2021 Preservation Book

PRESERVING, SHARING, AND CELEBRATING AMERICA’S CULTURAL LEGACY

THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY

Copyright © 2020 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.

#OpenDays25: A Quarter Century of America’s Gardeners and Their Gardens

ISBN: 978-0-578-68500-7

Gardens—Gardeners—Garden Visiting—United States

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.

Botanical artwork by Marian McEvoy

Photography credits:

Christine Ashburn Photography: Pages 3, 10, 15, 18, 21, 26, 29, 32, 37, 41, 48, 51, 52, and 56

Erica Berger: Page 45

Brian Jones: Pages 9, 12 16, 23, 25, 30, 35, 43, 46, 55, and 58

John Storey: Page 38

Editing and project management by Garden Conservancy communications staff members George Shakespear, Lori Moss, and Stephanie Werskey, in partnership with the Public Programs and Education team, including Patrick MacRae, Kate H. Kerin, Christopher Gow, and Rani Long.

Design by Kat Nemec, studiokatinc.com

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

THE GARDEN CONSERVANCY STAFF

James Brayton Hall

President and Chief Executive Officer

Donna Mortensen

Chief Operating Officer

Bridget Connors

Director of Membership & Annual Giving

Pamela Governale

Director of Preservation

Patrick MacRae

Director of Public Programs & Education

Sarah Parker Director of Development

George Shakespear

Director of Communications

Pruda Vingoe

Executive Assistant to the President

Kyle Beach

Events Coordinator

Arie Bram

Database Manager

Claire Briguglio

Development Associate

Christopher Gow

Open Days Program Manager

Katherine H. Kerin

Special Programs & New Region Coordinator, Open Days

Rani Long

Open Days Program Associate

Lorraine Mahon Fellows Tours Coordinator

Lori Moss

Associate Director of Communications

Cara Schaffer

Administrative Coordinator

Anne Welles

Associate Director of Preservation

Stephanie Werskey

Communications Manager

Elaine Zanck

Business Manager

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 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 veggie 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 learnings and insights that have inspired our evolving methods for protecting and stewarding these ephemeral cultural journeys. 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 is 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. Our challenge is to identify and articulate what is most essential to a garden’s purpose and to use that as the catalyst for treatment and planning.

I was captivated by gardens early on, growing vegetables at home and exploring magical, historic, and woodland gardens. It was a summer job gardening at the John P. Humes

Japanese Stroll Garden when I was a teen that ignited in me a passion for gardens that would be enduring. At the time, I didn’t know these places existed as a result of purposeful, careful preservation efforts

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, even more so is preservation!

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, 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 education 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 relationships, united in understanding the “why” of gardens, gardens as cultural legacy, and the importance of preserving them. We are grateful to our community, who share our mission to ensure these important places will be lasting and connect generations over time. As a department of dedicated preservationists, we enthusiastically manifest this mission.

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.

Pamela Governale Director of Preservation

Preservation as a Tool for Discovery

I am the first to admit that gardens exist in multiple realities. We read about gardens, plan them out on graph paper, drool over them in glossy publications, remember them from our childhood, even imagine them in our dreams. Many of my favorite (sometimes even heated) conversations with friends and colleagues are about gardens. Increasingly, as our culture seems ever more seduced by new technologies, we are introduced to gardens near and far by both amateurs and professionals aided by cellphones, video cameras, or even drones. All of these are good ways to think about, honor, and celebrate gardens.

But none of these activities can ever compare with visiting a garden.

While recently re-reading Andrea Wulf’s excellent book Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation, I was reminded that it was in Wulf’s writing that I first learned that Thomas Jefferson, on an unsuccessful trade mission to London, had left the city on April 2, 1786, to join, as Wulf tells us, “hordes of tourists who traveled the length and breadth of the country to visit England’s landscape gardens.” Visiting gardens and identifying notable gardens as worthy destinations are fine (and ancient) traditions. Included in the seven wonders of the ancient world, along with the pyramids, were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Unlike the pyramids, the.

Twenty-five years ago, the Garden Conservancy began partnering with gardeners in New York and Connecticut to open their private gardens and welcome other garden enthusiasts on an “Open Day.” A national garden visiting program was born. Long before the advent of the “pop-up” event, these carefully scheduled visiting opportunities made a private garden almost public, but just for one day. It was, in all honesty, a rather improbable proposition. Its success is a testament to the passion and generosity of gardeners. One of the things that I love best treasure hunt or a festival; if it rains, or if you have a conflict that day, you’re out of luck until next year…. or maybe not! Some gardens return year after year, and others close the gates. Like gardens themselves in which a rose may bloom beautifully.

A defining characteristic that all gardens share is that they are a creation of human beings. In one way or another, someone has drawn a conceptual line around that special “moment” in the wider landscape that is the “garden.” Irrespective of how we endeavor to blur the line between the man-made and the natural, gardens always delight us precisely because they are “artifice.” They often tell us as much (if not more) about the gardeners who created them as they do about the plants, trees, etc., that first draw our attention. This commemorative book introduces you to some of those gardeners and their stories.

The Garden Conservancy recently reaffirmed that the Open Days program is central to our mission. We will continue to work hard to offer opportunities to visit private gardens, hear from experts, see and explore parts of public gardens that are rarely accessible, to learn about garden history and I am delighted to mark this important milestone in the Garden Conservancy’s beloved Open Days program with this beautiful publication, the culmination of a year’s efforts to explore and celebrate the gardens and the people who have made Open Days possible. In the process, we hope we have also captured, in the portraits that follow, the spirit of the program. The book has come together with a great deal of excitement, Beautiful drawings from our good friend, artist, and aesthete Marian McEvoy, whose lovely hillside garden overlooks the Hudson River, grace the cover and pages of this book. Inspired by gardens she has visited around the world, Marian creates gardens on paper, using pen and ink, and also in delightful collages of pressed flowers and leaves the world, Marian creates gardens on paper, using pen and ink, and also in delightful collages of pressed flowers and leaves..

Photographers Brian Jones and Christine Ashburn traveled across the country last year to capture intimate portraits of passionate volunteers who open their own gardens and search out new gardens for our Open Days visitors t

Great credit and thanks also go to our communications and Open Days staff members, who created this important commemorative book based on an idea that I proposed barely twelve months ago. Graphic designer Kat Nemec embraced the idea of the project, working tirelessly and with great good humor to lend her careful and joyous aesthetics to the finished product.

I would be remiss were I to ignore that, as I write this, our world has changed radically. We are celebrating 25 years of the joy of visiting gardens at the very moment that a global pandemic prevents us from doing just that. However, it is the essence of gardens that they remind us of the passage of time and of the promise of a seasonal rebirth. I write these words with every confidence that not only will we return soon to the wonderful adventure and discovery that is an Open Day, but that gardens, and gardening, will show us the way to a brighter and healthier future.

Come join us in the garden!

James Brayton Hall President and CEO

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

By Thomas L. Woltz

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 pre-historic time to today 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 to 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

SHARING, AND CELEBRATING AMERICA’S CULTURAL LEGACY

Above We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific understanding of the environment, soil ecology, hydrology, and the complexity of nature has grown by leaps and bounds. Gardening practices increasingly reflect our

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, Tennessee, 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 6 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 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 col-

lections 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 camelias. 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 posthumously “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

Above We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific understanding of the environment, soil ecology, hydrology, and the complexity of nature has grown by leaps and bounds. Gardening practices increasingly reflect our

we were establishing from zero. The circulation seamlessly delivers the visitor to the starting point of the Olmsted, Jr. designed sequential approach to the tower. 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 a 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 their memory, were erased until the property was given to the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, who 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 in 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 death and life, 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 NatureSacred 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 Woltz 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 a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects Council of Fellows.

Above We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific understanding of the environment, soil ecology, hydrology, and the complexity of nature has grown by leaps and bounds. Gardening practices increasingly reflect our appreciation that actions we take on our plots of land have an observable impact on the health of the environment. As the gardening public becomes more informed, our gardens in turn have become vital sanctuaries for birds, pollinators, and native plant species and we are better

Preserving Traces and Remnants of a Gardening Past

By Brent Leggs and Lawana Holland-Moore

African Americans have always gardened.

Our cultural identity was once inextricably tied to soil, to earth, 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 rosebushes 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.

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

—George Washington Carver

Brent Leggs is the Executive Director and Lawana Holland-Moore is the Program Officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.

I am here.

By Shaun Spencer-Hester

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 alley white 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.

