who maintain this important garden, visitors from around the world can now glimpse one of Farrand’s most personal gardens.

On a more personal level, in 2002 I had the pleasure of collaborating with landscape architect Norma E. Williams on documenting Greenwood Gardens, a preservation project of the Garden Conservancy in Short Hills, NJ. The slumbering garden had Arts & Crafts teahouses, pergolas, trellises, and grottos filled with Rookwood tiles, as well as water features, including an Italianate cascade that turned out to be the work of a little-known architect, William Whetten Renwick. Eighty years later, the original 1920s gardens were slumbering, the Art Deco-style house had been replaced, and a newer layer of plantings had been installed in the 1960s. The ambitious, multi-year restoration of built features and plantings has now come to fruition.

Preserving Gardens that Spring from the Soul

Nestled into the Berkshire hills not far from the Garden Conservancy headquarters, Naumkeag is one of America’s cultural treasures and one of its most renowned Massachusetts gardens. Here, creators Fletcher Steele and Mabel Choate believed that garden making was a fine art, and pushed the limits of color, line, form, and horticulture as they molded their masterpiece. As biographer Robin Karson wrote, “Fletcher Steele made gardens as playgrounds for people’s imaginations.” Certainly, Naumkeag reflected this lavish garden theater: from the moon gated-wall of the Chinese Temple garden to the birch-bedecked Blue Steps, the magnificent views of the Stockbridge mountains offered a dramatic backdrop to Steele’s stage. Sometimes the magic of a garden, however, is not evident to everyone. When The Trustees was approached to accept Naumkeag as a bequest, one member of the Standing Committee vehemently argued against its acceptance, writing, “It isn’t an old house, it isn’t a beautiful house, and it has one of the most horrendous gardens in the Commonwealth… I really can’t see why The Trustees should take over this white elephant of a house.”

Many years later, long after Naumkeag did, in fact, come to The Trustees, retired president Gordon Abbott, Jr. wrote a history of the organization that included our foray into garden preservation. “Preserving gardens,” he wrote, “presents a special set of problems. Landscape gardens such as those at Naumkeag… derive their character from their design. Given sufficient funds, technical knowledge, labor, and, of course, an understanding of the original design concept and an appreciation for its subtleties, they can be maintained with

relative ease.” After having recently restored Naumkeag’s gardens, I might question the “relative ease” part of his statement as we continue to polish this masterpiece and determine the tools necessary to guide stewardship decisions in the future.

As we continue to steward Naumkeag, we are also challenged to rejuvenate two very personal gardens in North Andover and Beverly, MA, where historic records have been uncovered only after hours of diligent research, and the personal development of the gardens had to be understood and translated to master planners and organizational leaders. Abbot recognized these two gardens and their specific challenges as he wrote, “But it is the personal gardens such as those at Long Hill and the Stevens-Coolidge Place, whose poetic charm has come from the special interests, tastes, and sensibilities of an individual, which present the greatest challenge. For these are characteristics that spring from the soul and are not easy to institutionalize.” Certainly, this is the challenge of garden preservation: how to understand, guide, and institutionalize “gardens that spring from the soul” so that their inherent genius of people and place can continue to inspire under the umbrella of their legacy.

Each time the Garden Conservancy accepts a conservation easement on a garden property, it is pledging to ensure the easement’s preservation goals are maintained—in perpetuity. Part of shouldering that responsibility involves establishing a relationship with the garden owner (either

a nonprofit organization or a private individual) and creating resources for stewardship of the garden, such as management plans and records that document the garden’s special qualities or its “conservation values.” This is much like the suite of documents we at the Trustees of Reservations are developing to inform site stewardship and protect core features at garden properties that we manage.

Each time we establish a garden preservation easement, we build documents that guide its long-term management, a suite of documents to inform site stewardship and protect core features. Managing change is foundational to garden preservation. Gardens are dynamic and very personal heritage sites, filled with plants at various stages of youth, maturation, and decay. To preserve and protect what makes each one unique, guiding documents must specify how much change is acceptable. They must accurately defend features or plant collections sacred to the core spirit of the garden. Most importantly, they anticipate where, how, and at what pace, change will occur. As gardens transition from private to public spaces, they adapt to welcome and accommodate visitors, provide parking, ticketing systems, visitor services, staff workspaces, and appropriate interpretation and programming. Most of all, each needs a sound business plan and suitable financial support to operate and maintain the garden. Opening the doors to the public requires more funding, and more site changes, than supporting a private garden. Yet every generous gardener wants to share and engage their garden with the community. As they should, for each garden, when done well, offers an inspiration and refuge unlike any other cultural resource.

In 2014, The Trustees looked to the English National Trust as a model for our management tools. We established Statements of Significance. We tested Spirit of Place statements. We created baseline standards and a work order system for capital expenses. We approved a Living Collections Policy for the curation of plant collections. Today, we are testing Guiding Principles documents that describe each garden area, state its management intent, and frame the style, type, and intent of plantings while allowing individual horticulturists some freedom in horticultural selections that allow the gardens (and the horticulturists) to thrive. In almost all cases,

we have inherited a garden that has matured into a unique work of art. That maturation, however, means that existing plants are reaching their viable life span, particularly in New England, so the curation of the plant collections at each site is becoming our most critical planning need. While welcoming repeat visitors, we have also had to recognize the impact of people on a place and build awareness of site capacity and seasonal pacing of visitation to protect property resources while maximizing their public enjoyment 365 days a year.

As the nation’s oldest statewide conservation and historic preservation organization, the 120 properties of Massachusetts’ Trustees of Reservations are united by Charles Eliot’s bold idea of protecting exceptional places of historic, natural, and scenic value for the public enjoyment. Today, we are striving to create public gardens where curated horticultural collections thrive in beautifully preserved settings and welcome all visitors. Unique legacy gardens and creative new garden design is often signature to our public gardens. Interpretation and programming are focused on horticulture, botany, garden techniques, historic legacy, and new garden spaces that spring from that legacy. This work has leveraged our public gardens from relative obscurity to a major pillar of our current strategic plan. More than a preservation success, they connect spirit and mind with the personal touch of each creator. With the right guiding documents, preservation easements, and financial plans in place, they can each become playgrounds for the imagination.

Landscape and Memory at Sylvester Manor

As you enter the long drive at Sylvester Manor, the outside world drifts away and you are surrounded by the sounds and silence of the forest. Senses are heightened with the sway of the trees in the wind and the smell of the woods and the water. A feeling of “story” is present often without knowing anything about the place. This is a place of history and memory whose essence has been held by the land itself over the centuries and through generations.

Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island in New York is considered to be the most intact Northern plantation remnant. The island is the ancestral home of the Indigenous Manhansett people, who called it Manhansack-aha-quash-awamock, “Island Sheltered by Islands,” in the waters now known as Eastern Long Island’s Peconic Bay. The English claimed the territory for the king in 1638 and, in 1651, Shelter Island was purchased with 1,600 pounds of turbinado sugar by four English partners, including brothers Constant and Nathaniel Sylvester, to serve as a Provisioning Plantation for their sugar operations on the West Indies island of Barbados.

Far from the sugarcane killing fields, they brought to Shelter Island enslaved African men, women, and children to perform the labors of clearing and farming the land, raising livestock, harvesting timber for barrel staves to transport foodstuffs, sugar, and molasses, and tending the Sylvester house and family. For 368 years, property ownership passed through eleven generations of Sylvester descendants, until Sylvester Manor Educational Farm was established in 2009 and the land donated in 2014 to the nonprofit organization. Now comprising 235 acres, a Georgian-style Manor House built in 1737, outbuildings, and a working farm, Sylvester Manor Educational Farm’s mission is to preserve, cultivate, and share the history of Sylvester Manor.

As the Manor’s curator and archivist, I am dedicated to telling the stories of all the people of this land, openly and honestly promoting dialogue and insights into our history. And as a photographer, I am inspired by the memories I find evoked in the landscape that help me to imagine the lives of the people who lived and worked on this place. Their presence is palpable, and I am called to tell their stories as revealed and held in the landscape and captured in my photographs.

At the fork of the main entry drive, a mighty oak stands before a circle of eastern white pine trees surrounding an old fence. A large stone placed beside the road in 1886 by Sylvester descendants reads “Burying Ground of the Colored People of the Manor From 1651.” The stone acknowledges as many as 200 people believed to be laid to rest in this Afro-Indigenous Burial Ground. Grave mounds are barely discernible; a few field stones in loose alignment mark the site. This is sacred ground of the Manhansett people, who lost this land as their ancestral home, and of the enslaved African people brought here against their will, isolated, and held captive in a foreign place. Beyond scant listings of their names in last wills and testaments,

account books and letters, their individual lives are all but undocumented.

We look closely today to find their stories. Walking the grounds, remnants of their existence and their labors can be found — in the stone boulder wall constructed as a boundary, still evident from edge to edge of the property. And in the cobbled stone dooryard buried under the front lawn of the grand eighteenth-century house, that perhaps once served as a link between the work areas of the provisioning operations and the shoreline where workers unloaded molasses, sugar, and rum and reloaded the holds with preserved foodstuffs and material for the profitable sugar plantations in far-off Barbados.

These stones in the Manor landscape endure, as memorials to the people who placed them here, and to all that their labor represented and represents to today’s story of our nation. Though we have only their names and their echoes in the land, in truth they are among the founding families of Sylvester Manor and of Shelter Island. Through the stories, images, and art that we capture, create, and share, we pay them tribute.

Hannah, Jacquero, and their daughters Hope and Isabell, were among the first Black families of Shelter Island; they lived in bondage on this land and were laid to rest here.

Tammero and his wife, Oyou, Africans living enslaved at Sylvester Manor, started a family that would go on to include Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet. Julia Dyd Havens Johnson, a free-born woman of color, worked for three generations of Manor owners, only to have the land she inherited swindled from her. Julia is the last person known to be buried in the Burial Ground.

The landscape of Sylvester Manor is imbued with the memory of these individuals and countless others. Every day we strive to honor and celebrate them and to present their part in our history.

As I walk the land with my camera in hand, I call their names. Through captured images of the trees and woodlands, the waterways and gardens within the Manor house and the outbuildings—in the land, the soil, the boulders and beams, the boards and nails—I seek, and find, and reveal, their energy and their essence.

Preservation in Action at the Garden Conservancy: The Tools of Preservation

Preserving a garden begins with recognizing that landscapes are works of art, nature, and history that are constantly evolving. Rather than attempting to freeze a garden in time, our preservation work focuses on capturing a garden’s story in a way that will be meaningful for generations to come. We do this by partnering with nonprofits and community-based organizations to:

• Restore historic gardens

• Document the spirit of gardens

• Establish conservation easements

• Advocate for gardens at risk

• Develop educational programming

• Foster organizational development to help our partners thrive as independent entities

Since 1989, the Garden Conservancy has contributed to preservation efforts at more than 100 gardens across America. Each garden has unique characteristics and challenges. Together, they represent the broad range and rich diversity of garden types on our continent, as well as the distinctive character and rich cultural legacy of America’s gardens.

On rare occasions, we also assist a private garden in becoming a public garden. When assessing the feasibility of such a transition, we consider the garden’s legacy, resources, and context. Within these categories, we ask the following questions:

Legacy What makes a garden significant or worthy of preservation? Does it have a unique or iconic design, or a horticulturally noteworthy plant collection? Does the designer or creator of the garden—or the site itself—have historic or cultural significance?

