MAY 2007 » book review

Great Gardens

American Gardens 1890-1930: Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest Regions
edited with an introduction by Sam Watters
Acanthus Press, New York, NY; 2006
296 pp; hardcover; more than 250 duotone photographs and plans; $75
ISBN 0-926494-43-0

Reviewed by Daniela Holt Voith, AIA, LEED, IIDA

In grade school I had a friend who lived in a new split-level. Oddly, her backyard led to the derelict, French-inspired gardens of what we called Stotesbury Mansion. We ran along the graveled paths and played in the great shallow basins of empty fountains. The shadows of the crumbling statuary blended with our own and the disintegrating balustrades marked the boundaries of our terrain. We had a wonderfully vague sense of trespass and grandeur and decay. We imagined the gardens in their prime – the flowers, the parties, the dresses. In thinking back about the degree of disintegration and the rate at which the garden was disappearing, even then I knew that had the masonry been stone, the aging would have been more gentle and sublime than the ragged spalling of the heavy aggregate concrete.

Leafing through the sumptuous tome American Gardens 1890-1930, which has been so intelligently edited by Sam Watters, I felt as if a ghost of my childhood memory and imagination floated off the page. I was faced with a picture of a landscape that I knew, but had actually never seen. Here, in the soft detail of turn-of-the-century platinum prints, was a view of the parterres of Whitemarsh Hall built for Edward T. Stotesbury; it was designed by Jacques Auguste Henri Greber in conjunction with Horace Trumbauer, the architect of the house. The garden ruins in which we had romped were visible in their newly minted form: water in the pools, topiary elegantly spaced, boxwoods elaborately clipped – all there in a dreamlike perfect calm.

Though I drive past the relic of the gatehouse often, I have never had the heart to revisit the site of this childhood fantastical realm. The cul-de-sac encroachment on the estate seems, in my adult years, depressing. But because of this photograph, I went exploring in a more disembodied fashion. I found the roads named "Trumbauer Drive" and "Stotesbury Avenue." From the satellite view, I could see the last vestiges of that great garden, now further eaten up by development. The roofscape of the gatehouse turret was clear, as was a long retaining wall – now the back edge of townhouse yards – the sweeping symmetrical stairs now leading from nowhere to nowhere and a hint of an architectural element that now forms the entrance marker to a shared field where there once was formalized lawn.

This experience throws into relief the importance of books like this one – much of what we want to study is gone. Watters concludes his essay with the following statements:

The Depression closed the Great House and garden era. Taxes, a declining population of servants, and shifts in taste and ways of living made the large country house a luxury of the past. The legacy of this era is the continued examination and elaboration of the relationship of house to garden. The importance of site and the concept of the garden as an outdoor room to be defined volumetrically through plant selection and architecture continue to influence and define the evolution of American landscape design.

Watters has assembled a great resource for architects and landscape designers who often run to books such as this for inspiration or specific detail. Nothing replaces direct experience, but, as is the case with the garden of Stotesbury's house, many have been lost. Others remain, such as Kykuit – built for John D. Rockefeller – which is now a heritage site. Yet others, like Castle Hill, built for R.T. Crane, and Oheka, built for Otto Kahn, are now hotels and wedding venues. Smaller estates, like the one designed for Francis McIlhenny by Mellor Meigs & Howe and the one designed for Charles Borie by Wilson Eyre, are still in private ownership, but nevertheless, expectations and standards have changed, the gardens have matured past recognition or the plantings have changed as maintenance capabilities have decreased. Watters offers a reference and a starting point from which to study the genius of these landscape architects and others such as Beatrix Farrand, Marian Coffin and the Olmsteds in their great residential oeuvre.

Our interest today is, in part, spurred by the activities of The Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America and a growing demand for houses and gardens of large vision and scope based on the traditions so eloquently quoted in the early half of the 20th century. Turning the lens away from the house and its interiors to look at the gardens and the ways in which the houses were sited in the landscape gives us an important view not often seen. Even for smaller properties there are great lessons to be learned from these pages: how to frame a vista, create an intimate outdoor room or artfully include a pergola for shade. Careful study of these pages will yield subtler lessons: how to mitigate or exaggerate grade changes or how to incorporate water in natural context as well as in man-made fountains, pools and cascades.

Watters has brought together the publications of American Gardens, by Guy Lowell, Barre Ferree's American Estates and Gardens, P.H. Elwood's American Landscape Architecture and the annuals of the illustrations of work by members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, as well as other texts, to give us condensed portfolios of the works of the best landscape-design practitioners of the early-20th century. The organization of the book is alphabetical from Albro & Lindberg to Stanford White. On 252 pages are illustrations in archival black-and-white photography, amply and beautifully reproduced. The inclusion of garden plans and aerial views aids us in understanding the complex and ambitious estate layouts. From an historian's standpoint we could wish for specific dates on the projects. The architect in me cries out for scales and consistently shown north arrows on the drawings, but these are minor complaints in the face of admirable taste and erudition used in the selection of the projects and ordering of the views and the overall beauty of the publication.

The 15-page introduction is enlightening. Watters lays out the important issues that challenged the landscape architects of this age. He gives us a background of the start of this endeavor as a profession and, thankfully, provides a description of the role of women who early on had a significant impact on the shaping of the American landscape. The portfolios are augmented by an appendix of biographies of each of the landscape designers. Watters makes no distinction between those designers who were also the architects of the houses that the gardens augmented, such as Delano and Aldrich; McKim, Mead and Welles Bosworth; Charles Adams Platt; and those who worked solely as landscape architects, such as Arthur Shurtleff, Harold Hill Bloom and James L. Greenleaf. Finally, the selected bibliography is a helpful general guide to the sources of the scholarship underpinning the book as well as a road map for further reading.

Acanthus Press' mission is to represent, in an accessible and beautiful format, the original documentation of elaborate lifestyles, which gives us a fresh way to understand American design heritage. As the leading publisher on topics of residential architecture and design, Acanthus specializes in profiling America's most prominent houses created for the country's social, political and industrial leaders. With American Gardens 1890-1930 as a prime example, it is clear why the Arthur Ross Awards will be announcing this month that Acanthus Press has been selected a winner for excellence in publication this month. We greatly look forward to the forthcoming books in this series as this one is such a success.

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