Photo: David Lapage Shaun

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, Illinois, of the National Airmen’s Association (NAA). Shortly thereafter approximately twenty Negro Flyers produced an air show viewed by twenty-five thousand 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 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, who 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 U.S. Postal Stamp. Anne Spencer’s dreams and visions are thus still alive,

Earth, I thank you

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. The club restore, maintain, and volunteer in the public garden 38 years later. Edankraal, 25’ x 45’ 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.

Shaun Spencer-Hester is the executive director and board treasurer of the Anne Spencer House and Garden Museum in Lynchburg, VA.

Photo: Susan Saandholland

By Anne Spencer

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 Barbara and Rick Romeo, Stewards of Rocky Hills

The finest gardens in the world will wither and slowly transmogrify into a grotesque 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 a garden well known and loved by friends of the Garden Conservancy. Lovingly tended for decades by its equally 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 Rormeo: We’d lived down the street for 30 years. I was walking by one day and she 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 so well-regarded 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 knew 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 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 minimum 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 from 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), which were once planted and maintained, but now are 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 it was going to be a park and 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’re 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.

Any advice to others, in conclusion?

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, and we know when they were bought, where they were from, and all their names. It’s been a huge help.

Above We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific understanding of

An Accidental Preservationist

By Judith B. Tankard

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 Jekyll gardens that happened to be part of the grounds. Overgrown trees and shrubs, pitiful flower borders, missing ornament, 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 pro-

cedures. 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, 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, 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

Above We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific understanding of

gardens in perspective. After Katrina’s destruction 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 one of Shipman’s finest achievements.

It took a book, rather than a storm to resurrect a slumbering Shipman garden in Jacksonville, Florida, designed in the early 1930s, but long forgotten in the tangle of overgrown shrubs. Shortly after the publication of my book on Shipman 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 multi-year 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 and 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.

An art historian specializing in landscape history, Judith B Tankard is the author of books on Beatrix Farrand, Ellen Shipman, and Gertrude Jekyll, among others. She is a longtime Fellow of the Garden Conservancy and organizes the Martha’s Vineyard Open Day. Photo: Jennifer Packard

Preserving Gardens that Spring from the Soul

By Lucinda Brockway

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 which 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, they are 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 ”

Above: Long Hill, Beverly, MA Photo: Terri Unger Photography

Right: Stevens-Coolidge House & Garden, North Andover, MA Photo: Coco McCabe

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, staff build documents that guide its long-term management, a suite of documents we are developing 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 unique, guiding documents must clarify 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 visitation, 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.

Lucinda Brockway is the Program Director for Cultural Resources at the Trustees of Reservations, where she is responsible for 112 properties and 25,000 acres of Massachusetts cultural landscape.

Above We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific understanding of the environment, soil ecology, hydrology, and the complexity of nature has grown by leaps and bounds. Gardening practices increasingly reflect our appreciation that actions we take on our plots of land have an observable impact on the health of the environment. As the gardening public becomes more informed, our gardens in turn have become vital sanctuaries for birds, pollinators, and native plant species and we are better equipped to make a positive difference.

Landscape and Memory at Sylvester Manor

By Donnamarie Barnes

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.

Donnamarie Barnes is the curator and archivist at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm on Shelter Island on the east end of Long Island in New York State.

Importance of Preserving Gardens

By Walter Hood

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 conclusive 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 a diversity

of examples for 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.”2 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 in Rural Georgia, 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 90s 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

Above

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal

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 these important contributions using W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of twoness, 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 in cultural influences, African and European. In the “two-ness of the Negro” we find duality doubled.”3 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 was 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 the American garden 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 overtime. 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 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 to become 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 Is there a #2?

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

Walter Hood is a professor and the former Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and the principal of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California.

Preservation in Action at the Garden Conservancy

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 centers around 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, and foster organizational development to help our partners thrive as independent entities.

Following are a few examples of of different ways we approach our preservation work.

Reviving Gilded Age Beauty

In partnership with Bard College, we are working to rehabilitate Blithewood Garden, a beautiful, Italianate garden designed by Francis Hoppin, circa 1903. Together we are raising visibility for the project, conducting research, and establishing a rehabilitation plan so that future generations can enjoy this Beaux Arts gem in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Speaking Out for Gardens

As an advocate for garden preservation, the Garden Conservancy takes a public stand to protect at-risk gardens. Recent examples of our advocacy include letters of support for the preservation of the Russell Page garden at the Frick Collection in New York City; Powell Gardens, in Kingsville, MO; the McGinley Garden, in Milton, MA; and the sculpture garden at the entry plaza of the National Geographic Headquarters, Washington, DC.

Celebrating the Leagacy of American Designers

Lord & Schryver, the first all-female landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest, designed more than 250 landscapes throughout the region in the first half of the twentieth century, adapting European and East Coast landscape styles to the region. The Garden Conservancy helped establish the Lord & Schryver Conservancy. We assisted with its organizational development and advised on a multiyear restoration plan, a cultural landscape report, and a marketing plan to preserve Gaiety Hollow, the historic home and office of Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, in Salem, OR.

Preserving the Stories Gardens Tell

The Garden Conservancy’s documentation program seeks to capture the essence of something that is largely experiential: the beauty of a garden and the many stories it embodies. To do so, our garden documentation program uses photos and letters, drawings and plant lists, along with the stories and experiences that have inspired each garden’s creators. The goal is to bring gardens to life through film and an online educational tool that will continue to provide important insights for years to come.

Building Organizational Strength and Protecting Gardens for Future Generations

In Hempstead, TX, the John Fairey Garden has a unique collection of more than 3,000 species of rare plants native to the southern United States, Mexico, and Asia. The Garden Conservancy helped form the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation and guided strategic planning and collections management initiatives. We also hold a conservation easement that preserves the garden’s unique value for future generations. A conservation easement is a legally binding agreement that identifies the significant attributes of a property, and restricts or prohibits activities that might endanger or degrade them.

Preservation in Action At the Garden Conservancy: Our Partners and Projects

Since 1989, the Garden Conservancy’s Preservation team has worked with more than 100 gardens across America. Each 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 cultural legacy of American gardens. The following is a comprehensive list of gardens with whom we have partnered and helped to preserve since our founding in 1989. The gardens are listed in alphabetical order by garden name.

Abkhazi Garden Victoria, British Columbia

The Abkhazi Garden is an exquisite heritage home and garden located in Victoria, British Columbia. Prince and Princess Abkhazi began creating their garden in 1946, and worked together on their creation for over 40 years, referring to it as “their child”. After their deaths the garden changed hands, and in February 2000, the Garden Conservancy assisted the Land Conservancy of British Columbia (TLCBC) in purchasing the property to save it from development. The Garden Conservancy continued to advise TLCBC as the garden was developed for public usage.

Anderson Japanese Gardens Rockford, IL

This 12-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. In1996, the Garden Conservancy advised Mr. 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 assumed an advisory role with the Hillside Garden Club for the rehabilitation of the garden, including restoration of the pergola and pool. The Garden Conservancy’s 2019 “Giving Tuesday” fundraising campaign was for the Anne Spencer House & Garden Museum. In 2020, Anne Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester was included in a Garden Conservancy panel discussion on inclusive interpretation of gardens for the American Public Gardens Association (APGA) conference.

Arthur Erickson Garden Vancouver, British Columbia

This garden was created by famed Canadian architect the late Arthur Erickson, where he made his home for over fifty years. In the early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy assisted the Arthur Erickson Foundation, owner of the property, with fundraising strategies, as well as with development of a conservation plan for the house and garden and an archival program.

Ashintully Gardens Tyringham,MA

Ashintully Gardens is an 120-acre estate that is maintained by the Trustees of Reservations land trust. The gardens, and adjoining 594-acre reservation, were the gift of John McLennan Jr., and his wife Katharine. Following the death of John McLennan, Jr., in 1996, the Garden Conservancy supported the Trustees of Reservations in preserving the property, including suggestions for design improvements and management advice. Shortly thereafter, the Garden Conservancy advocated for the garden’s attempt to establish an endowment to support future maintenance. Ashintully participated in the first Garden Conservancy Preservation Weekend in 2008.

Aullwood Garden Metro Park Dayton, OH

Aullwood House and Garden is a registered historic site near Dayton, OH, and was listed on the National Register in 2005. The property 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 – 1998, the Garden Conservancy assisted Aullwood Garden in developing programs, building local support, and advising on maintenance and preservation practices. From 2000 – 2003, the Conservancy reviewed maintenance plans being created for the garden by with Five Rivers MetroParks. In 2008, Aullwood participated in the first Garden Conservancy Preservation Weekend and, in 2012, the Garden Conservancy conducted a garden assessment and reviewed preservation plans for the garden.

Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center Far Hills, NJ

Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center is a botanical garden and public park in Chester Township, NJ. The house and garden, listed by its historic name, Merchiston Farm, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989, for its significance as the home of the American landscape architect Martha Brookes Hutcheson and her landscaping of the property. In 1994, the Garden Conservancy, when contacted because the garden was deteriorating, urged the Morris County Park Commission to create a master plan. This resulted in a renewed commitment to the garden’s care and interpretation. In 2001, the Garden Conservancy endorsed and supported the proposed restoration of the garden, and this work took place from 2001 – 2002.

Bannerman Castle Trust Newburgh, NY

Pollepel Island is a 6.5 acre island in the Hudson River, in New York State. The principal feature on the island is Bannerman’s Castle, an abandoned military surplus warehouse, which is owned and managed by the Bannerman Castle Trust. In 2001, the trust asked the Garden Conservancy to help stabilize the island and ready it for public visitation. The Conservancy responded by soliciting their local members to volunteer to clear the derelict gardens.

AMERICA’S CULTURAL LEGACY

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 their strategic plan. In addition, they reviewed landscape policies and an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant application.

Bayou Gardens Lacombe, LA

From 1935-1956, Bayou Gardens was a major horticultural attraction on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain. Now the headquarters of the Southeast Louisiana National Wildlife Refuges, the gardens are maintained by volunteers and showcase an impressive variety of camellias and azaleas. In 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, Garden Conservancy representatives visited the garden, where local Open Days volunteers and hosts were hard at work with cleanup efforts.

Bellamy-Ferriday House & Garden Bethlehem, CT

The Bellamy-Ferriday House and Garden is a historic house museum built between about 1754 and 1767 by the Rev. Joseph Bellamy, a prominent Congregationalist minister who played an influential role in the First Great Awakening. Together with Connecticut Landmarks, the Garden Conservancy began to orchestrate reconstruction of the formal garden, a project that ultimately took ten years. Beginning in 1993, the Garden Conservancy assisted with documenting existing plants on the property and, a few years later, restoration of the property began, with the goal of recreating the spirit of the 1920s garden.

Bellefield at Historic Hyde Park Hyde Park, NY

This garden, which is the earliest example of an existing private garden designed by Beatrix Farrand, is part of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site. In 1997, under the advice of the Garden Conservancy, a part-time horticulturalist was hired to direct volunteers as they began to plant and maintain the perennial borders. The following year, the Garden 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 time frame, as well as informed stewardship of the garden.

Blithewold Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum Bristol, RI

Blithewold is a 33-acre summer estate with grand views of Narragansett Bay and is nationally significant in American history as one of the most fully developed and authentic examples of the Country Place Era. In 1998, the Garden Conservancy took action to save Blithewold from private development and keep it open to the public, as well as assisted in the formation of Save Blithewood, Inc., to raise necessary funding and help the group create a business plan to take over management of 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’s assistance turned to the restoration and interpretation of the grounds, as well as educational programs planning. In 2006, philanthropist Dodo Hamilton made significant contributions to both Blithewold and the Garden Conservancy.

Blithewood Garden Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Blithewood Garden is a formal Italianate walled garden located on the main campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. Designed by Francis Hoppin in the early twentieth century, the garden’s style is typically Beaux-Arts and site has significant connections to the heritage of the Hudson Valley region and the evolution of American landscape design. In 2016, the Garden Conservancy and Bard College entered into an agreement to work together to develop a strategy to rehabilitate Blithewood Garden

(for more information, see Blithewood case study, page ______).

The Blue Garden – Newport, RI

Among the many notable gardens created by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and the Olmsted firm, the Blue Garden, designed for Arthur Curtiss and Harriet Parsons James, 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 at Bard College entitled “The Architectural Garden: Challenges of Preserving Formal Structures in the Landscape.” 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

Over a twenty-year period, the collector, H.B. Wallace, acquired thousands of plants from commercial nurseries, private collections, horticulturists, scientists, and from the Arboretum’s Desert Legume Program. He filled his garden with an international palette of arid land plants from Madagascar, Mexico, Africa, South America, Australia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the southwestern U.S. In 2008, the Garden Conservancy gathered public garden professionals from around the country at Wallace’s private garden with the task of evaluating its potential to become a public garden and creating a plan for relocating Wallace’s plant collection to the Boyce Thompson Arboretum. The vast majority of the specimen plants have been moved to the arboretum.

The Breakers Newport, RI

The Breakers is a Vanderbilt mansion located at Salve Regina University. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994 and is a contributing property to the Bellevue Avenue Historic District. In 2016, the Garden Conservancy advocated to save the historic gardens at the Breakers, which were threatened by construction of a new visitors’ center, with a letter to the Preservation Society of Newport.Brooklyn Botanic Garden Brooklyn, NY

In 2019, a proposed high-rise development on property adjacent to the botanic garden threatened to block sunlight and harm its unparalleled plant collections. The Garden Conservancy joined countless organizations and individuals in opposing the project and encouraged people to sign their “Fight for Sunlight” petition through various communications channels.

Brookwood Point Cooperstown, NY

Brookwood Point is an estate on the shores of Otsego Lake, in western New York State, established in the early 1820s. It is home to a 100-year-old Italianate Renaissance garden. From 2002-2004, the Garden Conservancy advised Brookwood Point on management, programs, public use, long-range planning, organizational development, and fundraising.

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

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 of 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 offcers 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, 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 to last ten years launched. It 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—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.

Caption: please supply one caption for all images if possible so it does not look choppy. Not sure how you want to do photo credits. Caption: please supply one caption for all images if possible so it does not look choppy. Not sure how you want to do photo credits.

Casa Amesti Adobe and Garden Monterey, CA

A stunning achievement in interior decoration, Casa Amesti is one of the best examples of Monterey Colonial architecture. In 1953, it was willed to the National Trust for Historic Preservation which, in 1998, sought to transfer ownership to the Casa Amesti Foundation and establish a conservation easement on the property. Tenants of the property, the Old Capital Club, requested a proposal for preservation planning from landscape architect and garden historian Russ Beatty, and contacted the Garden Conservancy for guidance in determining a course of action.

Casa del Herrero Montecito, CA

Also known as the Steedman Estate, Casa del Herrero is an estate designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style architecture. 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. The Conservancy expressed their strong opinion that the gardens at the estate were in need of a complete professional assessment, and offered their services in that process.

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 woodland landscape. Chase Garden, which is now privately owned, was created over more than forty years, starting in the 1960s, by Emmott and Ione Chase (for more information, see Chase Garden case study, page ______).

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 back to 1903. The original designs of these gardens have been preserved for over a century and were designed by landscape designers such as the Olmsted Brothers, Thomas Meehan & Sons, and Ellen Biddle Shipman. The Cummer Gardens, which are on the National Register of Historic Places, sustained severe damage from Hurricane Irma in 2018. The Garden Conservancy made a $20,000 restoration grant to help fund the reconstruction of these historic gardens.

Deepwood Museum & Gardens Salem, OR

Deepwood Museum & Gardens, formerly known as Historic Deepwood Estate, or simply Deepwood, has been managed since 1974 by the non-profit 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 all-female landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest. In 2012, the Garden Conservancy advised the Lord & Schryver Conservancy on the renovation of the Scroll Garden at Deepwood, as well as

AMERICA’S

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 happy and close collaboration for almost thirty years, Mildred Bliss and 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 partnered with the Friends of Dumbarton Oaks Park to restore the garden and, in 1999, the Garden Conservancy supported the restoration of Forsythia Hill and the implementation of the Cultural Landscape Report.

Eby San Francisco, CA

Eby is a private terraced garden, originally designed in the 1930s, on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. The Garden Conservancy has held a conservation easement on the property since 2005. Uncharacteristically, the easement preceded the garden plan, with the stipulation that the plan be approved by the Garden Conservancy. The plan was implemented by the new owners, who bought the property in 2007.

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

Elawa Farm Lake Forest, IL

Elawa Farm is a restored gentleman’s farm on Chicago’s North Shore. The buildings forming the main farm group have been restored and adapted for today’s use to preserve Elawa Farm as a stunning example of estate farm architecture and a unique gem of Lake Forest. In 2007, the Garden Conservancy compiled a comprehensive written report and finalized a planting plan, based on the treatment philosophy and strategy, which was developed together with regional partners.