Resources Both human and financial resources are necessary for the ongoing success of a public garden. Are there dedicated staff, volunteers, and board members who have relevant experience and skills? Is there an endowment or donor base in place, or the ability to build one, that will provide sustainable support? Is there a viable source of earned income from programming, sales, and visitation?

Context The context of a garden includes its physical location as well as various cultural and demographic characteristics. Is there sufficient population density to support the garden? Easy access for visitors, including public transportation and adequate parking space? Potential for partnerships with other cultural institutions? Does the community show support for their cultural resources?

Preservation in Action at the Garden Conservancy: Our Partners

Following is a list of many—but by no means all—of the gardens with whom we have partnered and to whose preservation efforts we have contributed. It is as accurate as possible, to the best of our knowledge and our records. The gardens are listed in alphabetical order by garden name.

Abkhazi Garden Victoria, British Columbia

Prince Nicholas Abkhazi, of Russian nobility in Georgia, and his wife, Peggy Pemberton-Carter, began creating a garden in Victoria in 1946, working together on it for more than 40 years. In February 2000, the Garden Conservancy assisted the Land Conservancy of British Columbia (TLCBC) in purchasing the property to save it and its heritage from development. The Garden Conservancy continued to advise TLCBC as the garden was developed for public usage.

Anderson Japanese Gardens Rockford, IL

This twelve-acre Japanese garden was established in 1978 by John R. Anderson and landscape architect Hoichi Kurisu on the site of Anderson’s home in Rockford, IL. The garden was inspired by Anderson’s trips to Japan and his visit to the Portland Japanese Garden in Washington Park in Portland, OR, which was also designed by Kurisu. In 1996, the Garden Conservancy advised Anderson on establishing an endowment for the garden and in developing plans for future management of the garden.

Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum Lynchburg, VA

The Anne Spencer House was, from 1903 – 1975, the home of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer. In 2008, the Garden Conservancy advised the Hillside Garden Club on the rehabilitation of the garden, including restoration of the pergola and pool, and conducted a garden assessment in 2012. The Conservancy also raised funds for the garden through a “Giving Tuesday” campaign in 2019 and awarded it a Gardens for Good grant in 2021. In 2020, Shaun Spencer-Hester, Anne Spencer’s granddaughter and the executive director of the museum, participated in a Garden Conservancy panel discussion on inclusive interpretation of gardens for the American Public Gardens Association. See also Spencer-Hester’s essay on page 16.

Arthur Erickson Garden Vancouver, British Columbia

This garden was created by Canadian architect and urban planner Arthur Erickson (1924 – 2009) at his home for more than fifty years. In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy assisted the Arthur Erickson Foundation on fundraising strategies, as well as with development of an archival program and a conservation plan for the house and garden.

Ashintully Gardens Tyringham, MA

Ashintully Gardens is a 120-acre estate maintained by the Trustees of Reservations, a land trust in Massachusetts. The gardens and adjoining 594 acres were the gift of John McLennan, Jr. and his wife, Katharine. Following McLennan’s death in 1996, the Garden Conservancy supported the Trustees of Reservations in preserving the property, providing recommendations for design improvements and management. Shortly thereafter, the Conservancy advocated for the garden’s efforts to establish an endowment to support future maintenance.

Aullwood Garden Metro Park Dayton, OH

Now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, Aullwood House and Garden once served as home for Dayton-area industrialist John Aull and his wife, Marie. Today, the garden is one of 25 properties cared for by Five Rivers MetroParks. From 1996 to 1998, the Garden Conservancy assisted Aullwood Garden in developing programs and building local support, and advised on maintenance and preservation practices. In the 2000s, the Conservancy reviewed and made recommendations on the garden’s maintenance and preservation plans and conducted a garden assessment.

Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center Far Hills, NJ

A botanical garden and public park in Chester Township, NJ, the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 under its historic name, Merchiston Farm. It is significant as the home of the American landscape architect Martha Brookes Hutcheson (1871 – 1959) and for her landscaping of the property.

In 1994, with the garden’s condition deteriorating, the Garden Conservancy urged the Morris County Park Commission to create a master plan, which resulted in a renewed commitment to the garden’s care and interpretation. The Conservancy endorsed the proposed restoration of the garden, which took place shortly thereafter.

Bannerman Castle Trust Beacon, NY

The principal feature on Pollepel Island, a 6.5-acre island in the Hudson River in New York State, is Bannerman’s Castle, an abandoned military surplus warehouse that is now owned and managed by the Bannerman Castle Trust. In 2001, the Garden Conservancy enlisted local members to clear the derelict garden and help make it ready for public visitation.

The Barnes Arboretum at Saint Joseph’s University Merion Station, PA

In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy assisted with efforts to link the arboretum more closely to the university, providing fundraising advice and reviewing and making recommendations on the arboretum’s strategic plan, landscape policies, and grant applications.

Bellamy-Ferriday House & Garden Bethlehem, CT

A historic house museum, Bellamy-Ferriday was built by the Reverend Joseph Bellamy (1719 – 1790), a prominent Congregationalist minister who played an influential role in the First Great Awakening. Together with Connecticut Landmarks, the Garden Conservancy orchestrated reconstruction of the formal garden to recreate the spirit of the 1920s garden, a project that ultimately took ten years. Beginning in 1993, the Garden Conservancy assisted in documenting existing plants on the property and, a few years later, restoration of the property began.

Bellefield at Historic Hyde Park Hyde Park, NY

The earliest example of an existing private garden designed by landscape architect Beatrix Farrand (1872 – 1959), Bellefield is part of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site. In 1997, with the advice of the Garden Conservancy, a horticulturist was hired to lead volunteers in planting and maintaining the perennial borders. The following year, the Conservancy assisted with preservation planning and efforts to restore the garden. While Farrand’s original planting plans for Bellefield have been lost to the ages, the Garden Conservancy collaborated with a team of landscape designers to research the design of her nearby gardens created in the same timeframe, forming a basis for stewardship of the garden.

Blithewold Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum Bristol, RI

A 33-acre summer estate with grand views of Narragansett Bay, Blithewold is one of the most fully developed and authentic examples of Country Place Era (1890 – 1930) landscape design. In 1998, the Garden Conservancy took action to save Blithewold from private development and keep it open to the public by assisting in the formation of Save Blithewold, Inc., to raise necessary funding and help create a business plan to manage the property. These efforts were successful, and the Garden Conservancy then assisted in the creation of an operations plan and funding of a horticulturist position. In 2003, the Garden Conservancy also guided the restoration and interpretation of the grounds, as well as development of educational programming.

Blithewood Garden Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

A formal Italianate walled garden on the main campus of Bard College, Blithewood Garden was designed in the Beaux Arts style by Francis Hoppin in the early twentieth century. The site has significant connections to the heritage of the Hudson Valley and the evolution of American landscape design; it is a contributing property to the Hudson River National Historic Landmark. In 2016, the Garden Conservancy and Bard College entered into a multi-year partnership. For more information, see the Blithewood profile, page 45.

The Blue Garden Newport, RI

Among the many notable gardens created by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and the Olmsted firm, the Blue Garden, which opened at a gala in 1913, remains a unique expression of landscape art. In 2014, Garden Conservancy staff attended the formal unveiling of the restored garden and led a discussion on options for ownership structure. In 2018, Blue Garden Executive Director Sarah Vance presented at the Garden Conservancy’s landscape panel discussion “The Architectural Garden: Challenges of Preserving Formal Structures in the Landscape,” held at Bard College. A permanent conservation easement was placed on the property and is held by the Aquidneck Land Trust.

Boyce Thompson Arboretum / Wallace Desert Garden Superior, AZ

The philanthropist Henry Browne (H.B.) Wallace (1915 – 2003) filled his garden in North Scottsdale, AZ, with arid land plants from six continents. In 2008, the Garden Conservancy and public garden professionals from around the country gathered at Wallace’s garden to evaluate its potential to become a public garden. Between December 2015 and November 2017, approximately 5,848 plants were transported more than 75 miles to their new home and planted in a new thirteen-acre Wallace Desert Garden at the arboretum.

Brookwood Point Cooperstown, NY

An estate on the shores of Otsego Lake, in western New York State, Brookwood Point was established in the early 1820s and is home to a 100-year-old Italianate Renaissance garden.  In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy advised Brookwood Point on management, programs, public use, long-range planning, organizational development, and fundraising.

Casa del Herrero Montecito, CA

Also known as the Steedman Estate, Casa del Herrero was built in the Spanish Colonial Revival style in 1922 – 1925. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark. In 1994, the Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance on garden preservation and phased restoration.

Alcatraz

The rock. Military reservation. Maximum security prison. Birdman, Capone, Machine-Gun Kelly, and the boys.

Red Power, IOAT (Indians of All Tribes), and the Occupation. Gardens.

Alcatraz has a long and complex history. Gardens are at the end of the list because they aren’t the first thing that usually comes to mind when you hear about this tiny island. Its name dates to the first explorer of San Francisco Bay, Juan Manuel de Ayala, who sailed into the bay in 1775, mapped it, and named one of the islands “Isla de los Alcatraces” (Island of the Pelicans) because the birds were so plentiful there. By the 1850s, the island was housing its first military prisoners, and, in 1909, it was military prisoners who began building the prison we all know on the foundation of the fortified citadel that was its first use.

Sun and rain were the only elements the Rock had that could contribute to a garden. Everything else, including soil from other islands, had to be brought in. Gardens began as functional entities; they were created to break the vicious winds that sweep across the water and to help control erosion. Only gradually did they become aesthetic and therapeutic. Floriferous beds eventually helped to give meaning to the lives of the officers and staff and their families, and softened the hardship for spouses brought out to live on site.

In time, the gardens played a unique role in the lives of the prisoners who began to tend them. “Life is worth holding onto even at its bitterest,” wrote Fred Reichel, the warden’s secretary in the 1930s. For the men interned there, many at the end of the prison system line, the gardens humanized confinement. Many found their only contentment and solace while at work in the sun. The prison closed in 1963. For forty years, there was no maintenance and no water except the rains. The gardens were lost. In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy, at a meeting to establish a Bay Area presence, was approached about the possibility of rehabilitating the Alcatraz gardens. An unprecedented collaborative partnership was put together between the Conservancy, the National Park Service, and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (GGNPC). A volunteer group was assembled and a project that would last ten years was launched. The garden rehabilitation was completed in 2014 and management transitioned to the GGNPC, with the Garden Conservancy stepping into a less active advisory role.

As if the spirit of the island’s long-gone residents returned, plants that hadn’t been seen in decades reappeared as garden beds were cleared and rehabilitated. Far from sliding off into the bay, the gardens held on to some of the original meaning they created, and shared it once again. Fresh resources and new plants filled them out, the gardens were alive, and people noticed. Despite a prison population that never reached 300, Alcatraz now sees 1.5 million visitors a year, easily the most visited project in the Garden Conservancy’s history, with visitorship that would be the envy of many a large botanical garden.

Russell Beatty, author of Gardens of Alcatraz (Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, 1996), wrote, “Suddenly, we appreciate the true meaning of the gardens: the human drama they represent.” Alcatraz—any garden really—changes the lives of those who invest their sweat, occasional blood and tears, and spirit.

