Emmet Alan ALAN EMMET has written on landscapes and gardens for numerous periodicals. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Gar- den Conservancy, and a trustee of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, for whom she served as a garden history consul- tant. She recently coauthored a historic land- scape report for the National Trust for Historic Preservation on Chesterwood Daniel Chester Ac French's summer home and studio. Shank The draped summerhouse beside parterre garden Photo by Peter Mar Reproduced by permission. University Press of New England publishes books under its own imprint and is the publisher for Brandeis University Press, Dartmouth College, Middlebury College Press, University of New Hampshire, University of Rhode Island, Tufts University, University of Vermont, Wesleyan University Press, and Salzburg Seminar. University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755 © 1996 by University Press of New England All rights reserved Printed in Singapore 5 432 I Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emmet, Alan. So fine a prospect: historic New England gardens / Alan Emmet. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN o-87451-749-4 (alk. paper) I. Historic gardens-New England. 2. Gardens-New England- History. I. Title. SB466.U65N4825 1996 712'6'0'9944-dc20 95-36320 Title page spread: Grandmother's Garden, Lydia Field Emmet, oil on canvas, ca. 1912. (National Academy of Design, New York, New York) HE RASPBERRIES were dusted with T frost this morning, SO silvered with it that I could hardly tell which ones were ripe, but the sweet, perfect, dark red berries dropped into my hand as easily as ever. The sun shone through the canes, and the leaves and berries were translucent. The rough, whitened grass beneath the sugar maple was dappled with sparkling yellow leaves. As I picked, I thought of those other gardeners, the ones whose private letters Introduction and diaries I have been nosing SO earnestly through. We must have something in common, they and I. Surely, all of them must have had those moments of pure delight So Fine a Prospect in their gardens, when some homely detail or grand ef- fect makes it all worthwhile. Every year, every season, every day, and even every hour gardens change. Subject to natural rhythms of growth and decay, responding to care or neglect, gar- dens of every sort are continually evolving. Depending on the quality of light or the angle of the sun, the same place looks altogether different at different times and in different seasons. If constant change is the very essence of a garden, then there is no finished product and no point at which the need for upkeep ceases. There is no moment of which we can say, "This is it" or-looking back- "That was it." Certainly there are periods in the life of any garden when maintenance reaches its apo- gee, when the initial plantings approach maturity, and when painters or photographers are most likely to at- tempt to capture a moment of perfection. But the inevi- tably transient quality of a garden-the very fact of its evanescence--is reason enough to investigate its origins. For me the most intriguing questions about a garden are who built it and why. Before the first spade cleaves the earth, before the first stakes mark the course of a new path, before the first tree is cut or the first tree planted, the garden maker has decided to alter the landscape. The chief rea- son for the change is to make a place more beautiful, more productive, or in the usage of the eighteenth cen- tury, to "improve" it. Inspired by pictures in the mind, the gardener seeks to make a fantasy become real. Garden makers have always had visions all their own. One may have followed a modest dream of beauty, while another imagined a grand reordering of the land- scape. A third may have aimed at rivaling the accom- plishments of others. Some gardeners have deliberately adapted the dictates of contemporary fashion to their own terrain. Others have been influenced by current styles but less consciously, as if by osmosis. And then xi Thomas Hancock's stone house, built in 1737, and terraced front garden on Beacon Hill, Boston, in a photograph taken nurseries, Hancock and other American gardeners or- by G.H. Drew. ca. 1860. The dome of the Massachusetts dered all their plants from Europe. Hancock wrote to a State House is visible at the right. The once magnificent gar- London nurseryman to purchase dwarf trees, espaliers, den was near its end; the house was demolished in 1863. (So- and other plants. He boasted of his view in a letter to ciety for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) this nurseryman: "My Gardens all Lye on the South Side of a hill with the most beautiful Assent to the top & its allowed on all hands the Kingdom of England don't pagoda. had a spire topped with a gilt grasshopper as il afford SO Fine a Prospect as I have both of land & water. weathervane. Neither do I intend to Spare any Cost or pains on mak- On another slope of Boston's Beacon Hill, overlook- ing my Gardens Beautiful or Profitable." ing the Common. Thomas Hancock built himself a fine In nearby Medford in the 1730s, Colonel Isaac Roy- stone house in 1736. He commissioned a local gardener all, with a fortune from trade with Antigua, built the [1) "undertake to lavout the upper garden allys. Trim the handsome house that still stands. The central walk was Beds S till up all the allies with such Stuff as Sd. Han- on an axis with the doors of the mansion. The walk ex- cock shall Order and Gravel the Walks & prepare and tended five hundred feet behind the house, between Sodd ve Terras.`` Before the establishment of local tagonal garden beds summerhouse to a terraced and mount a carved crowned wooden with figure an OC- of vic INTRODUCTION Mercury. 10 A few miles away, in Lincoln, the Codman desire for "Prospect" meant that elevated sites were house, a close contemporary of Colonel Royall's, still preferred and that terracing was almost universal. The overlooks a "Front Yard" noted in a 1778 inventory and one landscape feature that more modest houses would stepped terraces that may be as old as the house itself. 11 have had in common with the great mansions was an Estates of the Cambridge Loyalists were noted for enclosed and planted forecourt, scaled down to become their gardens. which contained similar features. Henry a simple dooryard garden with a path from the gate to Vassall's garden, laid out in the 1740s, had the typical the house. enclosed front yard, or forecourt, and central axial path. This cursory look at a few pre-Revolutionary gar- His path was paved with beach stones. Beds edged with dens neglects their horticulture-the flowers, fruits, boxwood were planted with fruit trees imported from and trees in which the owners took such pleasure and France and England. 