Elizabeth Lawrence House and Garden Charlotte, NC

In 1949, garden designer and writer Elizabeth Lawrence began a garden on a modest lot in Charlotte, NC, that would embody her life-long celebration of Southern horticulture. A graceful refuge that doubled as a living laboratory for her study and appreciation of plants and design, Lawrence’s garden was a frequent reference and inspiration for her writing. In 2008, the Wing Haven Foundation purchased the garden and manages it today. The Garden Conservancy was granted a conservation easement on the property, placed an intern there for nine months in 2010, supervised creation of a management plan for the garden, and continues to partner with the garden.

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

This garden, located on a hillside estate overlooking the Williamette River, began consulting with the Garden Conservancy regarding long-term preservation in 2001. In 2003, Elk Rock was among sixteen gardens represented at a meeting organized by the Garden Conservancy that resulted in the creation of the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network – a regional organization of emerging public gardens.

Enid A. Haupt Garden Washington, DC

The Enid A. Haupt Garden is a 4.2 acre public garden in the Smithsonian complex, adjacent to the Smithsonian Institution Building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was designed to be a modern representation of American Victorian gardens as they appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. In October 2016, the Garden Conservancy joined a growing number of organizations in supporting the preservation of the garden, which was threatened by the proposed redesign of the Smithsonian’s south campus. In 2018, revised plans that preserved the Haupt Garden were approved.

Eudora Welty House & Garden Jackson, MS

The Eudora Welty House was the home of author Eudora Welty for nearly 80 years. It was built by her parents in 1925, and Welty and her mother built and tended the garden over decades. The house is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark. Welty, who died in 2001, bequeathed her house and garden to the State of Mississippi, which the Garden Conservancy assisted in restoring Welty’s garden to what it had been

during the prime of her life. 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 Italian gardens are detached from the house and incorporate formal elements typical of the Italian style. In 2008, the Garden Conservancy assisted the Frederick Vanderbilt Garden Association in developing a one-year strategic plan for a new landscape initiative. The Conservancy conducted a members’ survey and presented three workshops with the board of directors, key committee chairs, and former officers. The final result was a one-year strategic plan 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, the landscape was enhanced by his son, Clarence Hay. In 1993, with the gardens in a state of disrepair, the State of New Hampshire asked the Garden Conservancy, in partnership with the Friends of the John Hay Wildlife Refuge, to assume the day-to-day operations of the gardens and manage the restoration and interpretation of the landscape. Today, the Fells is a regional center for conservation and horticultural education.

Fort Greene Park Brooklyn, NY

Fort Greene Park is a 30-acre, city-owned and operated park in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY. In 2019, the Garden Conservancy sent a letter opposing the redesign of Fort Greene Park. The proposed plan threatened to destroy multipurpose cobblestone-and-grass relief mounds designed by pioneer American landscape architect Arthur Edwin Bye, Jr. in the 1970s.

Gaiety Hollow Salem, OR

In the early twentieth century, Gaiety Hollow was both the home garden and location of the office of Elizabeth Lord and Edith Schryver, the first all-female landscape architecture firm in the Pacific Northwest. The Garden Conservancy began providing preservation assistance for Gaiety Hollow in 2003. Two years later, the Lord & Schryver Conservancy was formed and has been a member of the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network since that time. The Garden Conservancy has advised on Gaiety Hollow’s preservation strategy and planning, their capital campaign to acquire and preserve the property, and their strategic planning process. In 2021, Gaiety Hollow was a recipient of a Garden Conservancy Gardens for Good grant.

Gardens at Palmdale Fremont, CA

The Gardens at Palmdale is a five-acre meditation garden located in the southeast San Francisco Bay Area. The Gardens at Palmdale is one of the last remaining fragments of the famous Mission San Jose land grant. Owned by the Congregation of the Sisters

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

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 the late 80s. 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. I 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 evokes a humanoid character. 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.

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 the 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 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.

of the Holy Family since 1948, the gardens were conveyed to the nonprofit Gardens at Palmdale, Inc. in 2019, who worked with the Garden Conservancy to develop a conservation easement for the property that will protect it in perpetuity. For more information on the Gardens at Palmdale, see case study on page _____).

Gardens of Alcatraz San Francisco, CA

For 150 years, a succession of soldiers, families of correction officials, and inmates cultivated gardens hewn on the rocky, windswept island of Alcatraz. For ten years, the Garden Conservancy led the effort to rehabilitate the Gardens of Alcatraz in partnership with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and the National Park Service. In 2014 the restoration project completed successfully. For more information on the Gardens of Alcatraz, see case study on page ______).

Garland Farm Bar Harbor, ME

Garland Farm was the ancestral home of Lewis Garland, Beatrix Farrand’s property manager at Reef Point. In 2003, the Garden Conservancy supported efforts to acquire the property for public use, education, and its operations by the newly-formed nonprofit organization, the Beatrix Farrand Society. Garland Farm was purchased from the Eveland estate in 2004.

Green Gables Woodside, CA

Green Gables is a 74-acre estate built in the early 1900s for prominent San Francisco businessman and philanthropist Mortimer Fleishhacker, Sr. The Garden Conservancy has held a conservation easement on Green Gables since 2003. In 2011, a garden party at Green Gables was the inaugural event for the Garden Conservancy West Coast Council’s development committee and raised more than $50K to support the Conservancy’s George W. Rowe Education Fund.

Greenwood Gardens Short Hills, NJ

Greenwood Gardens, a 28-acre formal Italianate garden, has been a Garden Conservancy preservation project since 2002. The Garden Conservancy directly managed the garden from 2003-2005 and conducted a feasibility study for Greenwood in 2004. With technical support and guidance from the Garden Conservancy, Greenwood Gardens has made a strong transition from private to public garden and obtained its nonprofit status in 2005. Greenwood attended the first Garden Conservancy Preservation in 2008 and is a supporting organization of the Garden Conservancy.

Greystone Mansion & Gardens Beverly Hills, CA

The Greystone Mansion, also known as the Doheny Mansion, is a Tudor Revival mansion on a landscaped estate with distinctive formal English gardens, completed in 1928 for oil baron Edward Donehy. In 2010, the Garden Conservancy advocated for garden with a letter opposing proposed development which threatened destruction of the house and gardens.

Hakone Gardens Saratoga, CA

Hakone Gardens is an 18-acre traditional Japanese garden and is recognized as one of the oldest Japanese-style residential gardens in the Western Hemisphere. Beginning in 2000, the Garden Conservancy provided Hakone Gardens with technical assistance, including the completion of a Cultural Landscape Report, a management plan, a master plan, and an interpretive plan.

Hannah Carter Japanese Garden – Los Angeles, CA

This garden was designed in 1959 by noted Japanese garden designer Nagao Sakurai. In 1964, the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) was deeded the garden 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. For the next several years, the Garden Conservancy assisted the Carter family in its efforts to preserve the garden. In 2016, the garden was purchased and, in 2017, the Garden Conservancy wrote a letter supporting designation of the garden as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. In that same year, both the house and the garden were subsequently designated official landmarks.

Harkness Gardens Waterford, CT

The Harkness Gardens, which were designed by Beatrix Farrand and Marian Cruger Coffin, are located in Harkness Memorial State Park, the 200-acre former estate of Edward Stephen Harkness and his wife Mary Stillman Harkness, who were the beneficiaries

of a fortune amassed by Edward’s father Stephen V. Harkness, a silent partner of John D. Rockefeller in the Standard Oil Corporation. In 1993, Friends of the Harkness contacted the Garden Conservancy for possible assistance with preserving the gardens. In 1995, the Garden Conservancy met with the Friends group for a strategic planning meeting with the specific goal of defining possibilities for the and determining the resources needed for those possibilities, as well as developing future course of action.

Harland Hand Memorial Garden

El Cerrito, CA

Harland Hand, inspired by the principles of fine art and rock formations in the High Sierra, designed this half-acre hillside garden with breathtaking views of San Francisco Bay. Shortly before Hand’s death, he asked the Garden Conservancy to explore the possibility of preserving his garden for public benefit. After Hand’s death, in 1998, the Conservancy continued to provide advice on evaluating the feasibility of transitioning the garden to become a public entity. Issues of access, financing, and governance seemed over-whelming to the estate and the garden was sold to a private individual.