Chase Garden Orting, WA

An outstanding example of Pacific Northwest modernist garden style, Chase Garden is a 4.5-acre garden that artfully combines Japanese and midcentury design with the naturalistic look of a Pacific Northwest landscape. The Garden Conservancy owned and managed all aspects of the garden for nearly a decade. For more information, see the Chase Garden profile, page 47.

Cohen Bray House Oakland, CA

A historic landmark built in 1884, the Cohen Bray House reflects California’s Gold Rush era. In 2001, the Garden Conservancy recognized the significance of the Cohen Bray Victorian landscape and extended preservation assistance to the nonprofit that manages it, the Victorian Preservation Center of Oakland. The Conservancy provided letters of support for grants and letters in opposition to a development project that would have adversely affected the landscape.

The Cross Estate Gardens Bernardsville, NJ

The Cross Estate’s formal gardens and native plantings are representative of the work of Clarence Fowler (1870 – 1935), a prominent and respected landscape architect. The estate is a project of the New Jersey Historical Garden Foundation in cooperation with the National Park Service. In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy conducted a garden assessment and produced a report to serve as a guide for preservation planning, site enhancements, and program development.

The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens Jacksonville, FL

Founded in 1961, the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens has three flower gardens on the museum grounds, the oldest dating to 1903. The original garden designs by the Olmsted Brothers, Thomas Meehan and Sons, and Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869 –1950) have been preserved for more than a century and are on the National Register of Historic Places. After severe damage from Hurricane Irma in 2018, the Garden Conservancy made a $20,000 restoration grant toward the reconstruction of the historic gardens.

Deepwood Museum & Gardens Salem, OR

Deepwood Museum & Gardens has been managed since 1974 by the nonprofit Friends of Deepwood and is owned by the City of Salem. The gardens at Deepwood were one of the earliest commissions of Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, the first

female landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest, which designed more than 200 landscapes and gardens in the region between 1929 and 1969. In 2012, the Garden Conservancy advised the Lord & Schryver Conservancy on the renovation of the Scroll Garden at Deepwood, as well as on the development of a cultural landscape report.

Dumbarton Oaks Garden Washington, DC

In 1920, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss found their ideal country house and garden within Washington, DC, a 53-acre property at the highest point of Georgetown. Working in close collaboration for almost 30 years, Mildred Bliss and landscape architect Beatrix Farrand planned every garden detail, each terrace, bench, urn, and border. The upper sixteen acres were transferred to Harvard University in 1940. In 1995, the Garden Conservancy provided advice and resources for garden stabilization and, in 1999, the Garden Conservancy sponsored the restoration of Forsythia Hill.

Eby San Francisco, CA

A private terraced garden originally designed in the 1930s, on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, the Eby garden is part of the historic Valetta’s Garden. The Garden Conservancy holds a conservation easement on this property and monitors it annually.

Elawa Farm Lake Forest, IL

A restored gentleman’s farm on Chicago’s North Shore, Elawa Farm is a stunning example of estate farm architecture and a unique gem of Lake Forest. It is managed by a public-private partnership between the Elawa Farm Foundation and the City of Lake Forest. In 2007, the Garden Conservancy created a report and planting plan based on a strategy developed together with regional partners.

Elizabeth Lawrence House & Garden Charlotte, NC

In 1949, garden designer and writer Elizabeth Lawrence (1904 – 1985) began a garden on a modest lot in Charlotte, NC, that would embody her lifelong celebration of Southern horticulture. It doubled as a living laboratory for her study of plants and design. The Garden Conservancy holds and monitors a conservation easement on the property to protect it in perpetuity. The Conservancy also placed an intern at the garden in 2009, provided a Gardens for Good grant in 2021, and continues to provide technical assistance. For more information, see the Elizabeth Lawrence Garden profile, page 51.

Elk Rock Garden at the Bishop’s Close Portland, OR

Located on a hillside estate overlooking the Williamette River with a view of Mount Hood, Elk Rock Garden at the Bishop’s Close is arguably the oldest and largest intact private garden in the Pacific Northwest. Businessman Peter Kerr (1861 –1957) developed Elk Rock for food production, recreation, socializing, and ornamental gardening, with advice from John C. Olmsted of Olmsted Brothers landscape architects.

The Garden Conservancy partnered with the Elk Rock Garden Foundation on preservation planning in the early 2000s. In 2003, Elk Rock was among sixteen gardens represented at a meeting that resulted in the creation of a regional organization of emerging public gardens, which would become the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network.

Enid A. Haupt Garden Washington, DC

A 4.2-acre public garden in the Smithsonian Institution’s complex on the National Mall in Washington, DC, the Enid A. Haupt Garden was designed to be a modern interpretation of American Victorian gardens in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. In October 2016, the Garden Conservancy joined other preservation-minded organizations in championing the preservation of the garden, which was threatened by a proposed redesign of the Smithsonian’s south campus. In 2018, the National Capital Planning Commission approved revised plans that preserved the Haupt Garden.

Eudora Welty House & Garden Jackson, MS

The home of author Eudora Welty (1909 – 2001) for nearly 80 years, the Eudora Welty House was built by her parents in 1925. Welty and her mother created and tended the garden for many decades. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark. Welty bequeathed her house and garden to the State of Mississippi. The Garden Conservancy assisted in restoring Welty’s garden to what it had been during her prime. The project was guided by Welty’s mother’s original garden designs and plant lists.

F.W. Vanderbilt Italian Garden Hyde Park, NY

Historically known as Hyde Park, the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site is one of the area’s oldest Hudson River estates. The gardens incorporate formal elements typical of the Italian style. In 2008, the Garden Conservancy partnered with the Frederick Vanderbilt Garden Association in developing a strategic plan for a new landscape initiative, which the board adopted and implemented.

The Fells Historic Estate & Gardens Newbury, NH

Once the nineteenth-century summer retreat of American statesman and author John Hay (1838 – 1905), the landscape was enhanced by his son, Clarence Hay. In 1990, with the gardens in disrepair, the State of New Hampshire contacted the Garden Conservancy and authorized it, in partnership with the Friends of The Fells, to take over the management, restoration, and interpretation of the landscape. The perennial border, rose terrace, rock garden, and Old Garden were renovated and a program of educational workshops established. In 1997, management responsibility was taken over by the Friends. In more recent years, the Conservancy has continued to provide periodic grants and technical support. Today, The Fells is a regional center for conservation and horticultural education.

Fort Greene Park Brooklyn, NY

A 30-acre, city-owned and operated public park in Fort Greene Park was originally built to house forts for the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The site was designated Brooklyn’s first park in 1847 and redesigned by Olmsted and Vaux in the late 1860s. In 2019, when a plan threatened to destroy multi-purpose mounds by landscape architect Arthur Edwin Bye, Jr. (1909 – 2001), the Garden Conservancy sent a letter in support of preserving Bye’s design.

Gaiety Hollow Salem, OR

In the early twentieth century, Gaiety Hollow was both the home garden and office of Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, the first all-female landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest.  The site demonstrates classic garden design principles adapted to a residential scale for the Pacific Northwest and is considered to be the tour de force of their life work. Its strong bones, quality of design, craftsmanship, and well-grown plants are the legacy of Lord & Schryver. The Garden Conservancy began providing preservation planning assistance for Gaiety Hollow in 2003 and has provided technical advice and resources, helped strategize for the capital campaign, and developed a marketing plan for the garden. In 2021, Gaiety Hollow received a Garden Conservancy Gardens for Good grant.

The Gardens at Palmdale Fremont, CA

A five-acre meditation garden in Silicon Valley, the Gardens at Palmdale is one of the last remaining fragments of the famous Mission San Jose land grant. In 2015, they partnered with the Garden Conservancy to create a conservation easement to protect the property’s conservation values in perpetuity, which was signed in 2019. For more information on the Gardens at Palmdale, see profile on page 57.

The Ruth Bancroft Garden

Walnut Creek, CA

In days gone by, stories always began, “Once upon a time...” If ever a tale deserved that opening, it would be that of the Ruth Bancroft Garden and the role it played in the formation of the Garden Conservancy. There was no Garden Conservancy when Frank Cabot paid his first visit to Ruth Bancroft in Walnut Creek, CA, in 1988. Until he visited, he hadn’t met Ruth or her magnum opus. And we have it on good authority that he was no fan of “spiny and spiky” things.

Frank Cabot was an inveterate garden visitor. “I see visiting a garden as basically an emotional and sensual experience, as well as something that is filled with surprise.” Emotional? Sensual? This was likely the most dangerous garden he’d ever visited. Spikes and spines and glochids, oh my! He was certainly surprised.

Penelope Hobhouse, world-famous doyenne of the British gardening world who has designed gardens in many countries and for many luminaries, had passed along a recommendation about this woman and this garden, calling it “one of the finest gardens in North America.” That would surely have been enough to excite interest, even for a “dry” garden. She undoubtedly mentioned the plants that comprised it. Nonetheless, it does not sound as if he was prepared for what he saw:

“I shall never get over the excitement and the sense of wonder that I experienced when I first visited your garden. It was something that does not happen very often in a garden visitor’s lifetime,” Garden Conservancy founder Frank Cabot wrote in a letter to Ruth Bancroft nearly ten years after his first visit.

He immediately acknowledged the greatness of both the garden and the gardener. Cacti, agave, and other succulents were not only mature and beautifully grown; they were displayed in a garden whose plot continued to unfold as it was walked. Ruth began creating her garden in the 1970s, and after some early design assistance from Lester Hawkins, founder of Western Hills Rare Plant Nursery in Occidental, CA, she single-handedly turned a personal passion into a nationally recognized horticultural wonder filled with remarkable specimens. For example, at 50+ years of age, and measuring more than three feet high, the garden’s rare Lobivia formosa is thought to be the largest specimen in northern California, while the imposing but whimsical Yucca filifera looks humanoid. A pioneer of drought-tolerant gardening, Ruth continued to be a guiding force in the garden’s development until she passed away at the age of 109 in 2017.

On the way home, and equally struck by the Bancroft garden, Anne, Frank’s wife, casually brainstormed the creation of some sort of organization to focus on preserving amazing gardens like the one they’d just seen—so outstanding, so unique, so American.

The rest, as is often said, is history. The Garden Conservancy was formed and its first preservation project was the transition of Ruth’s garden into a public resource that will inspire and educate visitors for generations to come. The Conservancy also pioneered the first use of a conservation easement to protect a garden at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in 1993. Critical to the success of the Ruth Bancroft Garden (which now welcomes tens of thousands of visitors each year) were committed volunteers from the local and regional community. While the garden now boasts a highly skilled professional staff, volunteers continue to form the backbone of the garden’s management.

The story of the Garden Conservancy is, now and forever, inextricably tied to that of the Ruth Bancroft Garden. It’s not just that Ruth’s garden is now mature, packed with a collection of collections, a beautifully designed showcase for plants many people only, if ever, see in stunted form in pots on windowsills. It’s that it tells its own story, a mystical, magical, and transcendent story about a passion, a vision and persistence; a story and a feeling that Cabot identifies in his letter to Ruth—one that is only experienced in the very finest gardens.

Gardens of Alcatraz San Francisco, CA

The island of Alcatraz has a long and unique history since the mid-nineteenth century, first as a military base, to housing imprisoned conscientious objectors during World War I, to African American inmates protesting segregationist policies, to the American Indian Occupation of 1969-1971 demanding civil rights and dignity. For ten years starting in 2003, the Garden Conservancy led an effort to rehabilitate the Gardens of Alcatraz in partnership with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service. For more information on the Gardens of Alcatraz, see profile on page 37.