12 The forecourt of Richard Lech- pride. Plants were the life of these gardens, but it is mere's 1761 mansion was enclosed by a fence with their design features that characterize them as belong- carved pineapple finials and was planted with rows of ing to a particular period. These gardens near Boston linden trees that stood until the hurricane of 1938. A were representative of their era; similar gardens were broad path led to a raised terrace and the entrance por- being made in and around other cities at the time. tico. The center hall of this house opened onto the gar- Eighteenth-century estate owners imported not only den at the rear, where the path continued down some plants and trees but also the books they depended on steps, straight through the garden, to terminate at an for guidance in the management of both the useful and arbor.13 At John Vassall Jr.'s house (now the Vassall- the ornamental aspects of their grounds. There were no Craigie-Longfellow House, administered by the Na- helpful American books at the time. Henry Vassall, for tional Park Service), built in I759, the landscape was example, owned and presumably consulted John Mor- arranged in the same typical fashion. The house was timer's The Whole Art of Husbandry (London, 1716) and built on a terraced platform to provide a broad view of Richard Bradley's A General Treatise of Husbandry and the Charles River marshes. A brick-walled forecourt Gardening (1725). The builder of the original Codman was planted with rows of American elms. 14 These grand house, Chambers Russell, turned to William Ellis's The mid-eighteenth-century estates in and around Boston Modern Husbandman (1742) and Edward Lisle's I757 were alike in their geometrical organization around a treatise on the same subject. 15 central axis, of which the house itself was the focus. The In their gardens, Americans of the colonial period Terraced gardens at the 1760 East Apthorp house, off Linden Street near Har- vard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts; photograph ca. 188o. (Society for the Preservation of New Eng- land Antiquities) So Fine a Prospect XV whered to the styles of the lands of their origin. When, 5. Christopher Tunnard, A World with a View: An Inquiry 11685, Sir William Temple described an English gar- into the Nature of Scenic Values (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni- den. Moor Park in Herefordshire, as "the perfectest fig- versity Press, 1978), 67. 111c of il garden I ever saw," he could have been writing 6. F. R. Cowell, The Garden as a Fine Art: From Antiquity to about an eighteenth-century American garden. 16 Moor Modern Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 8. Park may have been more ornate than most New Eng- 7. Abram English Brown, Faneuil Hall and Fanueil Hall lind gardens, but its major design features were the Market (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1900), 28. silline it close relationship between the architecture of 8. Alice G. B. Lockwood, ed., Gardens of Colony and State the house and the plan of the garden, the bilateral sym- (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), I:32. Hancock metry of the garden along the spine of a central path, uses the word "allys," or "allies," to mean beds of planting. the use of terracing, and the inclusion of arbors and 9. Ibid. summerhouses. As we will see, New Englanders contin- IO. Ibid., I:39. used to make and maintain this type of garden long after II. Middlesex County Probate Records (East Cambridge, 1/10 establishment of the new nation. Mass.), docket no. 19593. I2. Rupert Ballou Lillie, "The Gardens and Homes of the Loyalists," Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings for the Vores Year 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1940), 26:54. I3. Ibid., 57. I4. Ibid., 52-53. I5. Vassall's inventory is described in Lillie, "Gardens and 1. Greg McPherson, "Shedding the Illusion of Abun- Homes," 53. Russell's books are listed in a 1767 inventory of dance," landscape Architecture 79 (April 1989): 128. his estate, Middlesex County Probate Records, docket no. is 1.00 Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the 19591. Harmoned Idea in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 16. Sir William Temple, quoted in Ann Leighton, Ameri- luny). 84-85. can Gardens in the Eighteenth Century (Boston: Houghton Mif- is lbid., 104-5. flin, 1976), 328. * Ann Leighton, Early American Gardens (Boston: Hough- fill Mittlin, 1970), 6. INTRODUCTION there are the innovators, whose gardens have been in- not strictly a revival of anything-represents more than spired by fresh insights and new possibilities. These gar- anything else nostalgia for an imagined past, as often as deners may have followed literary sources, history dimly not a New England past. guessed at, or wisps of memory and dreams. Those who introduced novelty in design may have ended up as set- ters of the next trend or else were relegated to posterity as solitary eccentrics in their unique and private garden Leo Marx has pointed out two different meanings of cul-de-sacs. the word "garden," meanings that are in essence con- Curiosity led me to investigate the conditions under tradictory. Both interpretations have played significant which some of New England's most important gardens roles in American history. Marx quotes as one example were created during the first century and a half of this Robert Beverley's comment in his 1705 essay, History nation's independent life. People express through their and Present State of Virginia, that the reason there were gardens the degree of their self-confidence as well as SO few gardens in Virginia was that the entire region their attitudes toward the land. Some have sought to was a garden. In this sense. the term "garden" stands dominate the place they called their own, whereas oth- for the "Edenic land of primitive splendor," where Na- ers have tried to enhance the inherent qualities of the ture provides both bounty and beauty. This was the landscape. The names that people have given to their ideal that had drawn voyagers and settlers to America places often reveal their intentions as well as the sources and that, despite deprivation, climatic extremes, and of their inspiration: Roseland, Bellmont, The Vale. dread of the wilderness, continued for decades to in- The gardeners of New England have always had spire expeditions and expansion further westward. The much in common with each other. They share tradi- other meaning of the word "garden," according to tions, patterns of settlement, and a rigorous climate. Marx, is a piece of cultivated ground, from which those Over the years many have been linked by their earnest who work on it can produce beauty and abundance. efforts to expand knowlege and better the human con- While sounding more prosaic than the proverbial "land dition through scientific experimentation in agriculture of milk and honey," this definition describes the "mid- or horticulture. Many, too, have shared a moral bent, a dle landscape," neither wild nor densely urban, that belief in the ennobling influence of beautiful surround- represents the pastoral ideal SO prevalent in American ings. In the first period of national life after the Revolu- thought. tion, New Englanders did not abandon the ways of the This book is concerned with gardens made for pri- Old World but were quick to adapt to the opportunities vate use, beauty, and pleasure. These gardens are not offered by the New. As a result, they contributed far necessarily enclosed, but they are separated or set off in more to the national culture than might be expected, some way from the surrounding landscape. Their ap- considering their numbers and the limited size of the peal owes as much to what they exclude as to what they area. Although the region's influence gradually de- contain. The best