The Hermitage Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ

The Hermitage, a fourteen-room Gothic Revival house museum built in 1847-48, is a National Historic Landmark. In 1992, the Garden Conservancy sponsored an educational working symposium to assist the Friends of the Hermitage in establishing a landscape preservation plan. At the request of the Garden Conservancy, the Olmstead Center for Landscape Preservation assisted in the preparation of planting plans for the grounds, which were be based on an 1890s photograph of the site. The Conservancy offered advice as planting plans were being developed and assisted with fundraising efforts to maintain and restore the period landscape.

Heronswood Garden Kingston, WA

Heronswood is a 15-acre botanical garden and nursery established by Dan Hinkley and Robert Jones in 1987. In 2000, they sold it to the W. Atlee Burpee Company. Six years later, Burpee closed the Kingston nursery, at which time the Pacific Northwest Horticultural Conservancy (PNHC) began plans to purchase the garden. In 2007, the Garden Conservancy acted as an intermediary between Burpee and PNHC. In 2012, the Heronswood botanical garden and Heronswood Nursery Company were sold to the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, which stated that it is committed to maintaining the garden as an asset to the community.

Hills and Dales Estate / Ferrell Gardens – LaGrange, GA

The Ferrell Gardens at Hills and Dales Estate were begun in 1841 by Sara Coleman Ferrell and today represent one of the oldest surviving parterre gardens in the American south. In 1997, as the family prepared for the future public operation of the garden, they consulted with the Garden Conservancy. Upon Alice Callaway’s death in 1998, the property was bequeathed and entrusted to the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation with the request that it be used for the enjoyment and instruction of the visiting public.

Hirshhorn Museum Washington, DC

In 2020, the Garden Conservancy joined other cultural and preservation organizations in raising concerns about the redesign of the sunken sculpture garden at the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The proposed redesign threatened to destroy key features of the postwar landscape design, a masterwork of Modernist landscape architecture by Lester Collins.

Hollister House Garden – Washington, CT

A classic garden in the English manner with a loosely formal structure, situated in the Litchfield hills of northwestern Connecticut, Hollister House Garden is a supporting organization of the Garden Conservancy. With garden owner George Schoellkopf, the Garden Conservancy has worked to facilitate the property’s transition to nonprofit ownership and to become a public garden. The Conservancy was also instrumental in launching Hollister House Garden’s Garden Study Weekend, as a cosponsor.

Hortense Miller Garden Laguna Beach, CA

Established in 1959, this garden covers two-and-a-half acres of the upper slopes of Boat Canyon in Laguna Beach, California. In 2005, the Garden Conservancy assisted with fundraising strategies and the overall assessment of plans to sustain the garden.

Hortulus Farm Garden and Nursery – Wrightstown, PA

Hortulus Farm Garden and Nursery, a 100-acre, eighteenth-century farmstead in Wrightstown, PA, was created and is owned by garden and event designer Renny Reynolds and the late garden writer Jack Staub. In 2004, the Isaiah Warner Farmstead was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 2014, Hortulus was designated an Affiliate Garden of the Garden Conservancy, an extension of an already strong working relationship between the two organizations for more than ten years.

Innisfree Garden Millbrook, NY

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 from Harvard University, individual garden scenes inspired by the Chinese paintings were connected to an overall landscape around a glacial lake, in keeping with the ecological surroundings. Innisfree is a Public Garden Partner of the Garden Conservancy. In 2019, Innisfree was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

James Rose Center Ridgewood, NJ

The James Rose Center, a nonprofit research and study foundation, is headquartered at the former home of landscape architect James Rose, which he built in 1953. 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 collaborated with the James Rose Center to form an Advisory Council to develop programming and support and, in 1997, the formation of the James Rose Conservancy.

The Jens Jensen Formal Garden at Humboldt Park Chicago, IL

The Jens Jensen Formal Garden, an iconic circular garden designed and built in 1908 by noted prairie-school landscape architect Jens Jensen, is situated near the center of Humboldt Park, a 219-acre parkland located in the ethnically diverse Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago. In 2016, the Garden Conservancy, the Chicago Park District, and the Chicago Parks Foundation announced a new partnership to revitalize the garden, marking its first major project in the upper Midwest.

The John Fairey Garden Hempstead, TX

The John Fairey Garden is the creation of John Fairey, design 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. The sculptural quality of these plantings echoes the international-caliber collection of Mexican folk art displayed in the gallery. The Garden Conservancy holds a conservation easement on the property assisted the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation in public outreach and strategic planning for the garden’s

future as a public garden and study center. For more information on the garden, see case study on page _____.

John P. Humes Japanese Stroll Garden

Mill Neck, NY

The Humes Garden is a fine example of a Japanese stroll garden in the Northeast United States, seamlessly integrating ageless 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. For more information on the garden, see case study on page ____.

Juliet Low Gordon Birthplace Savannah, GA

In 2018, proposed renovation of the Juliette Gordon Low House in Savannah, GA, threatened to destroy a garden designed by Clermont Lee in the 1950s. Gordon Low was the founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA. Clermont Huger Lee was the first registered female landscape architect in Georgia. The Garden Conservancy sent two letters – one in 2018 and one in 2020 – encouraging the consideration of alternative renovation plans that would preserve the garden.

Justin Smith Morrill Homestead Strafford, VT

The Justin Smith Morrill Homestead is the historic Carpenter Gothic home of United States Senator Justin Smith Morrill in Strafford, VT, and was one of the first declared National Historic Landmarks, in 1960. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy advised the newly formed Friends group and, in 2002, made a grant to help implement the preservation master plan.

Kaiser Rooftop Garden Oakland, CA

Inspired by the rooftop garden at Rockefeller Center in New York City, industrialist Henry Kaiser hired the landscape architecture firm of Osmundson & Staley to design a garden atop the parking garage next to his company’s headquarters in downtown Oakland, CA. The garden opened in 1960 as the first “true” post-World War II rooftop garden in the U.S. In 2011, the Garden Conservancy wrote a letter of support for redevelopment of the garden and, in 2019, sent a letter opposing a revised plan that would result in shadowing of the garden.

Keil Cove Tiburon, CA

Bluff Point is 14.5 acres at the eastern end of the Tiburon Peninsula and includes about 2,000 feet of San Francisco Bay shoreline. The property shares this part of the peninsula with the 30-acre Keil Cove property, which has belonged to the Keil family since the 1880s. The Garden Conservancy holds a conservation easement on the property and conducts annual monitoring.

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

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 Annandale-on-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 19th 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.

Bard’s director of grounds and horticulture approached the Garden Conservancy for its assistance. 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; 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 midcentury 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, rock, and water integrate seamlessly into the landscape.

Thirty-three years after the garden’s design was created, the Chases came to the Garden Conservancy for help in making the garden an asset to the community at large. The Conservancy accepted a conservation easement on the property and a “friends group” was started. The Conservancy, in an unusual 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, ownership of 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 nd expanded. Extensive documentation work was also initiated to preserve the legacy and story of Emmott, Ione, and their garden.

Like all of the Conservancy’s projects, many component details must align, especially financial resources and context- and an army of passionate, 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—but it has been saved, with measures in place to ensure its future. It is good hands. It is once again locally owned, by people enthusiastic about both the historic garden they care for and about its story. It is open to the public at least twice a year.

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Kings’s Garden Ticonderoga, NY

The Pell family estate is located north of Fort Ticonderoga, a large eighteenth-century star fort built by the French at a narrows near the south end of Lake Champlain in northern New York State. In 1921, Sarah Pell undertook reconstruction of the gardens. She hired Marian Cruger Coffin, one of the most famous American landscape architects of the period. In 1995, the gardens were restored and later opened for public visitation; they are known as the King’s Garden. The Garden Conservancy assisted with the garden restoration, including the drafting of a master plan and several letter of support for grants to help fund the restoration.

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 newly-hired 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, which detailed recommended phases for garden restoration, public access, visitor services, and educational programming. In 2006, the garden asked for Garden Conservancy assistance in utilizing a master plan, identifying staffing needs, and identifying funding sources.

Kruckeberg Botanic Garden Shoreline, WA

Currently a private residence, this botanic garden is open to the public at designated hours which alternate seasonally. In 1998, the family formed a foundation to preserve the garden and, in 2003, it received an easement to preserve the garden in perpetuity, with advice from the Garden Conservancy. Kruckeberg is a member of the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network (GCNN).