Garland Farm Bar Harbor, ME

Garland Farm was the last home and garden of pioneering landscape architect Beatrix Farrand (1872 – 1959). In 2003, the Garden Conservancy supported efforts by a newly formed nonprofit organization, the Beatrix Farrand Society, to acquire the property for public use and education. In 2013, the Beatrix Farrand Society and the Garden Conservancy co-sponsored a seminar in Bar Harbor on “Restoring Beatrix Farrand Gardens.”

Green Gables Woodside, CA

The 74-acre Green Gables, an extraordinary example of a Country Place Era estate, was designed by architect Charles Greene (1868 – 1957) in the early 1900s and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Since 2003, the Garden Conservancy has held a conservation easement on the property to protect its architectural, historical, horticultural, ecological, and cultural values, all important legacies of the site.

Greenwood Gardens Short Hills, NJ

Twenty-eight acres of designed and naturalistic landscapes, Greenwood Gardens is an elegant and unique example of the Arts & Crafts aesthetic applied to traditional, formal garden design. Beginning in the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy partnered with the owners of Greenwood Gardens to study the feasibility of making a transition from private to public garden. For eighteen months, the Conservancy also directly managed the gardens, and has continued to provide technical support and guidance. Greenwood Gardens obtained its nonprofit status in 2005 and began an ambitious multi-year garden renovation plan in 2006, completing the second major phase in 2020.

Greystone Mansion & Gardens Beverly Hills, CA

The Greystone Mansion, also known as the Doheny Mansion, is a Tudor Revival building on a landscaped estate with distinctive formal English gardens completed in 1928 for oil baron Edward

Donehy. It is now owned by the City of Beverly Hills and managed as a public park. In 2010, the Friends of Greystone contacted the Garden Conservancy for a letter in support of their restoration of the formal garden and greenhouse.

Hakone Gardens Saratoga, CA

An eighteen-acre traditional Japanese garden, Hakone Gardens is recognized as one of the oldest Japanese-style residential gardens in the Western Hemisphere. In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy provided Hakone Gardens with technical assistance, including a garden assessment and recommendations for preservation planning and site management.

Hannah Carter Japanese Garden Los Angeles, CA

Designed in 1959 by noted Japanese garden designer Nagao Sakurai, this garden was deeded to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) by Edward Carter, who named the garden in honor of his wife, Hannah. After announcing plans to sell the garden in 2011, UCLA was sued by the Carter family for breach of donor intent. The Garden Conservancy organized a coalition to save the Hannah Carter Japanese Garden, a group that included both concerned individuals and cultural organizations, and led the coalition’s advocacy campaign for eighteen months. In 2016, UCLA sold the garden under the condition that the garden be preserved. In 2017, the Garden Conservancy wrote a letter supporting the coalition’s nomination of the garden as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument.

Harkness Gardens Waterford, CT

The Harkness Gardens, which were designed by landscape architects Beatrix Farrand (1872 – 1959) and Marian Cruger Coffin (1876 – 1957), are located in Harkness Memorial State Park, the 200-acre former estate of Edward Stephen Harkness and his wife Mary Stillman Harkness. In the mid-1990s, the Garden Conservancy provided technical and fundraising assistance and conducted strategic planning meetings.

The Hermitage Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ

The Hermitage, a fourteen-room Gothic Revival house museum built in 1847 – 1848, is a National Historic Landmark. In the early 1990s, at the request of the Garden Conservancy, the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation assisted in the preparation of planting plans for the grounds, based on an 1890s photograph of the site. The Conservancy sponsored a symposium to assist the Friends of the Hermitage in establishing a landscape preservation plan and assisted with fundraising efforts to maintain and restore the period landscape.

Hills & Dales Estate’s Ferrell Gardens LaGrange, GA

One of the oldest surviving parterre gardens in the South, the Ferrell Gardens at Hills & Dales Estate were created in 1832 by Nancy Ferrell and expanded by her daughter Sara Coleman Ferrell in 1841. In the mid-1990s, as the family prepared for the future public operation of the estate, the Garden Conservancy made recommendations on preservation planning. In 1998, the property was bequeathed to the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation and it opened to the public in 2004.

Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden Washington, DC

Part of the Smithsonian Institution and located at the National Mall, the Hirshhorn Museum’s Sculpture Garden was designed by landscape architect Lester Collins (1914 – 1993) in the late 1970s. It showcases his signature fusion of minimalism and Asian design philosophy, and reinforces the identity of the garden as a welcoming urban park. In 2020, the Garden Conservancy joined other cultural and preservation organizations in expressing concern about the proposed redesign of the sunken sculpture garden, which threatens to destroy key features of the master work by Lester Collins. As of this writing, the museum is moving ahead with its redesign.

Hollister House Garden Washington, CT

A classic garden in the English manner with a loosely formal structure, Hollister House Garden was created by George Schoellkopf in the Litchfield hills of northwestern Connecticut. Starting in 2004, the Garden Conservancy advised on the property’s transition to become a public garden. The Conservancy was also instrumental in launching Hollister House Garden Study Weekend and continues as a cosponsor of the event.

Hortulus Farm Garden and Nursery Wrightstown, PA

A hundred-acre, eighteenth-century farmstead in Wrightstown, PA, Hortulus Farm was created by the garden and event designer Renny Reynolds and the late garden writer Jack Staub, who participated in Garden Conservancy Open Days for many years. In December 2020, Reynolds presented their latest book, Chasing Eden: Design Inspiration from the Gardens at Hortulus Farm, as part of the Conservancy’s Fall 2020 Literary Series.

Hortense Miller Garden Laguna Beach, CA

The Hortense Miller Home and Garden covers 2.5 acres of ocean view property in Laguna Beach and highlights both native and exotic species in a spectacular setting of coastal sage scrub. In 2005, the Garden Conservancy made recommendations on fundraising strategies and preservation planning for the garden.

Innisfree Garden Millbrook, NY

Now a public garden, Innisfree Garden was established between 1930 and 1960 as the private garden of Walter and Marion Beck, inspired by scroll paintings of the eighth-century Chinese poet and painter Wang Wei. With the help of landscape architect Lester Collins (1914 – 1993), individual garden scenes inspired by the Chinese paintings were connected to an overall landscape around a glacial lake, in keeping with the ecological surroundings. In 2019, the Conservancy wrote a letter to support Innisfree’s application for designation in the National Register of Historic Places. Innisfree has also been a frequent cosponsor of Garden Conservancy educational events.

James Rose Center Ridgewood, NJ

The James Rose Center, a nonprofit research and study foundation, is headquartered at the former home of avant-garde modernist landscape architect James Rose (1913 – 1991). In the 1990s, the Garden Conservancy assisted in saving James Rose’s garden and home and transforming them into the James Rose Center. In 1994, the Garden Conservancy helped form an advisory council to develop programming and support and later assisted in the formation of the James Rose Conservancy.

The John Fairey Garden Hempstead, TX

The John Fairey Garden, formerly known as the Peckerwood Garden, was begun in 1971 by John Fairey (1930 – 2020), architecture professor, plant explorer, and founder of Yucca Do Nursery. The garden brings together rare, drought-tolerant plants native to the southern United States and the remote mountains of Mexico and Asia. Since 1997, the Garden Conservancy has been working with the garden’s nonprofit foundation, now called the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation, to transition the garden into a public garden and educational resource. The Conservancy holds and monitors a conservation easement, established in 2016, which protects the property in perpetuity. For more information on the garden, see profile on page 61.

The John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden Mill Neck, NY

A fine example of a Japanese stroll garden in the northeastern United States, this garden seamlessly integrates Japanese landscape techniques with the woodland terrain of Long Island’s North Shore. The Garden Conservancy was instrumental in saving the garden from closing in 1993 and managed the garden on behalf of the Humes Japanese Garden Foundation for twenty years before it was purchased by the North Shore Land Alliance, a nonprofit land trust, in 2017. For more information on the garden, see profile on page 53.

Blithewood Garden

Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Gardening is essentially an effort to stall natural succession. Without constant human intervention, the process of change in species composition of a community continues unabated. Without you, your “garden” exists in name only—nature does not wait to reclaim what is hers.

Although this is so with the living elements, manmade objects do not escape the processes of aging and decay. Time and the elements wear down structures as well. Blithewood Garden at Bard College in Annandaleon-Hudson, NY, is a jewel of a garden that has been slowly crumbling away. A small garden with outsized significance, it has been aptly described as, “a garden on an intimate scale within a grand setting.” It is easy to overlook the decay and admire instead the idyllic view of the walled garden, or the borrowed one of the Catskill Mountains across the river, but age and the elements have been taking a toll: the garden was sending up an SOS. Blithewood Garden is an early and significant example of the design of a house and garden together as one thought process. The formal garden is sited within a picturesque landscape that has significant connections to Hudson Valley and American landscape history of the nineteenth century, when pioneering figures like Andrew Jackson Downing emphasized the importance of integrating house and landscape.

As tastes changed at the turn of the century, Blithewood’s new owners, Captain Andrew and Mrs. Frances Zabriskie, hired Francis L.V. Hoppin to replace the existing “villa” with a Georgian manor house and to add a neoclassical walled garden. Hoppin was a former apprentice of the prominent architectural firm McKim, Mead & White, and along with Beatrix Farrand, designed The Mount for Edith Wharton.

Designed nearly 120 years ago, the garden is Italianate in style, with Beaux Arts influences. This generally means order, symmetry, geometry, and formality. Hardscape and structure are more important in these gardens than in many other styles. Walls, terraces, pathways, statuary, water features, and hedges create outside rooms to extend the footprint of the interior living space.

The garden, as much as the house, is architectural. As a result, the hardscape is critically important for structure. Gardens that emphasize structure and hardscape elements face special challenges as they age. While some remnants of the estate’s original vegetation remain, Blithewood Garden’s plantings have evolved, making it a rehabilitation rather than a restoration. It was essential, however, that its historic structure be restored and preserved.

In 2015, Bard’s director of grounds and horticulture approached the Garden Conservancy for its assistance. The following year, a memorandum of understanding was put in place to guide joint efforts and the Friends of Blithewood Garden was created, drawing upon the community at Bard, in Annandale-on-Hudson, and the broader Red Hook/Tivoli area, for whom the garden is a cherished place.

Bard and the Garden Conservancy are planning a comprehensive rehabilitation project. With the Garden Conservancy’s project management support, research has been conducted to complete necessary studies and materials analyses. Raising broader awareness of the garden’s significance is essential, as Bard and the Garden Conservancy gear up for securing the needed funds for the project.

Blithewood is a superlative manifestation of the role that gardens played in early twentieth-century American culture. Yet it remains totally relevant today, providing the sense of comfort and peace that people feel when experiencing a garden, as well as a heightened awareness to the beauty and history around them. There could be no better argument for why we preserve gardens.

Chase Garden Orting,

WA

The most striking thing about Washington State’s Mount Rainier is its singularity. It is the most topographically prominent mountain in the contiguous United States. In addition to that distinction, it is topographically isolated. Basically, as flying over it reveals, it sticks up in the middle of nowhere, and has no similar peaks near it.