gardens convey this sense of their creased as the country grew, idealized images of New separateness, a feeling of seclusion and sanctuary from England are important national models to this day. In- the workaday world. Ann Leighton put it almost bibli- deed, the developer of a recent subdivision in the dry cally: "A garden, to be a garden, must represent a differ- prairie of central Texas named it "Nantucket," bringing ent world, however small, from the real world, a source in old dock pilings and maritime flotsam to create a of comfort in turmoil, of excitement in dullness, secu- "theme" landscape of the New England coast. A village rity in wildness, companionship in loneliness."4 on a hill, white houses facing on a green, tall elms arch- Every garden is unique, depending on the purpose ing overhead, and a white church spire pointing heav- for which it was designed, the lay of the land, and any enward: for many Americans this picture represents sta- number of other factors. Size is one variable that signif- bility, tradition, national roots, and a retreat from urban icantly affects the character of a garden. The smallest stress. Revival styles based on New England examples might be a flowery, fenced enclosure adjacent to a house. have been popular for domestic architecture and gar- At the other end of the scale would be a rural estate ex- den design for nearly a century, within and beyond the tending over hundreds or even thousands of acres. Tra- region. The popularity of herb gardens for instance- ditionally, large landed estates were intended to be agri- xii INTRODUCTION culturally productive; with imagination and skill, the the other hand, gardens that continue in private owner- whole rural scene could become a garden, a harmo- ship are just that: private. nious unity where use and beauty flourished. Christopher Tunnard once referred to a garden as "a luxury of the imagination."5 F. R. Cowell observed that only in periods of high civilization has gardening been Before the Revolutionary War, during the first century elevated above a necessary and useful craft to become a and a half of New England's European colonization. fine art. Both writers pointed out that with the oppor- gardens were seldom characterized as works of art. To tunity for self-expression in the landscape there was the first settlers, luxury and leisure were inconceivable: room for eccentricity. Luxury, eccentricity, and suffi- survival was at stake. Utility was the chief consideration cient leisure: it should come as no surprise that most of during the seventeenth century, when families had to the creators of the gardens described in these chapters produce their own food, clothing materials, and reme- had either inherited money or achieved worldly success dies against illness. People put their gardens near their on their own. houses and fenced them against the depredations of The selection of the gardens to be discussed had a wild and domestic animals. Beds of vegetables and use- certain inevitability. The gardens I chose are not neces- ful herbs were arranged for convenience, divided by sarily superior to others of their periods, even were it straight and narrow paths, after the late medieval Euro- possible to make such value judgments. There are many pean fashion familiar to the settlers. The sole conces- other gardens worthy of study, some of which I wished I sion to fancy might be a sweet rose, grown from a pre- might include as well as others unknown to me. More cious slip carried on the long sea voyage. gardens remain to be uncovered or discovered. The As life in the colonies became more settled and se- treasure hunt has no end. cure, people inclined toward expanding and adorning The gardens included here provide a chronological their homes. Before the end of the seventeenth century sequence from the early years of the republic to the pe- those who were comfortably settled and reasonably well riod prior to World War I. I chose gardens that either off felt free to make gardens purely for their own en- typify a particular period or exemplify an innovation. A joyment. Few detailed descriptions survive of pre- third criterion was the existence of a written record. Revolutionary gardens. Maps, deeds, and probate rec- Whether or not a particular garden still survives in any ords are the most likely sources of evidence. In many form, it was the diaries, the correspondence, and the vi- cases, trees, walls, terraces, pathways, and the layout of sual records that made it possible to study each garden's beds survived well into the nineteenth century. Archae- history and to inquire into the motivation of its creator. ology is a potential source for more information. Mem- All of the garden owners in these chapters had their ories kept the early gardens alive, too, although remi- own reasons for doing what they did, beyond the in- niscences were often colored by sentiment for one's lost evitable influence of the social and cultural milieu in youth. which they lived. The history of the relationship be- The gardens of the rich and prominent left a greater tween garden owners and the professional designers mark than did those of ordinary people. In Boston in some of them hired interested me for what it revealed 1700, Andrew Faneuil, a successful businessman, built a about both. In this relationship the owner became a mansion house on the side of Beacon Hill, above client, dependent on the expertise of the professional. Tremont Street. Here he and, after him, his nephew At the same time, the owner was also a patron, with the and heir, Peter Faneuil, developed a seven-acre garden opportunity to provide support and scope to the de- famous for choice fruits, hothouses, and flowers im- signer, as well as the ultimate power to terminate their ported from France. Terraces marked the descent from association. the house to the street and also rose behind the house, The gardens in these chapters are scattered across supported by walls and steps of hewn granite. Railings New England. Surviving records allowed me to dis- along the edges of the terraces were surmounted by gilt cover four gardens that are entirely lost. Although this balls. At the top of the garden was a summerhouse with is in no sense a guidebook, most of the extant gardens a splendid view of Boston Harbor. This fanciful struc- that I have written of can be visited by the public. On ture, said to have been patterned after an oriental So Fine a Prospect xiii E DITH WHARTON, at thirty-eight, was tired of Newport, the spot where she had spent every summer ofher life. The year was 1900. You would think she might have been satisfied. After all, she had gotten her way in everything. Edith Jones had married Teddy Wharton, an ami- able bon vivant thirteen years her senior, in 1885, when she was twenty-three. Together, they followed the pat- tern of Edith's life as a child: New York City winters, Chapter I5 Newport summers, and frequent trips to Europe. After fifteen years they had no children but plenty of money, especially after Edith's fortunes were unexpectedly en- The Great Good Place hanced by the legacy of a remote Jones cousin. They lived in the style to which they were both accustomed. The Whartons had bought a Newport cottage called Edith Wharton at The Mount, Land's End in 1893, a house well away from her mother's. Edith promptly embarked on a