Ladew Topiary Gardens Monkton, MD

The gardens were 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 1993, the Garden Conservancy met with the Board and Garden Committee of Ladew to discuss ways in which they might assist them with the ongoing preservation of the garden. Long-term planning and maintenance as well as capital needs were discussed as areas of possible collaboration.

Lanark / Alabama Nature Center Millbrook, AL

Lanark, which has been the headquarters of the Alabama Wildlife

Federation (AWF) since 2003, is the former home of Isabel and Wiley Hill, who moved to Lanark as newlyweds in 1948. The gardens at Lanark, covering more than 30 acres, represent a lifelong labor of love by the Hills. In the late 1990s, the Garden Conservancy provided technical support, including extensive information on conservation easements. When Isabel Hill died, in 2001, it had already been established that the property would become a conservation education center for the state and AWF headquarters.

Les Quatre Vents – La Malbaie, Quebec

Les Jardins de Quatre-Vents, or the “Garden of the Four Winds,” is the second, major personal garden created by Frank Cabot, founder of the Garden Conservancy. The garden is spread over twenty lush acres above the St. Lawrence River, about 90 miles north of Quebec City. It is a supporting organization of the Garden Conservancy.

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 and Crafts style summerhouse, walled gardens, pools, and fountains. The Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance to Linwood in the late 1990s, at which time a Friends group was established. In 2002, Garden Conservancy preservation staff participated in a roundtable discussion focused on preservation issues at Linwood Gardens.

LongHouse Reserve East Hampton, NY

A sixteen-acre property created by internationally acclaimed textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen, LongHouse Reserve is a remarkable integration of nature, art, and design. In 2011, LongHouse was designated the first Affiliate Garden of the Garden Conservancy. That same year, the Conservancy completed a garden assessment and implemented a garden maintenance plan.

Longue Vue House & Gardens – New Orleans, LA

As a National Historic Landmark, Longue Vue House & Gardens has beautifully preserved and kept their gardens for public enjoyment for many years. In 2006, the New York Botanical Garden and the Garden Conservancy raised $50,000 and sent a team of volunteers to assist in recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. In addition to fundraising, the Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance, as well as help with program development, creation of a long-term maintenance plan, and identification of ways in which

PRESERVING, SHARING, AND CELEBRATING AMERICA’S CULTURAL LEGACY

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

Longue Vue could attract national attention to their historically significant gardens and the partnership that was formed around the renewal of the historic tree canopy. The Conservancy funded a landscape renewal plan and placed a Marco Polo Stufano Fellow-in-residence to implement initial phases of the restoration and reclaim the original design brilliance.

Los Pablanos Albuquerque, NM

Los Pablanos is the former home of politicians Albert and Ruth Simms, who sold the property to the Rembe family in the mid1970s. In 1998, the family expressed an interest in preservation and development after an assessment by the Garden Conservancy. A proposal was given to the family so as to realize some of the property while preserving the most historically significant features of the landscape. Today, Los Pablanos is an inn, organic farm and apothecary.

Lotusland Montecito, CA

Ganna Walska Lotusland is a nonprofit botanical garden near Santa Barbara, California. 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 their efforts to open the garden to the public.

Lovelace Residence Montecito, CA

Today known as the Harold S. Gladwin Residence, this estate is the former home of Jon B. and Lillian Lovelace. From 2013 to 2014, the Garden Conservancy provided a feasibility study outline and a list of potential consultants for garden restoration. The Conservancy also suggested that they could possibly oversee, review, and advise on the project, until it was revealed that the owner’s youngest son had an interest in the property. He rebuilt it in 2016. Lovelace sustained significant damage from the 2017 fire season and subsequent mudslides in drought-stressed California.

Lyman Estate (a/k/a The Vale) Waltham, MA

The Lyman Estate, also known as The Vale, is a historic country house located in Waltham, MA. It is now owned by the nonprofit Historic New England organization. The estate was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970 for its architecture and for its landscape design, which is remarkably rare for having retained much of its original eighteenth-century character. The Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance to the Lyman Estate from 1994-1996, specifically the development of a Friends group and an assessment of trees and shrubs on the property.

Madoo Sagaponack, NY

Over the last 40 years, artist and writer Robert Dash has established a green, organic encyclopedia of gardening on two acres of land, featuring Tudor, High Renaissance, early Greek, as well as Orienta,l garden influences. In the early 1990s, the Garden Conservancy helped Madoo launch the Madoo Conservancy, a nonprofit foundation with a focus on study, preservation, and enhancement of Madoo. At the urging of the Garden Conservancy, the Madoo Conservancy became an independent nonprofit organization in 1994.

Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center

Garrison, NY

Manitoga is the house, studio, and 75-acre woodland landscape of mid-century designer Russel Wright (1904-1976). It is a National Historic Landmark, an Affiliate Site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and a World Monuments Fund Watch Site. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Garden Conservancy provided technical support to Manitoga, giving them a list of landscape priorities as well as letters of support for their Save America’s Treasures and National Trust’s Artists’ Homes and Studios grant applications. In 2011, after Manitoga sustained extensive damage from Hurricane Irene and an untimely late October snow storm, the Garden Conservancy worked with Manitoga’s Woodland Landscape Council to assess damage and implement clean-up efforts. Since that time, the Conservancy has maintained an advisory role with Manitoga.

Marian Coffin Gardens at Gibraltar Wilmington, DE

Marian Cruger Coffin designed the gardens at Gibraltar, the former estate of Hugh Rodney Sharp and his wife, Isabella Mathieu du Pont Sharp, purchased in 1909. In 1995, Preservation Delaware, which owns and manages the property, asked the Garden Conservancy for assistance in rehabilitating the Gardens at Gibraltar. The Conservancy advised on the development of a master plan and a capital campaign, as well as provided letters of support for Save America’s Treasures, Garden Club of Delaware, and other grants for the garden.

Marin Art and Garden Center Ross, CA

The Marin Art and Garden Center is a nonprofit organization that provides eleven acres of gardens, educational programs, and a venue for weddings and other events. The only entry we have is that “In 2008, the Garden Conservancy made a site visit, when the center was having financial challenges and Antonia Adezio met with them several times.” According to her, “Garden Conservancy involvement was fairly minor, mainly focused on raising awareness of the center.”

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

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, welcoming viewers 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 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 is 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 to the Garden Conservancy who 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.

Caption: please supply one caption for all images if possible so it does not look choppy. Not sure how you want to do photo credits. Caption: please supply one caption for all images if possible so it does not look choppy. Not sure how you want to do photo credits.

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, Long Island in New York 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. Humes’ original designer 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, “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 own 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 this 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 90’s 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 two-acre 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, an online storehouse of written, visual, and recorded information 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 John Peter Keane. 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.

Maudslay’s Gardens Newburyport, MA

Maudslay’s Gardens are located in Maudslay State Park, which was once the Moseley family estate. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy was enlisted to provide technical assistance in developing fundraising strategies to support the restoration and maintenance of the gardens. In 2003, the Conservancy collaborated with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, the National Park Service, and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation on the restoration project.

McGinley Garden Milton, MA

The McGinley Garden in Milton, MA, was designed by renowned landscape architect Ellen Shipman in 1925 and is a stunning example of her garden design philosophy: the close integration of house and garden. The site is an example of living history, representing the work of several significant figures in American architecture and landscape architecture. In 2020, both the house and garden, which are privately owned, were threatened by an application to raze the site and build 120 multi-family rental units and 180 parking spaces. The Garden Conservancy joined scholars and cultural organizations in opposing the development proposal in letters to the Mass Housing Finance Agency and the Town of Milton, MA.

McKee Botanical Garden Vero Beach, FL

The McKee Botanical Garden is an 18-acre sub-tropic botanical garden founded in 1929 by Waldo Sexton and Arthur G. McKee. Tropical landscape architect William Lyman Phillips was hired to design its streams, ponds, and trails. In 1932, it was opened to the public and was successful for several decades but shut down in 1976 and most of its land was sold for development. The site remained vacant for twenty years until the Trust for Public Land purchased the property in a cooperative project with Indian River Land Trust. The current garden was formally dedicated in 2001 and is now a Florida landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1996, the garden was accepted by the Garden Conservancy as a preservation project, and the Conservancy assisted with a master plan to preserve and re-open the garden, as well as planning and fundraising efforts.