The Chase Garden, a passion project of Emmott and Ione Chase, is also prominent and remote. It sits in the foothills outside Orting, WA, and, on clear days, has an amazing view of its volcanic neighbor some miles distant. It takes some work to get to the garden—and the “Volcano Evacuation Route” signs along the way will make you think deer aren’t the worst threats to gardens after all.

The mountain, and the vistas and plant-life surrounding it, inspired the Chases, who worked with landscape architect Rex Zumwalt to design the garden. They then built and planted it themselves, along with doing all the finish work on their new, now classic, mid-century home.

The garden is often called one of the finest in the “Pacific Northwest” style. That means that its design doesn’t get in nature’s way and artfully combines mid-century and Japanese design. Instead, it highlights the beauty of the region. It works with and adapts to the environment around it, connecting the outdoors to interior living space while being sensitive to both. Its plants, rocks, and water integrate seamlessly into the landscape.

Thirty-three years after the garden was first designed and created, the Chases came to the Garden Conservancy for help in making it an asset to the community at large. The Conservancy accepted a conservation easement on the property and a “friends group” was formed. The Conservancy, in an atypical move, took over all aspects of direct management of the garden and its small staff. The Chases lived well into their nineties. When they passed, the property was left to the Garden Conservancy, with Chases’ wishes to make the garden public. It was the first and only time the organization was in the position of owning a garden that it helped to preserve.

For multiple reasons, the ownership and management position became untenable, and efforts to collaborate with local nonprofits, which were deemed essential to the ongoing success of the garden, did not lead to a sustainable long-term solution. The difficult decision to sell the property was made, but not before the conservation easement, under which the new owners took title, was strengthened and expanded. Extensive documentation work was also initiated to preserve the legacy and story of Emmott, Ione, and their garden.

As in all garden preservation projects, many component details must align, especially financial resources and context, and an army of passionate and dedicated volunteers, organizations, and stakeholders are necessary to make things go. All situations have their challenges, and some are more challenging than others.

Sometimes a story of prominence and isolation ends in a way not anticipated. In a unique twist the Chase Garden went from private, to public, to private again—but it has been saved, with measures in place to ensure its future. It is in good hands. It is once again locally owned, by people enthusiastic about both the historic garden they care for and its story. It is open to the public at least twice a year.

Juliette Low Gordon Birthplace Savannah, GA

In 1953, Juliette Gordon Low, the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA, commissioned landscape architect Clermont Lee, the first registered female landscape architect in Georgia, to design the garden at her home. In 2016, a proposed renovation threatened to destroy the garden. The Garden Conservancy  joined other preservation organizations and sent two letters—in 2018 and again in 2020—encouraging consideration of alternative renovation plans. The garden was razed in 2020.

Justin Smith Morrill Homestead Strafford, VT

The historic home of Justin Smith Morrill (1810 – 1898), who served in the United States House of Representatives and Senate for nearly 44 years, was one of the first National Historic Landmarks recognized when the program began in 1960. Morrill was a serious student of landscape gardening; his designs and plantings are in the best tradition of the Romantic landscape movement in America, at once formal yet picturesque. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy advised the newly formed Friends of the Morrill Homestead and, in 2002, made a grant to help implement the preservation master plan.

Keil Cove Tiburon, CA

A 34-acre property on the shores of San Francisco Bay, Keil Cove’s landscape was created 1890s by John McLaren (1846 – 1943), the horticulturist and landscape engineer responsible for designing and developing Golden Gate Park. Landscape architect Thomas Church (1902 – 1978) contributed an important component of the landscape surrounding the main house, a garden that survives as one of the few remaining examples of his early work. In 2002, the Garden Conservancy accepted a conservation easement on the property to protect its conservation values. Monitoring continues annually.

King’s Garden Ticonderoga, NY

King’s Garden, on Lake Champlain north of Fort Ticonderoga, is a Colonial Revival garden inspired by eighteenth-century military gardens. Around 1920, landscape architect Marian Cruger Coffin (1876 – 1957) was commissioned to design a new garden plan. In 1993, the Garden Conservancy hosted a design charette at the garden to plan its restoration and the following year commissioned a cultural landscape report. Through the 1990s, the Conservancy continued to advise and to provide letters of support for grants to help fund the restoration. In 1995, the gardens were restored and later opened for public visitation.

Knoxville Botanical Garden and Arboretum Knoxville, TN

In 2001, after a group of local citizens bought the property and were unsure of next steps, the Knoxville Botanical Garden executive director reached out to the Garden Conservancy for advice. In collaboration with the Knoxville Botanical Garden board, the Garden Conservancy prepared a program plan detailing recommended phases for garden restoration, public access, visitor services, and educational programming. In 2006, the Garden Conservancy provided further assistance in implementing a master plan and identifying staffing needs and funding sources.

Ladew Topiary Gardens Monkton, MD

Now a public garden known for its remarkable topiaries, Ladew Topiary Gardens was established in the 1930s by socialite and huntsman Harvey S. Ladew, who, in 1929, had bought a 250-acre farm to build his estate. In the early 1990s, the Garden Conservancy provided recommendations and resources as part of Ladew’s long-term preservation planning for the garden.

Linwood Gardens Linwood, NY

A private garden in the farmlands of New York State’s Genesee Valley, the original garden at Linwood was designed in the early 1900s with an Arts & Crafts summerhouse, walled gardens, pools, and fountains. The Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance to the nonprofit Linwood Gardens, Inc. in 1999 and participated in a roundtable discussion on preservation issues in 2002.

LongHouse Reserve East Hampton, NY

A sixteen-acre property created by internationally acclaimed textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen (1927 – 2020), LongHouse Reserve is a remarkable integration of nature, art, and design. In 2012, the Garden Conservancy conducted a garden assessment and made recommendations for garden management.

Longue Vue House & Gardens New Orleans, LA

Renowned landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman (1869 –1950) designed the gardens at Longue Vue, a National Historic Landmark, in 1934. Following severe damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Garden Conservancy staff and a team of volunteers went to the garden to assist with recovery efforts on the ground. The Conservancy also co-sponsored an event with the New York Botanical Garden to raise funds for the garden’s recovery. The Conservancy placed an intern in residence in 2008 to implement initial phases of the restoration, funded a landscape renewal plan, and, for several years, continued to provide technical assistance and help with program development and creation of a long-term maintenance plan.

Lotusland Montecito, CA

Madame Ganna Walska, a well-known Polish opera singer and socialite, purchased the estate in 1941 and spent the next 43 years creating Lotusland. The spectacular collections of exotic plants throughout the 37-acre property are a very personal expression of Walska’s penchant for the dramatic, the unexpected, and the whimsical. In the early 1990s, the Garden Conservancy assisted Lotusland’s trustees in raising awareness of the garden as it transitioned from private to public. In 2018, the Conservancy partnered with Lotusland to present a “Gardens in Paradise” program of garden visits in celebration of its 25 years as a public garden.

Lyman Estate (The Vale) Waltham, MA

A historic country house located in Waltham, MA, the Lyman Estate, also known as The Vale, is now owned by the nonprofit Historic New England. The estate was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970 for both its architecture and its landscape design, which has retained much of its original eighteenth-century character. The Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance and preservation planning to the Lyman Estate in the mid-1990s, as well as a report assessing the condition of the garden’s hardy plants.

Madoo Sagaponack, NY

Over 40 years, artist, gardener, and writer Robert Dash (1931 – 2013) established a highly stylized, green encyclopedia of gardening on two acres of land, featuring Tudor, High Renaissance, early Greek, and Oriental garden influences. In the early 1990s, the Garden Conservancy helped launch the Madoo Conservancy, a nonprofit foundation with a focus on study, preservation, and enhancement of Dash’s garden and artistic legacy. The Madoo Conservancy operates the garden as a public resource and cultural center.

Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center Garrison, NY

A National Historic Landmark, Manitoga is the house, studio, and 75-acre woodland landscape of mid-century modern industrial designer Russel Wright (1904 – 1976). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy provided technical support to Manitoga, defining landscape priorities and providing letters of support for grant applications. In 2011, after Manitoga sustained extensive damage from Hurricane Irene and an untimely late October snowstorm, the Garden Conservancy worked with Manitoga’s Woodland Landscape Council to assess damage and implement clean-up efforts.

Marian Coffin Gardens at Gibraltar Wilmington, DE

Landscape architect Marian Cruger Coffin (1876 – 1957) designed the gardens at Gibraltar, the former estate of Hugh Rodney Sharp and his wife, Isabella Mathieu du Pont Sharp, who purchased it in 1909. The nonprofit Preservation Delaware, Inc. took ownership in 1998. The Garden Conservancy provided a garden survey, advised on a master plan to restore the gardens, and provided technical recommendations for garden rehabilitation and letters of support for grant applications.

Maudslay’s Gardens Newburyport, MA

An early work of landscape architect Martha Brooks Hutcheson (1871 – 1955), one of the first female members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Maudslay’s Gardens are located in Maudslay State Park. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy assisted in developing fundraising strategies to support the restoration and maintenance of the gardens. In the early 2000s, the Conservancy collaborated with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, the National Park Service, and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation on a garden restoration project.

McGinley Garden Milton, MA

The McGinley Garden was designed in 1925 by landscape architect Ellen Shipman (1869 – 1950). The estate’s formal garden is an excellent example of early twentieth-century garden design and of Shipman’s design philosophy: the close integration of house and garden. As of this writing, both the house and garden, which are privately owned, are threatened by development. In 2020, the Garden Conservancy joined scholars and cultural organizations in opposing the development proposal.

McKee Botanical Garden Vero Beach, FL

An 18-acre subtropical botanical garden founded in 1929 by Waldo Sexton and Arthur G. McKee, the garden’s streams, ponds, and trails were designed by tropical landscape architect William Lyman Phillips (1885 – 1966). Most of its land remained vacant for twenty years until the Trust for Public Land and Indian River Land Trust collaborated to purchase the property in the mid-1990s. Between 1996 and 2004, the Garden Conservancy helped develop a master plan to preserve and re-open the garden, reviewed proposals for the garden’s botanical and interpretive program, advised on hiring a horticulturist, and held a reception at the garden in conjunction with a Vero Beach Open Day. The garden is now a Florida landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Elizabeth Lawrence Garden

Charlotte, NC

The most iconic photograph of Elizabeth Lawrence shows her opening her garden gate under an arch of Clematis armandii, with a soft smile and her hand extended, just as she greeted visitors for many years. Thanks to her graceful and prolific writing and to the remarkable efforts to preserve her Charlotte, NC, garden, it continues to welcome guests on her behalf today.

The Elizabeth Lawrence Garden is small, a very modest city lot. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for in stature. Though one-third the size of her earlier garden in Raleigh, it is packed with hundreds of different plants from all over the world. Her main goal was to find all the best growing plants for her conditions. She was sanguine about her efforts: “I cannot help it if I have to use my own house as a laboratory, thereby ruining it as a garden,” she once wrote.

It is well-chronicled that Lawrence was the first woman to graduate with a degree in landscape architecture from North Carolina State College (now North Carolina State University). Less known is that in the same year (1933) she began her prolific garden writing career with an article in Garden Gossip. Her “laboratory” was created, in part, to provide source material for books during her lifetime, and for pieces that were collected and published posthumously. It informed hundreds of articles, columns, and lectures to garden clubs everywhere.