radical re- modeling of Land's End with help from Ogden Cod- Lenox, Massachusetts man, then in his early twenties and just embarking on his ambitious career as a society architect. She and Codman discovered their shared admiration for a re- strained classicism in architecture and interior design. They collaborated on a book that promulgated the clas- sical style. The Decoration of Houses was barbed with blasts at the frowzy, overstuffed rooms and houses in which they and most people they knew had grown up and still lived. First published in 1897, the book was an immediate success. Two years later, Edith Wharton's second book came out, The Greater Inclination, a collec- tion of her previously published stories. Even though she had now achieved recognition and success as a writer, Edith Wharton wanted to change her life, starting with Newport. The setting of Land's End is bleak, as its name implies, and might on gray days depress one who was not entirely enamored of the sound of surf forever crashing against cliffs. Edith pined to get away from the gloom and dampness, but she was also determined to flee from the social constraints, the "watering place trivialities" of Newport. 1 She yearned for the deeper, richer life in the arts that her literary ac- complishments seemed to offer. She longed to be with creative people who shared her interests. She knew well by then that her dull, benevolent husband did not. During the summer of 1899, while Teddy and his mother were in Europe, Edith stayed in her mother-in- law's summer cottage in Lenox, in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. The following year the Whartons rented a house there and began looking for a property to buy. Edith Wharton confided her enthusiasm to Ogden 206 August and September marked the height of the Berkshire social "season." House-party guests filled the giant cottages; others flocked to Curtis's Hotel in Lenox or the Red Lion at Stockbridge. Hillsides were claimed as the most desirable house sites, providing the views that had originally attracted summer residents to the region. In the 1880s, Joseph H. Choate, a New York lawyer, began building the house and now famous gar- den at Naumkeag on a hill in Stockbridge. During the 1890s the industrialist Stokeses, Sloanes, Schermer- horns, and Westinghouses built mansions of unprece- dented size over former hill farm pastures. The earliest of these "cottages," in shingle style, were soon out- classed by oversize Colonial Revival mansions that were in turn superseded by palaces of brick and marble. Shadowbrook (1893) had one hundred rooms; the builder of Blantyre (1901) had his wife's ancestral Scot- tish castle copied, antlers and all. The winner in terms of ostentation may have been Bellefontaine (1899), modeled on the Petit Trianon by architects Carrère & Hastings, who also laid out the grounds. To Edith Wharton, Bellefontaine's elaborately decorated archi- tectural gardens were cold, impersonal, and the epit- ome of vulgar ostentation. She told Ogden Codman that he really ought to see the place an awful warning!" Edith Wharton early in her writing career. (The Beinecke This was the Lenox that Edith Wharton had chosen Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) for what she hoped would be a home for her spirit and for a life of the mind. She was to thwart the conventions of her upbringing many times in her life, but her choice Codman: "I am in love with the place-climate, scenery, of Lenox was entirely conservative. She was, after all, life & all-& when I have built a villa & have planted merely moving from the summer resort her mother had my gardens & laid out paths through my bosco, I doubt chosen to that of her mother-in-law. Her attitude to- if I ever leave here." In the summer of 1901 the Whar- ward "society" was always ambivalent. She scorned the tons purchased the Sargent farm in Lenox, II3 acres busy social "inanities" of both Newport and Lenox, sloping down to Laurel Lake. Their reasons differed, which did not endear her to her new neighbors. She but both Edith and Teddy embarked eagerly on the could not stand the pretentious flaunting of wealth. Ac- project of making a country place for themselves in the cording to Ogden Codman, Mrs. Wharton was rude to Berkshires. Mrs. Sloane, the queen of Lenox society. 6 On the other For her escape to "real country," it is ironic that Edith hand, Edith did not intend to be an outcast; in fact, her Wharton chose Lenox, a community already known efforts to belong and contribute to the Lenox summer popularly as "the inland Newport." Although in an community cut into her writing time and eventually ex- earlier, simpler time, Lenox, like Stockbridge, had been hausted her.7 She was very sociable--as long as she a mecca for intellectual vacationers such as Nathaniel could choose her companions. The Whartons' new Hawthorne and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, by house was planned from the outset as the setting for the 1890s both towns were enormously fashionable re- continual hospitality. sorts. The glamour once attached in the public eye to The deed to the Lenox property was in Edith Whar- writers and artists had faded when faced with the glitter ton's name. It was she who selected the site for the of the purely rich. house, a knoll with a view southeast to Laurel Lake and Edith Wharton at The Mount 207 the hills of Tyringham. The Whartons asked Ogden remainder of his life. Two years after the fight with Codman to design their house, Edith knowing that Codman, he suffered his first "sort of nervous collapse" Codman shared her penchant for rooms, facades, and in the summer of 1903. landscapes of cool restraint. She and he adhered with Edith Wharton was undoubtedly a difficult and de- religious zeal to the articles of faith that lay behind such manding client in her own way. Even though she shared designs. They chose as their model a seventeenth- Codman's taste and wanted to keep him as a friend, she century English manor house attributed to Christopher told him she too thought it best that they not collabo- Wren. rate on the house after all. ¹ Codman, however, contin- The Whartons liked his plans, Codman told his ued to feel vindictive toward them both; he delighted in mother in February 1901, "but I don't know what they recounting their problems over the house and enumer- mean to spend."9 That was the first hint of what soon ating the defects he was sure he would have avoided. grew into a full-blown quarrel over money. Codman The Whartons turned to another architect, Francis vented his anger at the Whartons in letters to his Hoppin, whom they had known in Newport, to design mother, letters that reveal him as childish and arrogant. the house they christened The Mount. According to He complained peevishly that "[t]he Whartons' house Codman--a biased reporter, to be sure-Hoppin's life instead of being my first is my sixth & the smallest of was made miserable by fussy Mrs. Wharton, who the four now building."10 Codman, at last successful telegraphed him almost daily and made him revise the and busy, felt that the Whartons still treated him as plans continually. By the spring of 1902, Codman's feud their pet protégée and resented his new prosperity. When Teddy Wharton tried to beat down his commis- sion, Codman waved the American Institute of Archi- tects rule book at