McLaughlin Garden South Paris, ME

The McLaughlin Garden & Homestead, a two-acre garden in South Paris, ME, was created over six decades by Bernard McLaughlin, starting in 1936. It is listed as a Cultural Landscape on the National Register of Historic Places. Beginning in 1996,

the Garden Conservancy supported the McLaughlin Foundation’s effort to purchase and protect the garden by endorsing its plans, providing technical assistance, and facilitating the purchase of the property. The Conservancy also assisted with the development of a master plan.

Meadowburn Farm Vernon, NJ

The gardens at Meadowburn Farm were created by Helena Rutherfurd Ely, an American author, gardener, and founding member of the Garden Club of America. They served as the basis for a series of three books on gardening in which she favored perennials.

Heirs to the late C.H. Coster Gerard, who owned the estate, contacted the Garden Conservancy regarding possible preservation of the gardens and opening it for public visitation. The Conservancy connected the Gerards with a Fellow in the Longwood Graduate Program in Public Horticulture, who spent the next two years researching Helena Rutherfurd Ely and options for garden preservation.

Milner Gardens and Woodland

Qualicum Beach, British Columbia

Milner Gardens and Woodland is a 60-acre seaside garden on the east coast of Vancouver Island and serves as a living laboratory for Vancouver Island University. In 2002, the garden became part of a network of emerging public gardens in the Pacific Northwest – first known as the Emerging Public Gardens Roundtable, then as the Pacific Northwest Garden Conservancy Forum and, eventually, the Garden Conservancy Northwest Network (GCNN).

La Mirada Monterey, CA

La Mirada Gardens are located at the Monterey Museum of Art. The Garden Conservancy helped garner awareness for this historic garden and advocated for fundraising for a demonstration garden in water conservation and cistern system at La Mirada.

Montrose Garden Hillsborough, NC

The landscape and layout of Montrose, in Hillsborough, NC, originates from the mid-nineteenth century. The 61-acre property was purchased in 1977 by Nancy Goodwin and her husband, Craufurd, professor of economics at Duke University, 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 preservation partner garden in 2003.

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

Moore-Turner Heritage Garden Spokane, WA

Built between 1889 and 1932 as a residential garden for original property owner, Frank Rockwood Moore, the property was later acquired by US Senator George Turner in 1896. Turner hired Hugh Bryan in 1911 to make improvements to the Victorian-influenced design following the then popular Arts and Crafts movement. 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 2002-2003, including guidance in fundraising, volunteer management, landscape preservation, and program development.

Morgan Library & Museum New York, NY

In 2019, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission approved plans to re-vamp the Charles McKim-designed Morgan Library & Museum’s exteriors for the first time in the landmark’s 112-year history. The Garden Conservancy sent a letter in support of this project. The project team included the London-based design firm of Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, who has presented educational programs for the Garden Conservancy.

Morven Museum & Garden Princeton, NJ

Morven is a historic eighteenth-century house which was 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 and has been designated 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

Founded by Issei pioneer B.D. Mukai in 1926 as a strawberry farm, Mukai Farm & Garden today is on the National Register of Historic places with its rare heritage home, Japanese Garden, and Barreling Plant. In 1996, the Garden Conservancy assisted Island Landmarks in acquiring the property and restoring both the house and garden. In 2016, the Friends of Mukai, a nonprofit organization, gained control of the property after the home fell into decline and launched a major revitalization effort. In 2020, the Friends of Mukai largely completed restoration of the house and garden.

National Geographic Headquarters Washington, DC

In 2020, The Garden Conservancy joined other cultural and preservation organizations in raising concerns about the redesign of the sunken sculpture garden at the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The proposed redesign threatened to destroy key features of the postwar landscape design, a masterwork of Modernist landscape architecture by Lester Collins.

Nehrling Gardens Gotha, FL

Dr. Henry Nehrling, one of Florida’s pioneer horticulturists and naturalists, developed Palm Cottage Gardens on 25 acres of his land in central Florida between 1885 and 1896. In 1998, the then-owners of Palm Cottage contacted Dr. Nehrling’s grandson for advice, who in turn contacted the Garden Conservancy. As advised, the Henry Nehrling Society was formed, with the mission to save, restore, and operate the gardens. Several years later, the Garden Conservancy provided assistance with fundraising efforts to save the property and, eventually, endorsed the move of Orange County to have ownership of the property to save it from development.

New Orleans Botanical Garden New Orleans, LA

In 2006, the Garden Conservancy and the New York Botanical Garden raised funds to assist both Longue Vue House & Gardens and the New Orleans Botanical Garden following the substantial damage of Hurricane Katrina. Proceeds went to procure plants for the garden to replace those lost to storm damage.

New York City Community Garden Coalition New York, NY

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. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy joined many other advocacy groups, including the Trust for Public Land and the Green Guerillas, in petitioning the Giuliani administration to protect more than 100 community gardens which were under threat of being auctioned. The gardens were saved in in the eleventh hour as the result of negotiations and a $3 million fundraising effort led by the Trust for Public Land.

Oakland Museum of California Oakland, CA

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA), a historic mid-century modernist landmark designed by renowned architects Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, contains exceptional collections of art, science, and history. Its distinctive tiered landscape serves as a

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

The Gardens at Palmdale Location

Musician 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 gardens’ 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.

popular gathering space while also integrating seamlessly with the building. In 2020, the Garden Conservancy began a five-year partnership in support of the renovation of the museum’s campus.

Olana State Historic Site Hudson, NY

Olana is a historic house museum and the former residence of Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900), one of the major figures in the Hudson River School of landscape painting. The estate has a wide view of the Hudson River Valley, the Catskill Mountain,s and the Taconic Range. It is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark. From 2008 to 2009, the Garden Conservancy provided support via publicity and participation in a fundraising event to protect the historic views at Olana.

Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden Bishopville, SC

The Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, a three-acre garden, is a story of plants, sculpture, community, hard work, and inspiration. Self-taught and armed with a hedge trimmer, Pearl Fryar worked for more than twenty years to create and maintain remarkable topiaries from plants that were often salvaged from a local nursery. In 2007, the Garden Conservancy helped to create and incorporate the Friends of Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, which later became the nonprofit organization, Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden, Inc. For the next ten years, the Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance to the Friends as they planned for preservation of the garden, promoted it to the public, and raised funds for its preservation and maintenance. The Conservancy also gifted Pearl with a cherry picker and hired a project manager for the garden.

Planting Fields Arboretum Oyster Bay, NY

Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park, which includes the Coe Hall Historic House Museum, is an arboretum and state park covering over 400 acres in the town of Oyster Bay, NY. In 1999, the Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance to the Arboretum and, in 2007, it was an Affiliate Garden of the Conservancy. In 2018, the Conservancy conducted a garden documentation interview with the Arboretum’s executive director.

Powell Gardens Kingsville, MO

In 1984, the Powell family partnered with the University of Missouri’s School of Agriculture to develop this site—originally a farm created in 1948 by a prominent Kansas City businessman—as a horticultural resource for the people of Kansas City and the surrounding region. In 2018, the Garden Conservancy sent a letter opposing the siting of an Omaha Steaks Company “factory farm” just three miles from the garden, which threatened the garden with air pollution in the form of particulates, odors, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia, as well as polluted water run-off.

The Prouty Garden Boston, MA

The Prouty Garden is located at Boston Children’s Hospital. In 2012, the hospital announced plans to remove the garden in order to expand its facilities. Despite opposition by the Garden Conservancy and other organizations, the garden was demolished in 2016 in order to expand the hospital.

Raemelton Farm Mansfield, OH

Raemelton Farm was established in 1918 by civic leader Frank Black, and was landscaped by famed landscape architect Marian Cruger Coffin, who was responsible for several outstanding gardens and landscapes including those at Winterthur in Wilmington, DE. The Garden Conservancy provided technical assistance in the late 1990s, including furnishing information on conservation easements and reviewing plans and garden archives.

Ragdale Lake Forest, IL

Ragdale is a non-profit artists’ community located on historic Arts and Crafts architect Howard Van Doren Shaw’s country estate, 30 miles north of Chicago. In 2007, after Ragdale contacted the Garden Conservancy for assistance, the Conservancy researched the site and submitted a proposal for a treatment plan of the property, as well as facilitated a charrette and produced a final report.

Rocky Hills Mount Kisco, NY

The beautiful thirteen-acre property and strolling garden in the northern suburbs of New York City is the product of an old-world sense of stewardship and the patient artistry of Henriette and William Suhr. 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 eventually transitioning it to become a public garden. A conservation easement was granted to the Conservancy and was subsequently transferred to the Westchester Land Trust. In 2016, Rocky Hills was sold to private owners. It was one of the first gardens to be documented by the Garden Conservancy.