The garden was set up in a grid, but planted so profusely it hardly mattered. The diversity of plants also made it a classroom for visitors, a place to get schooled in plants and gardening in the South. People came not just to enjoy, but to learn.

And then, after decades, it was time to move on. This is when serendipity took over. Lawrence, in declining health, moved to Maryland to be near a niece. Her property was sold, then sold again three years later to Mary Lindemann (“Lindie”) Wilson, without much knowledge of the significance of the property or its earlier owner.

Not long after, famous gardeners from other parts of the world began ringing her bell to visit, including Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter! It didn’t take long for Wilson to figure out she had something special, and she dedicated her life to maintaining the garden and its plants. Ultimately those efforts led her to the Garden Conservancy, which helped put together a preservation plan and provides ongoing resources to keep the garden a Lawrence-inspired laboratory of plants for Southern gardens.

Purchased by the Wing Haven Foundation in 2008, the property is now protected by a conservation easement held by the Garden Conservancy and has its own curator. It is a ‘rehabilitation’ project rather than a restoration. It is managed to meet changing conditions while retaining the properties historic character, not as a snapshot in time. Part of that character is the garden’s continually evolving plant palette and planting scheme. “You have not seen my garden...,” Lawrence is quoted as replying to a guest excited to tell her friends about her visit, “you have only seen it today.”

Everybody wins... and Elizabeth would be happy.

John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden

Mill Neck, NY

In many gardener’s minds Japanese gardens are among the most spiritual, evocative expressions of what is capable on the ground with plants. It just comes with the territory. Some people can quiet their thoughts with the mere memory of meditative, inspiration-generating chikurin no oto—the sound of the bamboo grove.

That Japanese gardens are planted around the world in various iterations is testament to the style’s enduring significance and influence. There are more than 300 in the United States alone. The Humes Japanese Stroll Garden in Mill Neck, NY, is one that uniquely integrates ageless Japanese landscape techniques with the woodland terrain of Long Island’s North Shore.

Japanese garden style evokes and symbolizes humanity’s special relationship with nature and the wider universe. The original designer of the Humes garden, Douglas DeFaya, born in Hokkaido as Shoju Mitsuhashi, was not classically trained and used gardening—not strict tradition and styles—and his experience as a Japanese American during World War II, to create his artistry. DeFaya was conscious of the four seasons and endeavored to create a layered garden—with heaven, earth, and sea—an abstraction of nature within the architecture of the place and its tea house. His earliest garden assistant, James Petry, who, as a teenager helped install the garden, understood that “What makes people garden the most is that it’s an escape to another world.”

Ambassador John P. Humes, founder of the garden and its owner for decades, was inspired by a visit to Japan and wanted a semblance of that “other world” within which to escape. He managed to enjoy it briefly before his world took him from it to a post in Austria. Years of benign neglect took their toll, the property bereft of the attention a maintenance-hungry garden needs. Upon his return in the late 70s, restoration efforts began and a foundation to assume ownership of the garden was created.

Preserving gardens is not just about maintenance. It is “constantly tuning the harmony between the elements, and the sky, and the space,” says Belgian landscape architect Francois Goffinet, who completed a restoration of the garden early on in his career. It is this kind of layering and sequencing that brought into alignment long-term plans to ensure the garden’s future.

In the early 1990s the Conservancy became involved, and, from that point on until 2015, provided management support of the garden, offered public programs, restored the tea house, and planned for the garden’s future. The Garden Conservancy was able to serve as a bridge, linking the garden with a larger local effort to protect critical land, when it was purchased by the North Shore Land Alliance (NSLA). Today, the garden completes a 150-acre green corridor that the NSLA tends to protect a local watershed. It’s also been enshrined as one of the charter gardens in the Conservancy’s Documentation Program, a collection of archival written and visual materials as well as original film footage to keep gardens alive in a new way.

“There is the way we touch and shape the world. And the way it touches and shapes us,” notes garden designer Marc Peter Keane in his book, Japanese Garden Notes: A Visual Guide to Elements and Design (Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA, 2017). The soft, irenic clacking of bamboo on bamboo; each stone telling its own story on the path; light dripping through leaves of every shade of green; water, and people; this is how the Humes Japanese Stroll Garden touches its visitors and lifts them to another reality.

Like the best gardens, the Humes Japanese Stroll Garden is transformative. It is the way. It is a place to restore and nourish the human spirit.

McLaughlin

Garden South Paris, ME

A nineteenth-century Maine farmstead known for its collection of more than 200 lilacs, the McLaughlin Garden & Homestead was created single-handedly over six decades by Bernard McLaughlin, starting in 1936. In 1996, the Garden Conservancy supported the McLaughlin Foundation’s preservation efforts by facilitating its plans to purchase the garden. In 1998, Garden Conservancy staff participated in a charrette to develop a master plan. In 2013, the Conservancy also helped raise awareness of the McLaughlin Foundation’s and the community’s efforts to purchase the adjacent property and prevent development that threatened the character of the garden.

Meadowburn Farm Vernon, NJ

The gardens at Meadowburn Farm were created by Helena Rutherfurd Ely (1858 – 1920), an American author, gardener, and founding member of the Garden Club of America. Meadowburn Farm’s gardens served as the basis for a series of three books on concerning her practical approach to hardy gardening. In 2011, heirs to the estate contacted the Garden Conservancy regarding possible preservation of the gardens and opening it for public visitation. The Conservancy connected them with a Fellow in the Longwood Graduate Program in Public Horticulture, who spent the next two years researching Helena Rutherfurd Ely and options for preserving the garden.

Montrose Garden Hillsborough, NC

The gardens at Montrose were begun in 1842 while William Alexander Graham, then governor of North Carolina, and his wife, Susan Washington, lived on the property. The 61-acre property was purchased in 1977 by plantswoman and author Nancy Goodwin and her late husband, Craufurd, who used the remains of the historic gardens to create a landscape that has greatly influenced and expanded the palette of plants for Southern gardens. The garden was added to the National Register of Historic Gardens in 2001 and recognized by the Garden Conservancy as a significant American garden.

Moore-Turner Heritage Garden Spokane, WA

Built between 1889 and 1932 as a residential garden for Frank Rockwood Moore, the property was later acquired by US Senator George Turner in 1896. In 1945, the Spokane Park Board bought the property and combined it with the D.C. Corbin property to the east to form Pioneer Park. The Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance from 2002-03, including guidance in fundraising, volunteer management, landscape preservation, and program development.

Morgan Library & Museum New York, NY

The Morgan Library & Museum, formerly the Pierpont Morgan Library, is a landmarked Italian Renaissance-style structure built between 1903 and 1906 and designed by Charles McKim of the firm of McKim, Mead and White. In 2019, the library proposed a comprehensive exterior restoration that included a new garden, improved lighting and new signage. The Garden Conservancy submitted a letter in support of this proposal to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Morven Museum & Garden Princeton, NJ

A historic eighteenth-century house, Morven was first the residence of Robert Wood Johnson, head of Johnson & Johnson, and then served as the New Jersey governor’s mansion for nearly four decades in the twentieth century. The site is a National Historic Landmark. In 1996, the Garden Conservancy supported and guided the initial phase of the restoration of the Colonial Revival style garden at Morven and continued in an advisory role for several years. Morven reopened as a museum and garden in 2004.

Mukai Farm & Garden Vashon, WA

Mukai was founded by first-generation Japanese immigrant B.D. Mukai in 1926 as a strawberry farm. The formal stroll garden was designed in the 1930s by Kuni Mukai, making it a rare early example of a traditional Japanese garden designed by a Japanese woman. In 1996, the Garden Conservancy assisted Island Landmarks in acquiring the property and restoring both the house and garden. Restoration was largely completed by 2020 by the Friends of Mukai. Mukai Farm & Garden is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a member of the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network.

National Geographic Society Headquarters Plaza Sculpture Garden Washington, DC

In 1984, the National Geographic Society commissioned Elyn Zimmerman, an award-winning environmental artist, to create an installation for their headquarters in Washington, DC. Zimmerman’s design, Marabar, is an excellent example of the use of art and landscape design to integrate a building with its surroundings. In 2020, the Garden Conservancy joined scholars and other organizations in opposition to a planned renovation of the plaza that proposed to remove Marabar. As of this writing, National Geographic plans to relocate Marabar to a public park in Washington, DC, saving it from destruction, but removing it from the site for which it was created.

Nehrling Gardens Gotha, FL

Dr. Henry Nehrling (1853 – 1929), one of Florida’s pioneer horticulturists and naturalists, developed an experimental botanical garden, Palm Cottage Gardens, on 25 acres of his land in central Florida between 1885 and 1896. In 1998, the Garden Conservancy was contacted for guidance when a new ownership structure was needed, and advised the formation of a Henry Nehrling Society to save, restore, and operate the gardens. Over several years, the Garden Conservancy assisted with fundraising and provided other organizational guidance. The Nehrling Society was ultimately able to purchase the property in 2009 and operates it as an educational botanical garden. Nehrling Gardens is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

New Orleans Botanical Garden New Orleans, LA

The New Orleans Botanical Garden, part of New Orleans City Park, was developed during the Depression by the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.) in the 1930s. It is one of the oldest urban parks in the country. In 2006, the Garden Conservancy and the New York Botanical Garden raised funds to assist both the New Orleans Botanical Garden and Longue Vue Garden following the substantial damage of Hurricane Katrina. The botanical garden used the proceeds to procure plants to replace those lost to storm damage.

New York City Community Garden Coalition New York, NY

In 1999, the Garden Conservancy joined many other advocacy groups, including the Parks Council, the Trust for Public Land, and the Green Guerillas, in petitioning New York City to protect more than 100 community gardens which were under threat of being auctioned. The gardens were saved in the eleventh hour as the result of negotiations and a $3 million fundraising effort led by the Trust for Public Land. Founded in 1996, New York City Community Garden Coalition’s mission is to promote the preservation, creation, and empowerment of community gardens through education, advocacy, and grassroots organizing.

Oakland Museum of California Oakland, CA

The Oakland Museum is a mid-century brutalist landmark designed by architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, with the distinctive, tiered gardens by the modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley (1912 – 2004). It serves as an urban museum campus and gathering place for the Oakland community. In 2020, the Garden Conservancy began a five-year partnership in support of

GARDEN CONSERVANCY NORTHWEST NETWORK

the renovation of the museum’s campus, which is being designed by award-winning landscape architect Walter Hood. The garden revitalization will feature sustainable and native California plantings and will open up the campus to neighboring communities. See also Walter Hood’s essay on page 21.

Olana Hudson, NY

A 250-acre naturalistic landscape and former residence of Frederic Edwin Church (1826 – 1900), one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting, Olana is a New York State Historic Park and has remarkable views of the Hudson River Valley, Catskill Mountains, and Taconic Range. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and a National Historic Landmark. From 2008 to 2009, the Garden Conservancy partnered in raising awareness for the need to preserve the site and vistas.

Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden Bishopville, SC

Self-taught and equipped with a hedge trimmer, Pearl Fryar worked for more than twenty years to create and maintain topiaries from plants that were often salvaged from a local nursery. In 2007, the Garden Conservancy helped form a Friends group. For the next ten years, the Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance to the Friends, promoted the garden to the public, and helped plan for the garden’s preservation, including hiring a project manager for the garden in 2010 who documented Pearl’s gardening techniques. Garden Conservancy board members also presented him with a cherry picker in 2008. In 2021, the Garden Conservancy contributed a Gardens for Good grant to a new effort to secure the future of the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden. The Conservancy is partnering with the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and WeGOJA (formerly the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission) to help build community consensus around a plan for the long-term preservation of the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden.