him; when Wharton shouted and Postcard view from the flower garden to the Wharton house, slammed a door, Codman walked away from the job, Lenox, Massachusetts. An awning shaded the long terrace. expressing relief and telling his intimates that Wharton Edith Wharton penned the verse for Charles Eliot Norton in was an idiot. Teddy Wharton was probably showing 1906. (bMS AM1193[336]; by permission of the Houghton signs of the instability and paranoia that blighted the Library, Harvard University) J. Lenve Cup. 7th, 208 THE GREAT GOOD PLACE with the Whartons was superficially over, and he was the lake. Edith Wharton developed her gardens within invited back to decorate the interior of their house. He this regional context. told his mother gleefully that the Whartons rued the day they had quarreled with him and were hoping now that he could redeem Hoppin's failure. Edith Whar- ton was pleased with Codman's designs for her rooms. At the time she was involved in the building of The Both Whartons were "very humble," gloated Codman; Mount, Edith Wharton was immersed in Italian his- "[h]owever I will try to be kinder now. "13 The patched- tory and culture. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision up friendship nevertheless became permanently un- (1902), was set in Renaissance Italy. Impressed by this glued three years later, when Teddy, refusing once again book, her Berkshire neighbor Richard Watson Gilder, to pay Codman's bills, called in a lawyer. 14 By that time, editor of Century magazine, commissioned Edith Whar- however, Codman had married a rich wife and no ton to write a series of articles on Italian villa gardens. longer really cared. Edith and her eccentric English friend, Vernon Lee, The Whartons' house was named The Mount, "not with Teddy in tow, traveled from villa to villa in 1903. because it was one," as Edith Wharton's friend Daniel With the addition of painted illustrations by Maxfield Berkeley Updike put it, "but because some old family Parrish, the articles were published as a book, Italian place had been SO named." The house was entered in Villas and Their Gardens. The book was a popular suc- the European style from a walled, statue-lined fore- cess, more ambitious than Charles Adams Platt's pio- court, which Codman considered "an utter failure," SO neering book on the same subject, published a decade small that "it looks like a clothes yard and is all out of earlier. Edith Wharton wrote her book with the hope of proportion." "16 This enclosed introductory space an- encouraging in her American readers a return to form nounced that privacy was valued here. Indeed, one pro- and structure in the planning of their gardens. Her gressed only gradually and in stages to the main rooms opening sentence was guaranteed to shock: "The Ital- of the house. "Privacy would seem to be one of the first ian garden does not exist for its flowers; its flowers exist requisites of civilized life," the authors of The Decoration for What really counted, the chief lesson to be of Houses had declared. ¹ learned from the great Italian country houses, was the Each of the principal rooms at The Mount opened intimate relation between the house and its garden. onto a broad brick-floored terrace that ran the length of Mindful of some new American estate gardens, she the house on the rear, or garden, side. Shaded by a fes- cautioned, "a marble sarcophagus and a dozen twisted tive striped awning, the terrace overlooked the garden. columns will not make an Italian garden." Instead of Beyond the garden, D. B. Updike recounted, "a lawn struggling to make a literal copy, one should strive for sloped to a meadow stretching to the border of a little "a garden as well adapted to its surroundings as were wooded lake. One day when a party for lunch had gath- the models which inspired it." ered on the terrace, Mr. Choate [of Naumkeag] arrived, Edith Wharton had plunged right into a contro- accompanied by the Austrian Ambassador. 'Ah, Mrs. versy that had torn the garden world in two when she Wharton,' he said as he stepped from the house, 'When plunked herself down on the side of formality and I look about me I don't know if I am in England or in structure. She could not abide the "laboured natural- Italy."18 Mrs. Wharton may not have been entirely ism" of the English landscape style and its later off- pleased by this remark, presumably intended as a com- spring. She had no use, either, for the flashy formless pliment. The ambassador had missed the point, for The gardens favored by some of the very rich. Mr. Mindon, Mount was intended to be distinctly American, Mrs. the harried protagonist of her 1900 story, "The Line of Wharton's attempt to synthesize and adapt the histori- Least Resistance," looks out at the grounds of his cal principles of harmony and proportion to the New Newport villa: "The lawn looked as expensive as a vel- England scene. Rugged outcrops of limestone, native vet carpet woven in one piece; the flower borders con- white pines, and a giant American elm were featured in tained only exotics. A marble nymph smiled at him her landscape. The house was painted white, with green from the terrace; but he knew how much nymphs shutters, that quintessentially American combination. cost."20 Wharton's own garden at The Mount, indeed The Whartons' barns and livestock enhanced the typi- her entire place, could be characterized by the phrase cal rural New England character of their view toward she used to describe a Roman villa she admired: "the Edith Wharton at The Mount 209 day-dream of an artist who has saturated his mind with ing to work in the kitchen garden. In the afternoons she the past. took long rides on her horse, returning "stupid with Having sited the house on a hillside, Mrs. Wharton fresh air." She wrote her friend Sara Norton that "Lenox was forced to deal with the slope. "We are going to ruin has had its usual tonic effect on me, & I feel like a new ourselves in terraces," she told Ogden Codman, "but edition. It is great fun out at the place now too- the effect will be jolly."22 Before construction of the Everything is pushing up new shoots-not only cab- house could begin, however, there must be an entrance bages & strawberries, but electric lights & plumbing."23 drive. For assistance with this project she called upon Ogden Codman came to visit. In a typically snide her niece, Beatrix Jones (later Farrand). "Trix," ten years comment he told his mother, "The place looks forlorn younger than Edith, was already well trained and estab- beyond my powers of description and it will take years lished as a "landscape gardener," to use her term for her and a small fortune in Landscape gardening to make it professional role. From the white-picket entrance gate look even decent."2 But to Edith Wharton, when they and the lodge, the drive runs for half a mile through a moved into The Mount in September 1902, "[t]he views double avenue of sugar maples, past the stable, then are exquisite, & it is all SO still & sylvan-I have never dipping and turning through a dense wood and emerg- seen the Michaelmas daisies as beautiful as this year- ing into a clearing, from which the house comes sud- the lanes are purple. "25 denly into view. After months in Italy, the Whartons returned to The The next project, also designed by Beatrix Jones, was Mount in June 1903 with happy anticipation. Edith