Russell Page Garden at the Frick Collection – New York, NY

The courtyard garden designed by Russell Page at the Frick Collection in New York City made news in 2018 because of the museum’s revised renovation plans. After public criticism (including a press release from the Garden Conservancy in 2014) for disregarding the importance of the garden in earlier designs for remodeling their buildings and grounds, the Frick proposed a new design which promised to preserve the garden with relatively few changes. The Garden Conservancy sent a letter supporting the new design.

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. It is the garden that inspired the founding of the Garden Conservancy and it is our very first preservation project. For more on the Ruth Bancroft Garden, see the case study on page _______.

Shelburne Farms – Shelburne, VT

Shelburne Farms is a nonprofit education center for sustainability, 1,400 acre working farm, and National Historic Landmark on the shores of Lake Champlain. The property is nationally significant as a well-preserved example of a Gilded Age “ornamental farm,” developed in the late nineteenth century with landscaping by Frederick Law Olmsted. In 2003, the Garden Conservancy completed a landscape stewardship master plan and, in 2006, a multi-phased formal garden restoration project was launched. In 2010, the Conservancy designated Shelburne Farms a Preservation Assistance Garden.

We now understand better than ever that gardens are much more than just beautiful places. In an increasingly fragmented world, our gardens are places that celebrate the natural world and where we have an opportunity to help heal the damage done to the planet. Scientific

Sonnenberg Gardens – Canandaigua, NY

Sonnenberg Gardens and Mansion State Historic Park is a 50acre state park located in the Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. Our notes on this point to the fact that it’s a story we might not want to tell. Misappropriation and stealing of funds by Sonnenberg management, etc. It doesn’t seem like we have had contact with the garden since 2002; more wrong-doing was revealed in 2003.

Springside Landscape Restoration Poughkeepsie, NY

Springside is a 20-acre designed landscape and historic site that was once the country estate of Matthew Vassar, the Poughkeepsie brewer, philanthropist, and founder of Vassar College. It is the only landscape of Andrew Jackson Downing, one of the founders of landscape architecture in America, to survive largely intact. The Garden Conservancy began working with Springside in the mid1990s and Springside officially became a Conservancy preservation project in 2000. The Conservancy provided assistance with grant writing and the creation of a master plan, which Springside implemented.

Steepletop Austerlitz, NY

Steepletop, a farmstead in Austerlitz, NY, served as the home and inspiration of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay for the last 25 years of her life. It is a National Historic Landmark. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Garden Conservancy assisted Steepletop with preservation efforts and, in 2003, it was designated a preservation project. The Conservancy assisted with management, landscape, and horticultural preservation planning, as well as the development of a Cultural Landscape Report, which helped guide the restoration of Millay’s kitchen garden.

Stonecrop Gardens Cold Spring, NY

Stonecrop was originally the home of Garden Conservancy founder Frank Cabot and his wife, Anne. The Cabots began creating the gardens in 1958 and, in 1992, Stonecrop became a public garden. Caroline Burgess, the garden’s longtime director, became a member of the Garden Conservancy Steering Committee in 1990. Stonecrop became a supporting organization of the Garden Conservancy in 2000.

Stoneleigh Garden Villanova, PA

Stoneleigh Garden was designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm and is a historically and culturally significant garden in the Philadelphia area. Shortly after opening in 2018, Stoneleigh was threatened by the possible expansion of a local school district. The Garden Conservancy joined with numerous horticultural and conservation organizations and wrote a letter to the school district to oppose their proposed action.

Swan House at Atlanta History Center Atlanta, GA

Located on the grounds of the Atlanta History Center, Swan House was designed by Philip Trammel Shutze in 1928 for Edward and Emily Inman and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2015, a Garden Conservancy Society of Fellows garden-study tour resulted in a grant to assist in the restoration and replanting of Swan House’s iconic Boxwood Garden. The grant also helped uncover evidence of an earlier planning plan for the garden, which led to the discovery of a circle of redbud trees.

Sylvester Manor Educational Farm – Shelter Island, NY

Over time, Sylvester Manor has been transformed from a slaveholding plantation to an Enlightenment-era farm, to a pioneering food industrialist’s estate, and today, to an organic educational farm. In 2020, the Garden Conservancy conceived of and developed a discussion panel for an American Public Gardens Association (APGA) which included Sylvester Manor. The presentation examined how organizations are developing programs to convey a complete picture of their gardens’ historic connection to issues of racial and social injustice. In 2021, Sylvester Manor was the recipient of a Gardens for Good grant.

Ten Chimneys Waukesha, WI

Ten Chimneys was the summer home and gentleman’s farm of Broadway actors Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, and a social center for American theater. In 1998, the Ten Chimneys Founda-

tion purchased the estate and reached out to the Garden Conservancy as they began extensive research and planning for restoration, preservation, and program development.

United States National Arboretum Washington, DC

Established in 1927, the United States National Arboretum is operated by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. In 2011, the Garden Conservancy wrote a letter opposing the disposing of the arboretum’s historic boxwood and azalea collections.

University of Virginia Pavilion Gardens Charlottesville, VA

In anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the garden’s refurbishment, the University of Virginia asked for the Garden Conservancy’s help in organizing a garden summit to consider future contributions of these historic gardens to public horticulture in central Virginia. The project was completed in 2004.

Untermyer Park and Gardens Yonkers, NY

A historic 43-acre city public park just north of New York City, Untermyer is a remnant of Samuel J. Untermyer’s 150-acre estate, “Greystone.” In 2011, the Garden Conservancy began serving in an advisory role on management, preservation, and development of the gardens for the benefit of the public. In 2016, the Conservancy helped the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy with vision, organizational programming, collections management policy, interpretive media, and fundraising.

Val Verde Montecito, CA

Val Verde, also known as the Wright Ludington House, is an estate which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. The Garden Conservancy provided preservation planning assistance to Val Verde from 1996 to 2006. “The garden received attention from the Garden Conservancy Preservation Assistance Center in 2004.” (Several of the entries on the look-book worksheets have this notation, but I’m not sure what it means.)

Van Vleck House & Gardens – Montclair, NJ

Van Vleck House & Gardens is a nonprofit committed to the historic preservation of its early twentieth-century house, an exemplar of classical Mediterranean Revival architecture. Three generations of the Van Vleck family lived on the property and developed the gardens for 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

Villa Terrace is a historic house built in 1924 for the Lloyd R. Smith family - 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 which enabled the Friends group to raise funds and marshal volunteers to restore the garden, which reopened in 2002.

Western Hills Garden Occidental, CA

Western Hills became a Preservation Assistance Garden of the Garden Conservancy in 2007. The Conservancy provided assistance in preservation planning, developing a volunteer program, creating a plant collections inventory, and providing a garden intern. In addition, the Conservancy was instrumental in the formation of a Friends group and assisting with grant proposals for the garden, as well as organizing extensive volunteer work to tend to the garden.

Yew Dell Botanical Garden Crestwood, KY

The creation of self-taught master craftsman and nurseryman

Theodore Klein, this 30-acre property in Crestwood, KY, features open farmland transformed into Arts-and-Crafts-style gardens with unusual 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 helped develop the master plan and the technical strategies needed to preserve Yew Dell Botanical Gardens for the enjoyment and education of the public.

The John Fairey Garden Location

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 Gardens to honor its recently deceased founder), makes political and other boundaries disappear with the sleight-of-hand of horticulture.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper,” wrote poet

W. B. Yeats. Fairey was adept at recognizing those enchantments and using them to conjure a new reality. The Texas garden has the United States’ 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 recognized 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.

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With deep gratitude to the following donors for their transformative support to the Open Days program over the past 25 years:

W. Atlee Burpee & Company

Ruettgers Family Charitable Foundation

Leon Levy Foundation

Sara Lee Corporation

Barbara Whitney Carr

Mr. and Mrs. Charles E. Schroeder

J.M. Kaplan Fund

Fine Gardening magazine

William and Henriette Granville Suhr Fund for the Environment

And to our most committed advertisers:

Longshadow Planters & Garden Ornaments

SavATree

Garden Design magazine

Seibert & Rice

The F.A. Bartlett Tree Expert Co.

Rodney Robinson Landscape Architects

Charleston Gardens

Cultivating Place

Oliver Nurseries

Filoli Historic House and Garden

Colorblends

Rosedale Nurseries

John Scheepers

Southport Marketing Group

Kettelkamp & Kettelkamp Landscape Architecture

White Flower Farm