Planting Fields Arboretum Oyster Bay, NY

Planting Fields Arboretum is more than 400 acres and includes a landscape designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm. In the late 1990s, the Garden Conservancy provided preservation planning and resources to the arboretum. In 2018, the Conservancy interviewed Henry Joyce, then executive director of the arboretum, for the Garden Documentation program.

A collective of small public gardens, botanical gardens, city parks, and plant societies, the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network (GCNN) promotes resource-sharing, networking, and professional education for members throughout Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. First formed in 2003 by the Garden Conservancy as the Pacific Northwest Garden Conservancy Forum, the group was renamed in 2010. The GCNN has grown to 30 member organizations who meet twice yearly for workshops tailored to member-garden needs and who also connect throughout the year for peer-to-peer support and information-sharing.

2021 GCNN members include:

Albers Vista Gardens Bremerton, WA

Bellevue Botanical Garden Bellevue, WA

Bloedel Reserve Bainbridge Island, WA

Dunn Gardens Seattle, WA

Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden Seattle, WA

Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy

Port Townsend, WA

Gaiety Hollow Salem, OR

Hardy Plant Society of Oregon Portland, OR

Highline SeaTac Botanical Garden SeaTac, WA

Kruckeberg Botanic Garden Shoreline, WA

Lake Wilderness Arboretum Maple Valley, WA

Lakewold Gardens Lakewood, WA

Leach Botanical Garden Portland, OR

Meerkerk Gardens Greenbank, WA

Milner Gardens and Woodland Qualicum Beach, BC

Mukai Farm & Garden Vashon, WA

Peninsula Park Rose Garden Portland, OR

Plant Amnesty Seattle, WA

PowellsWood Garden Federal Way, WA

Rhododendron Species Botanical Garden  Federal Way, WA

Rogerson Clematis Garden West Linn, OR

Soos Creek Botanical Garden & Heritage Center Auburn, WA

Streissguth Gardens Seattle, WA

The Gardens at Palmdale Fremont, CA

Horticulturist Charles A. Lewis* once wrote that, “...gardening ultimately leads to spiritual realization.” In many ways the reverse is also true—especially in the case of the Sisters of the Holy Family and the Gardens at Palmdale, one of the Garden Conservancy’s newest family members. Recognition of a divine presence, contemplation, and action animate the lives of service led by the Sisters, the drivers behind this project.

The Palmdale property has a long, significant, and well-documented history. In microcosm, it reads as the history of California. From its presettlement history as part of the home of the Ohlone, or Costanoan people, through Spanish rule, a mission land grant, and an agricultural boom, it parallels much of what happened in the rest of the state.

To its lasting benefit, it was acquired by the Sisters of the Holy Family just after World War II, prior to the explosive growth of the area into what we now call Silicon Valley.

The existing garden was created years ago and has been lovingly tended by the Sisters, becoming an oasis and refuge from the swirling world around them. It has also been a much loved community resource, with a significance out of proportion to its five-acre size. It became another way for the Order to minister to the poor and needy, especially families.

If gardening truly leads to spiritual realization, it was that realization that breathed life into the idea that this special place should be preserved. That vision, and persistence over many years, led to an innovative multi-stakeholder collaboration between the Sisters, community members (including indigenous Ohlone), governmental agencies, businesses, a real estate developer, and the Garden Conservancy.

The group’s resulting plan does far more than preserve a garden. It provides continued housing for the Sisters and provides most of the financial resources needed for the project through the sale of part of the overall property— and the development of nearly 80 affordable housing units for the community. It’s a manifest expression of that part of the Sisters’ mission to “stand against conditions that demean or undermine the dignity of persons or the sacredness of the family.”

The effort was one worthy of the giant technology companies that also call the area home. But it was that very intricacy—the web of interacting relationships, complicated planning, financial arrangements, and special needs— that made it difficult for the Sisters to find a preservation organization willing to hold the conservation easement. The easement was a critically important element of the plan as municipal approvals hinged on having a conservation easement in place to protect the garden and dedicate it to public use. The Garden Conservancy was uniquely suited to play this role. Its mandate to “preserve, share, and celebrate America’s gardens and diverse gardening traditions...” and its long history of creating the living collaborations necessary for maintaining entities that would otherwise melt away with time, made it the ideal partner, and the catalyst needed to make the project a reality. As the holder of the easement, the Conservancy is there alongside the Gardens at Palmdale, Inc., the organization created to own and operate the garden, as a resource and a partner in preserving the garden’s defining features and essential purpose.

The Sisters of the Holy Family realized long ago that gardens and spiritual realization are both ways to feed the soul. Now the rest of the Fremont, CA, community does, too.

Powell Botanical Gardens Kingsville, MO

A 970-acre botanical garden outside of Kansas City, MO, Powell Botanical Gardens is known for spectacular garden displays incorporating native plantings and the Heartland Harvest Garden, the nation’s largest edible landscape. In 2018, Powell requested support from the Garden Conservancy in opposing the siting of a “factory farm” just three miles from the garden. The feedlot and slaughterhouse threatened the garden with degraded air quality from a variety of pollutants, as well as polluted water run-off. The Garden Conservancy wrote a letter to Missouri elected officials citing these concerns. In 2019, the factory farm closed operations, citing community opposition and poor economic conditions.

Ragdale Lake Forest, IL

Ragdale is a nonprofit artists’ community located on the historic Arts & Crafts estate of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869 – 1926), 30 miles north of Chicago. In 2007, the Garden Conservancy facilitated a planning charrette and developed a preservation treatment report for the site.

Rocky Hills Mount Kisco, NY

A strolling garden on thirteen acres in the northern suburbs of New York City, Rocky Hills was created by Henriette and William Suhr, starting in the 1950s. It features mature specimens of black walnut and ash, complemented by collections of magnolias, tree peonies, and conifers. In 2000, the Garden Conservancy, the Westchester County Department of Parks, Recreation, and Conservation, and Henriette Suhr signed an agreement to partner on preserving the garden and transitioning it to become a public garden. A conservation easement was granted to the Conservancy and subsequently transferred to the Westchester Land Trust when the County stepped back from accepting ownership and management of the property. In 2016, Rocky Hills was sold to Barbara and Rick Romeo; see the interview with the current owners and garden stewards on page 18. Rocky Hills remains protected by the conservation easement in perpetuity and was one of the first gardens to be included in the Garden Conservancy Documentation Program.

Russell Page Garden at the Frick Collection New York, NY

The residence of the industrialist and art patron Henry Clay Frick (1849 – 1919) in New York City was constructed in 1912 – 1914 and transformed into a museum in the mid-1930s. The Frick Collection was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008. The museum’s small courtyard garden designed by renowned British landscape architect Russell Page (1906 – 1985) is considered Page’s most famous urban garden and may be the only one that can be enjoyed by the public. In 2014, the garden was jeopardized by proposed expansion or renovation plans for the museum. The Garden Conservancy joined the preservation community in speaking out against proposed development plans that threatened the garden. In 2018, revised plans were put forward and the Conservancy made recommendations for minimizing impacts to the garden. Museum officials made further changes to the plan and committed to preserving the garden with relatively few changes. The Garden Conservancy supported the new design and held a panel discussion held at the Frick in 2019.

Ruth Bancroft Garden Walnut Creek, CA

Located in California’s Ygnacio Valley, the Ruth Bancroft Garden is recognized as one of America’s finest examples of a dry garden, featuring a variety of rare and extraordinary succulents and cacti. The garden was created by Ruth Bancroft (1908 – 2017) on three acres starting in 1971 and is now a thriving public garden. This is the garden that inspired the founding of the Garden Conservancy. It was our very first preservation project and conservation easement. For more on the Ruth Bancroft Garden, see the profile on page 41.

Shelburne Farms Shelburne, VT

A nonprofit education center for sustainability, Shelburne Farms is a 1,400-acre working farm and National Historic Landmark on the shores of Lake Champlain. The property is a well-preserved example of a Gilded Age “ornamental farm” developed in the late nineteenth century, with landscaping by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822 – 1903). Between 1999 and 2012, the Garden Conservancy provided technical advice at various stages of Shelburne’s planning and execution of a landscape stewardship master plan and a multi-phased formal garden restoration.

Sonnenberg Gardens Canandaigua, NY

A 50-acre state park in the Finger Lakes region of New York, Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park has magnificent views of Canandaigua Lake. The gardens were developed between 1902 and 1920 and reflect a variety of styles. In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy worked with the nonprofit Sonnenberg Gardens on preservation planning, including the creation of a management plan and setting priorities for garden maintenance and preservation. In 2006, the garden was purchased by the state, one of only two public gardens operated by the New York State Department of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation.

Springside Landscape Restoration Poughkeepsie, NY

A 20-acre Romantic landscape and National Historic Landmark, Springside was once the country estate of Matthew Vassar, the Poughkeepsie brewer, philanthropist, and founder of Vassar College. It is the only landscape of horticulturist and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815 – 1852), one of the founders of landscape architecture in America, to survive largely intact. The Garden Conservancy began working with Springside in the mid-1990s to develop a plan to stabilize and interpret the site, as well as a plan for implementing landscape treatment recommendations. The Conservancy also obtained a grant from the New York State Council for the Arts for a historic landscape report for Springside.

Steepletop Austerlitz, NY

Steepletop, now a 200-acre farmstead in Austerlitz, NY, was the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950) for the last 25 years of her life and is a National Historic Landmark. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Garden Conservancy worked with Edna St. Vincent Millay Society members to write grants and help develop a management plan and landscape and horticultural preservation plans.

Stoneleigh Garden Villanova, PA

Designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm, Stoneleigh Garden is a historically and culturally significant garden in the Philadelphia area. Shortly after opening as a public garden in 2018, Stoneleigh was threatened by an expansion proposed by a local school district. Through a letter and social media, the Garden Conservancy joined numerous horticultural and conservation organizations to oppose the proposed action and encourage public involvement. Fortunately, the property is protected by a conservation easement and local officials determined that the school district’s “eminent domain” did not trump the protection provided by the easement.

Swan House at Atlanta History Center Atlanta, GA

Located on the grounds of the Atlanta History Center, both the house and landscape at Swan House were designed in 1928 by prominent Atlanta architect Philip Trammel Shutze (1890-1982).

Swan House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2015, a Garden Conservancy Society of Fellows garden-study tour to Atlanta reported a critical need for assistance to restore and replant of Swan House’s iconic Boxwood Garden. The Conservancy provided a grant for the restoration.

Sylvester Manor Educational Farm Shelter Island, NY

Over time, Sylvester Manor has been transformed from a plantation employing enslaved Africans as well as indentured or paid Native American and European laborers, to an Enlightenment-era farm, to a pioneering food industrialist’s estate, and, today, to an organic educational farm. In 2020, Sylvester Manor participated in an American Public Gardens Association discussion panel developed by the Garden Conservancy on telling the garden’s whole story. In 2021, Sylvester Manor received a Garden Conservancy Gardens for Good grant in recognition of its community-oriented approach to preserving history.