a kitchen garden, surviving now only in plans and a Wharton was devastated by what she found: photograph or two. No mere vegetable plot, this was an elegant parterre 250 feet long, divided by paths into eight squares and enclosed by a clipped hedge with top- iary archways. At one end was a grape arbor; along the Beatrix Jones (later Farrand), perspective drawing of the other end ran a double row of pear trees. In the summer kitchen garden at The Mount, 1901. (College of Environ- of 1902, when the house was nearing completion but mental Design Documents Collection, University of Califor- before they moved in, Edith came nearly every morn- nia, Berkeley) 18 210 THE GREAT GOOD PLACE Dolphin fountain in the flower garden, surrounded with white petunias. (Bei- necke Library) Edith Wharton's friend Walter Berry posing as a statue with one of her dogs in the trellis niche designed by Ogden Codman, ca. 1904. The niche had been moved to The Mount from Mrs. Wharton's Newport garden. (Bei- necke Library) Edith Wharton at The Mount 2II out of doors the scene is depressing. There has been shade from pale rose to dark red, it looks, for a fleeting an appalling drought of nine weeks or more, & never moment, like a garden in some civilized climate. has this fresh showery country looked SO unlike itself. The dust is indescribable, the grass parched & brown, The Whartons never reached The Mount before flowers & vegetables stunted, & still no promise of June, and the weeks in midsummer when the phlox was rain. You may fancy how our poor place looks, still in in bloom may have been the most brilliant season in the the rough, with all its bald patches emphasized. In addi- garden. tion. our good gardener has failed us, we know not why, A highlight of the Lenox social season was the Mid- whether from drink or some other demoralization, but summer Flower Show. Edith Wharton worked with the after spending a great deal of money on the place all committee on arrangements and fretted over her own winter there are no results, & we have been obliged to entries, tying and labeling little clusters of flowers, get a new man. This has been a great blow; as we can't many of them raised in her small greenhouse. She was afford to do much more this year-I try to console my- competitive, anxious to do well in this field as in every self by writing about Italian gardens instead of looking other aspect of her life. In 1906 she was delighted when, at my own. 26 as usual, she won a bundle of first prizes for her phlox, snapdragons, lilies, poppies, and gladioli. In her diary, The new head gardener, Reynolds, was a great suc- Edith noted the number of first prizes she had collected cess; he and Mrs. Wharton got on well. Despite the at the flower show and on the next page the number of drought, she and Reynolds and his crew planted the weeks that her new novel, The House of Mirth, had leighty-by-one-hundred-foot flower garden below the been the best-selling book in New York. 28 One might house. In the center of the garden was a pool with a assume that both accomplishments were equally grati- spouting dolphin fountain. At the far end was an arched fying to her. trelliswork niche that Codman had designed for the Daniel Berkeley Updike, a frequent and charmed re- Whartons' garden in Newport. The garden was filled cipient of the hospitality of The Mount, had mixed feel- with rosy-colored flowers. The terrace and the room ings about his hostess's avid gardening: above, where Edith Wharton wrote each morning, over- looked the glowing flower garden far below. Edith was very learned about gardens, and she and a The friend who best understood and shared Edith neighbor, Miss Charlotte Barnes, used to hold inter- Wharton's passion for plants and gardening was Sara minable, and to me rather boring, conversations about Norton. Miss Norton was a daughter of Charles Eliot the relative merits of various English seedsmen and the Norton, an eminent professor of art history at Harvard precise shades of blue or red or yellow flowers that they and a translator of Dante's Divine Comedy. In summer could guarantee their customers. Edith was con- the Nortons lived simply on an old farm in Ashfield, a scious of my half-hearted interest in horticulture, and small town in the Berkshires that was removed from on one particularly dull autumn afternoon when she Lenox by miles but even more by its utter lack of pre- was directing some planting, I asked her if there was tense. Edith described her flower garden to Sara Nor- not something I could do-hoping that there wasn't! ton in 1905, urging her to come to see it: With a malicious glint in her eye she replied, "Yes, you can pick off the withered petunias that border the foun- [My garden] is really what I thought it never could be- tain." If you have ever tried that particular task you will a "mass of bloom." Ten varieties of phlox, some very realize the punishment inflicted. gorgeous, are flowering together [by August, thirty- two varieties were in bloom], & then the snapdragons, From the terrace at The Mount a grand double stair- lilac & crimson stocks, penstemons, annual pinks in case led down into the garden. The flower garden on every shade of rose, salmon, cherry & crimson-the the left was balanced visually by a sunken garden on the Hunnemania [a yellow Mexican poppy], the lovely right. The two gardens were linked by a straight gravel white physostegia, the white petunias, which now form walk, bordered by lindens. On a slope around the cor- a perfect hedge about the tank-The intense blue Del- ner of the house was Edith's rock garden, where she phinium Chinense, the purple & white platycodons, grew sun-loving alpines between natural outcrops of & c.-really with the background of hollyhocks of every limestone. 212 THE GREAT GOOD PLACE The flower garden at The Mount, as seen from the terrace at the house, 1905. (Beinecke Library) Still shuttling architects, Edith Wharton had Francis terrace that overlooked "a landscape tutored to the last Hoppin return to The Mount in 1905 to design steps degree of rural elegance. In the foreground glowed the and walls for the sunken garden. She wrote Sara Nor- warm tints of the gardens. Beyond the lawn, with its ton, "Did I tell you that we are building a high wall pyramidal pale-gold maples and velvety firs, sloped around the sunk garden? It will be charming when it is pastures dotted with cattle; and through a long glade quite 'tapisse' with creepers. "30 The shadowy walled the river widened like a lake under the silver light of garden echoed with the cooling plash of water falling September."31 from a single jet. Edith knew from her experience of Edith Wharton's description fit the scene spread out Italian gardens how welcome were shade and the sight before her as she wrote. It was the view from the house and sound of water in the heat of the day. And how re- that held meaning for her; house and landscape were freshing was a view: tall arched openings in the wall re- parts of one felicitous whole. She conveys this sense of vealed the countryside beyond. the harmony she had evoked in a passage from Sanctu- In The House of Mirth (1005). the novel that was illy's a novella she wrote in 1903: "The large coolness of Edith Wharton's first large success, her doomed hero- the room, its outlook over field and woodland to- ine, Lily Bart, wanders off