University of Virginia Pavilion Gardens Charlottesville, VA

In 2001, in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the Pavilion Garden’s refurbishment, the Garden Conservancy convened a summit to consider future contributions of the historic gardens to public horticulture in Virginia. The Conservancy coordinated a panel of garden leaders, who made recommendations for the restoration of the Pavilion III garden as a demonstration project, which was completed in the spring of 2004.

Untermyer Park and Gardens Yonkers, NY

A historic 43-acre city public park just north of New York City, Untermyer Park is a remnant of Samuel J. Untermyer’s 150-acre estate, “Greystone.” In 1915, architect William Welles Bosworth (1869 – 1966) began the design for the property, including neoclassical features, garden rooms, and Indo-Persian elements that identify the garden as a symbol of paradise. The site was donated to the City of Yonkers and added to the National Register of Historic Places. The Untermyer Gardens Conservancy

is facilitating the restoration of the gardens in partnership with the Yonkers Parks Department. The Garden Conservancy served in an advisory role in 2011. Stephen Byrns, president of the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy, presented at the Garden Conservancy’s landscape panel discussion at Bard College in 2019.

Van Vleck House & Gardens Montclair, NJ

Now a public garden and community center, Van Vleck House & Gardens is an exemplar of classical Mediterranean Revival architecture and includes extensive grounds with collections of rhododendrons, azaleas, and other broad-leaved evergreens. Three generations of the Van Vleck family lived on the property and developed the gardens over 130 years. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy helped to establish the Friends of Van Vleck Gardens and, in 2003, the Conservancy funded a Marco Polo Stufano Fellow who renovated the formal garden and documented its history.

Villa Terrace Milwaukee, WI

A historic house built in 1924 for the Lloyd R. Smith family, Villa Terrace is an Italian Renaissance-style home on a bluff above Lake Michigan. Since 1966, the house and grounds have housed the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance, enabling the Friends group to raise funds and marshal volunteers to restore the garden, which reopened in 2002.

Western Hills Garden Occidental, CA

Western Hills was developed as a garden starting in 1959 by plantsmen Lester Hawkins (1915 – 1985) and Marshall Olbrich (1920 – 1991), pioneers in the back-to-the-land movement. They opened a rare plant nursery in 1973, introducing many Mediterranean and Australian plants into cultivation in Northern California, inspiring a new generation of gardeners and influencing many of today’s most distinguished plant explorers and garden designers. Beginning in 2007, the Garden Conservancy provided assistance to new owners in preservation planning, developing a volunteer program, and creating a plant collections inventory. As of this writing, Western Hills is once again on the market.

Yew Dell Botanical Gardens Crestwood, KY

The creation of master craftsman and nurseryman Theodore Roosevelt Klein (1905 – 1998), this 34-acre property in Crestwood, KY, features open farmland transformed into Arts & Craft gardens with unusual plant specimens and classic stone structures. After Klein’s death and the formation of a board of community volunteers to purchase the property, the Garden Conservancy developed a stabilization plan and prepared the nomination for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The Conservancy also helped develop a master plan and funding strategies needed to preserve Yew Dell Botanical Gardens for the enjoyment and education of the public. Today, Yew Dell is a thriving public garden with guided tours, classes, and community events.

The John Fairey Garden Hempstead, TX

Brujería is the traditional folk magic of Mexico. In addition to stories, spirits, spells, and spiritual cleansing, there is an element of alchemy: the turning of natural substances into other substances.

John Fairy was an alchemist, and to that extent, a brujo. Using elements of the Mexican and southwestern flora, he made a one-of-a-kind garden. Like all gardens, it took more than wizardry to create an experience, BUT it was no less magical. The John Fairey Garden (renamed from Peckerwood Garden to honor its recently deceased founder), makes political and other boundaries disappear with the sleight-of-hand of horticulture.

The saying “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper,” has been attributed to Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865 – 1935). Fairey was adept at recognizing those enchantments and using them to conjure a new reality. The Texas garden has the United States’s premier collection of plants from Mexico in its holdings, with plants from other countries that are suitable bedfellows.

A true plantsperson’s garden since its very beginning, the John Fairey Garden sprang from its founder’s artistic talent and the passion for horticultural exploration—and an eye for both. In addition to being trained as a painter and teaching design to architects for decades, Fairey, the plant explorer, made over 100 trips into Mexico to search out little-used or unknown plant material suitable for gardens of the Southwest.

Fairey’s goal was to create a cultural bridge between Mexico and the United States and to highlight the richness of the horticultural heritage of the region—and the threat to its continued existence in either country. As a result, the garden is internationally known for its collection of rare and endangered plants and is home to important collections of Mexican and Texan natives, oaks, Mahonia, and woody lilies (Agave, Manfreda, Yucca, and related taxa). Its work has been called “monumentally important” to botany and horticulture.

Collectors’ gardens are notoriously difficult from a design perspective. Often they are defined by the “drifts of one” concept. Artists’ gardens are often no more comprehensible. “They have to remake the world around them,” says landscape architect Mark Kane in the foreword to the book Artists in Their Gardens by Valerie Easton and David Laskin. It is especially significant then, that among his many national awards for horticultural excellence, Fairey was the recipient of the 2016 Place Maker Award from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Fairey’s love of art remains part of the equation. Amid the thousands of specimens of plants, is a collection of distinctive sculptures. He also amassed a significant collection of Mexican folk art and donated a portion, over 400 pieces, to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.

The Garden Conservancy was involved early in its existence to assist in the transition to a public garden and helped form the Peckerwood Garden Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization to own and operate it. Over the years, the Garden Conservancy has provided guidance and resources to the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation (the garden’s current owner), and continues to steward the conservation easement it holds, which protects the garden in perpetuity. Most recently, the Garden Conservancy awarded a Gardens for Good grant to the John Fairey Garden for ongoing management and protection of the collection.

Even if plants could recognize boundaries, the John Fairey Garden magically erases them, combining disparate elements from botany, horticulture, landscape architecture, design, culture, art, and geography, into a transcendent whole. In the process—and for all of us—it creates a limpia, a spiritual cleansing that clears negative energy from body, emotions, mind, and soul.

The Garden Conservancy is deeply grateful to our lead donors:

Suzanne & Ric Kayne

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• • and to the generous sponsors of this publication:

Ms. Rise S. Johnson

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Ms. Mary V. Buckingham

Mr. Scott L. Byron

Mr. Ronald L. Fleming

Ms. Dorian Goldman & Mr. Marvin Israelow

Suzy Wetzel Grote

Ms. Marlena C. Heydenreich

Barbara Israel Garden Antiques

Joseph Marek & John Bernatz

Mr. & Mrs. Spencer S. March III

Ms. Katherine Nelson

Mr. & Mrs. Rodman Ward, Jr.

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Ms. Patricia Elias & Mr. Michael Rosenfeld

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Carolyn & Jamie Bennett

Ms. Bettie Bearden Pardee

Special thanks also to our lead donors to the Suzanne & Frederic Rheinstein Garden Documentation Program:

Mrs. Frederic Rheinstein

Mrs. Susan Zises Green

Philip & Shelley Belling

Mr. & Mrs. Terrence D. Daniels

Gilbert P. Schafer III & the Elisha-Bolton Foundation

Suzanne & Ric Kayne

With additional support from:

Mr. & Mrs. Robert M. Balentine

Mrs. Walter F. Ballinger II

Brittain Bardes Damgard

Constance M. Goodyear Baron & Barry C. Baron

Ms. Ritchie Battle

Mr. & Mrs. Mogens C. Bay

Carolyn & Jamie Bennett

Ms. Heather Bland

Mr. & Mrs. Franklin O. Booth III

Ms. Emily R. Boyle

Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Brodsky

Mr.* & Mrs. Coleman P. Burke

Mr. & Mrs. F. Colin Cabot

Mr. & Mrs. Edmund M. Carpenter

Mr. & Mrs. Alan B. Clark

Mrs. James Connelly

Mrs. Anne Crawford de Zonia

Ms. Page Dickey & Mr. Francis Schell

Mr. & Mrs. Coburn D. Everdell

Mr. & Mrs. William H. Fain, Jr.

Mr. & Mrs. Richard D. Field

Dr. & Mrs. John W. Given

Mr. & Mrs. Lionel Goldfrank III

Mr. & Mrs. Richard T. Grote

Mr. James Brayton Hall

Mrs. William Hamilton

Dr. & Mrs. Douglas Hampson

Dr. & Mrs. Kenton Horacek

Ms. Rise S. Johnson

Mr. & Mrs. Thomas F. Kranz

Mr. Glen Lajeski & Mr. Gerry Etcheverry

Mr. & Mrs. Benjamin F. Lenhardt, Jr.

Susan & Glenn Lowry

Joseph Marek & John Bernatz

Mr. & Mrs. Spencer S. March III

Mr. David C. Martin

Ms. Janet Mavec & Mr. E. Wayne Nordberg

Mr. & Mrs. J. Patterson McBaine

Mr. & Mrs. Joseph H. McGee

Ms. Charlotte Moss

Mrs. Bettie Bearden Pardee

Mr. & Mrs. Robert M. Penfold

Mrs. Sarah F. Perot

Ms. Renvy G. Pittman

Mr. Trevor Potter

Mr. & Mrs. Steven M. Read

Mr. Paul Redman & Mr. Dean Berlon

Mrs. Varner H. Redmon

Ms. Katie Ridder & Mr. Peter Pennoyer

Mr. & Mrs. Richard Roeder

Mr. & Mrs. Andrew C. Rose

Ms. Patricia Elias & Mr. Michael Rosenfeld

Mrs. Elizabeth B. Ruprecht

Mrs. Daniel P. Ryan

Mr. & Mrs. Howard G. Seitz

Elizabeth C.B. & Paul G.* Sittenfeld

Mr. & Mrs. Andrew P. Steffan

Merrielou H. Symes

Mr. & Mrs. J. Taft Symonds

Mr. Dana Scott Westring

Ms. Bunny Williams & Mr. John Rosselli

*Deceased

The Garden Conservancy’s work to help preservation efforts at gardens across America has been recognized with a number of external awards, including:

2020 Olmsted Medal American Society of Landscape Architects

2012 Medal for Historic Preservation The Garden Club of America

2012 Heritage Award Royal Oak Foundation

2009 Trustees’ Award for Organizational Excellence National Trust for Historic Preservation

2009 Trustees’ Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation

2009 Preservation Design Award California Preservation Foundation

Garden Conservancy founder Frank Cabot was also the recipient of numerous awards from horticultural societies, many of which cited the garden preservation work he initiated through the Garden Conservancy.

Sylvester Manor, on Shelter Island, NY, has a long and storied history. Once a Native American hunting, fishing, and farming ground, it has been home to eleven generations of its original European settler family since 1651. Over time, Sylvester Manor has been transformed from a plantation with both indentured and enslaved staff, to an Enlightenment-era farm, to a pioneering food industrialist’s estate. Today, Sylvester Manor is an organic educational farm that preserves and tells the stories of its land and all of its people through interpretive programming for all ages.

THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY

The mission of the Garden Conservancy is to preserve, share, and celebrate America’s gardens and diverse gardening traditions for the education and inspiration of the public.

The Garden Conservancy works to: Preserve gardens by partnering with gardeners, communities, horticulturists, garden designers, and historians Share distinctive gardens and ideas with the public through Open Days, tours, and other educational programs Champion the vital role gardens play in our culture, our history, and our quality of life

www.gardenconservancy.org