during a house-party week- ward the lake lying under the silver bloom of Septem- end to lean pensively against the balustrade of a broad ber: the very scent of late violets in a glass on the writ- Edith Wharton at The Mount 213 ing table; the rosy-mauve masses of hydrangea in tubs Wharton. After this the growth of plants was linked, along the terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf for Edith, to sexual awakening. Her novel, Summer; through the still air-all, somehow, were mingled in the published in 1916, is filled with erotic metaphors: "the suffusion of well-being."33 crowding shoots of meadowsweet and yellow flags A biographer of Beatrix Farrand, prejudiced perhaps this bubbling of sap and slipping of sheathes and ca- in favor of her subject, castigated the garden Edith lyxes." Flowers sometimes represented physical passion. Wharton made without her niece as "a designed disas- "Under his touch, things deep down in her struggled to ter" that appeared to be "stretched on a rack. "33 There the light and sprang up like flowers in the sunshine."3 is more than one angle of vision, but this one seems to To Fullerton she compared her efforts as a gardener to ignore the view and the setting. With her keenly devel- her writing: "[T]he place is really beautiful. I was oped visual sense, her self-confident taste, and her years amazed at the success of my [efforts]. Decidedly, I'm a of studying gardens in Italy and elsewhere, Edith better landscape gardener than novelist, and this place, Wharton was quite capable of arranging the landscape every line of which is my own work, far surpasses the about her house in such a way as to please herself and House of Mirth. others. She no longer needed the help of the talented Not everyone understood Edith Wharton's direct Beatrix, who seems never to have returned to The and intimate connection with her garden. She was much Mount after 1901, when she had planned the entrance amused by a review in the Atlantic, which stated that her drive and the kitchen garden. Edith urged Trix to visit book on Italian villa gardens made it clear that she had in July 1903, to recuperate from an appendectomy, but "never worked in a garden!!!"+1 The reviewer was con- there is no indication that she came. Even if she had, vinced that "Mrs. Wharton has never spent an hour in a she would have been unable to work. "[T]his house has garden uprooting weeds, hunting rose-bugs, squashing been a hospital all summer," Edith told Sara Norton in caterpillars. She betrays no acquaintance with the early August while Teddy was in a state of collapse. trowel and a broken back the heat and sweat of Beatrix or her mother (Edith's sister-in-law, Minnie noon. "+42 This was SO far from the truth that it made her Jones) would occasionally propose over the next few laugh, but some who actually visited Edith Wharton's summers to bring the other to The Mount to conva- garden came away feeling that it lacked the owner's per- lesce from nervous illness, but Mrs. Jones seems always sonal touch. Ironically, the very perfection she strug- to have come alone. 35 gled SO hard to achieve made it seem less than perfect to Edith Wharton was intimately involved with her some observers. In her book on the gardens of well- garden, from its overall design to "every tiniest little known people, Hildegarde Hawthorne complained that bulb and shoot." Each time she returned to Lenox in Mrs. Wharton's garden lacked "intimate charm the June after a winter's absence, she would walk through sense of personal and loving supervision," in contrast to the garden with Reynolds, her head gardener, checking the "special spiritual quality" emanating from Mrs. Jack to see how each "tree, shrub, creeper, fern, 'flower in Gardner's garden at Green Hill in Brookline, for exam- the crannied wall' had come through the winter.³6 ple.43 Sara Norton's sister Lily found The Mount quite Sometimes she was dismayed. Her emotional attach- chilling: "Her house, her garden, her appointments ment was such that she suffered when her garden suf- were all perfect-money, taste, and instinct saw to every fered. 37 During recurrent "cruel" droughts, she ago- detail; yet the sense of a home was not there." nized over "parched grass and starved skinny trees." Daniel Chester French and his wife, Mary, who had She raged at the hill-country winters that interfered made their own garden at Chesterwood, perceived with her gardening plans and injured her plants. "Even more clearly Edith Wharton's artistry. Her place, with the clematis paniculata I had established SO carefully is its view "like an old tapestry," was, according to Mrs. dead," she wailed one spring. Another year she cried, French, "one of the most exquisite to be found any- "Don't talk to me about this climate! I don't think any- where in the Berkshires. "44 Edith Wharton visited the thing has grown an inch since last year. "38 She pined for Frenches' garden, and they came sometimes to The a more "civilized climate" than that of the region she Mount. Mrs. French described how "when we went to had chosen. her place, she and Mr. French would wander about the Morton Fullerton visited The Mount in October grounds, exchanging ideas, she courteous enough to ask 1907, setting the stage for a passionate affair with Edith his advice, but artistic enough to need little from any 214 THE GREAT GOOD PLACE one." The Frenches considered The Mount a model of The more involved and successful Edith Wharton "what can be done in landscape gardening by develop- became as a writer, the more she was drawn to friend- ing every little natural beauty, instead of going in with ships with artists and intellectuals. Teddy Wharton, in- preconceived ideas and trying to make it like some creasingly cantankerous. was left out. His wife's friends other beautiful place to which the lay of the land bears often found him as trying as he found her literary life. no resemblance whatever." To Charles Eliot Norton he wrote, "I should like you to see 'The Mount,' to prove to you that Puss [Edith's nickname] is good at other things besides her to me rather clever writing." In a letter to a friend, Edith Wharton described the The Whartons found one mutual interest when they daily routine at The Mount: "Here I write every morn- acquired their first automobile in 1904, "a little sputter- ing, & then devote myself to horticulture, while Teddy ing shrieking American motor in which we hope to see plays golf & cuts down trees." This may have been something of the country."+7 How difficult it is to imag- how she thought she would like to spend her days, but ine the sense of liberation that the first motorcars her account bore little resemblance to reality. In fact, brought to their privileged owners. Edith Wharton such a disciplined and solitary life would not have suited thrilled at "the escape from the railways, the charm of her, for by choice she led such an overwhelmingly social exploring new roads, of being able to flit from point to existence that her steady literary output seems miracu- point as the fancy takes us."+8 With their chauffeur, lous. The writing was done early, in the privacy of her Charles Cook, Teddy Wharton beside him, and accom- own room. Serious gardening followed, as she said. But panied at the best of times by her new friend Henry always there were friends coming to stay, servants to James, Edith Wharton whirled over the hills and val- manage, guests for lunch or dinner, meals to plan, and leys of New England, each year in a new and more pow- letters to write. Her little dogs-Miza, Jules, Nicette- erful car. clamored for attention. Then Mrs. Wharton would dash The Whartons introduced Henry James to the mo- off to a committee meeting or a social call. The Whar- torcar. Both he and the motor figured largely in Edith tons traveled continually: to Europe and to New York Wharton's life at The Mount and in the meaning the as a matter of course, but even when supposedly settled place held for her. James, then in his sixties and at the at Lenox, they would frequently depart for a few days peak of his literary powers, paid three visits to The visit here or a week there. Mount. At that beautiful place and on their motor The Whartons' motorcar at The Mount, 1904. Edith Wharton and Henry James are seated in the back, with chauffeur Charles Cook at the wheel and Teddy Whar- ton beside him. (Lilly Li- brary, Indiana University) Edith Wharton at The Mount 215 "flights" over the countryside, he was in some measure The view from the terrace at The Mount, toward Laurel consoled for the depressing changes he had found on Lake and the Tyringham hills. ca. 1905. (Beinecke Library) his return to his homeland after twenty years abroad. "I have been won over to motoring, for which the region is, in spite of bad roads, delightful."+9 As they spun along through the glorious autumn afternoons, amid Sprague at Faulkner Farm in Brookline and visited the colors "like molten jewels," James was overwhelmed by Thayers gardens in Lancaster. "the sweetness of the country itself. this New England Riding through the back country, away from the re- rural vastness." sorts of the prosperous. both Henry James and Edith For Edith Wharton, too, motoring provided "an im- Wharton were struck by the bleak desolation of lonely mense enlargement of life."50 By motor they drove farmsteads and villages. Even in summer the starved as- often to visit the Nortons in Ashfield, trying different pect of New England's hinterland was a reminder of the routes through the hill country. One day they drove to long months of wintry chill, against which Edith Whar- Litchfield, Connecticut, a town that charmed James. ton SO fruitlessly railed as it affected her garden. Out of ()n a jaunt to Cornish, New Hampshire, the Whartons her sense that the weathered gray facades were prisons visited the Maxfield Parrishes and others in that colony of a sort. she wrote of desperation and hopeless entrap- of artists and gardeners. On longer motor trips, Edith ment in Ethan Frome and of rural degeneracy in Sum- Wharton visited more gardens. After lunching one day mer. The barren lives of her characters were ostensibly in 1005 with the Coolidges at the old Governor Ben- the reverse of her cushioned existence, but as her hus- ning Wentworth place near Portsmouth, New Hamp- band's mental state deteriorated. her own life became SO shire. the Whartons drove on to tea with Mrs. Tyson at fraught with uncertainty and anguish that she may her- Hamilton House. Another time they called on Mrs. self have felt imprisoned. The Mount itself became one 216 THE GREA T GOOD PLACE of the complexities of her life as her husband and her Late into the moonlit night, James held as charmed marriage disintegrated. captives the little "inner group" of friends while he spun tales and evoked visions of his lost youth. 54 The Mount had to be sold. After too many scenes, too many arguments over money, too many unsuccess- One of Henry James's stories, "The Great Good Place" ful attempts to mend Teddy Wharton's mind, Edith (1900), still strikes a responsive note in those who have Wharton finally concluded that life with him was im- felt the frantic despair of the protagonist, a man beset possible. She could no longer afford to keep The and bound by a web of worldly concerns, a web no less Mount, with or without Teddy. In September 1911, she constricting for his having woven it himself. In a vivid left Lenox for the last time and sailed for France. The dream he finds himself at a place of peace and beauty, Mount was sold in 1912. The Whartons were divorced where hours of solitude are spent in the serenity of a in 1913. Edith Wharton lived in France for the rest of fine library, and companionable hours are passed in her life, making there two homes for herself and two conversation of a high order. James may have thought memorable gardens. of this as an ideal spiritual state or as a vision of what The house and gardens at The Mount are being re- civilization at its best might be. While staying at a for- stored now, thanks to the timely intervention of Edith mer monastery in France in 1910, Edith Wharton felt Wharton Restoration, Inc. The view has been recov- that she had found James's Great Good Place. 52 All her ered; garden walls and walks have been reclaimed. efforts at The Mount had been directed toward mak- From her terrace, on' an autumn afternoon, the ideals ing such a place of her own. For a few years she suc- of harmony, proportion, and beauty that inspired Edith ceeded, balancing creative work with social intimacy in Wharton seem distinctly possible. She came quite close a beautiful and harmoniously ordered setting of her to achieving her goal at this great good place. own making. Writing to Bernard Berenson in I9II, Edith Whar- ton summed up her delight in her "really beautiful" place: "the stillness, the greenness, the exuberance of my flowers, the perfume of my hemlock woods, & above Notes all the moonlight nights on my big terrace, overlooking the lake." The terrace was the focus of The Mount, where, on precious fleeting occasions during her ten I. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: Apple- years there, her ideal was made real. From "that dear ton-Century, 1934), 124. Biographies of Edith Wharton in- wide sunny terrace" she and those she loved could feast clude R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (New York: Harper & their eyes on the landscape she had composed with just Row, 1975), and Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraor- this vantage point in mind. The view of the gardens, dinary Life (New York: Abrams, 1994). woods, lake, and hills soothed her mind and spirit. 2. Edith Wharton (hereafter cited as EW) to Ogden Cod- Evenings too brought serenity: "I went out on my ter- man Jr. (hereafter cited as OC), I August 1900, Codman Fam- race last night, and took up my interrupted communion ily Manuscripts Collection, Society for the Preservation of with Vega, Arcturus, and Altair." One night "the terrace New England Antiquities (hereafter cited as CFMC), box 84. was saturated with real white moonlight, & it was hot 3. Picturesque Berkshire (Northampton, Mass.: Picturesque enough to sit out late & listen to the Aristophanes cho- Publishing Co., 1893), 22. rus in the laghetto."53 4. George A. Hibbard, Lenox (New York: Charles Scrib- On the terrace, Edith Wharton also found social ner's Sons, 1896), 35-38. communion of the highest order, justifying all her ef- 5. EW to OC, 27 September 1900, CFMC, box 84. See forts at The Mount. The memory of one evening in Edwin Hale Lincoln, A Pride of Palaces, ed. Donald T. Oakes particular stayed with her, "when we sat late on the ter- (Lenox, Mass.: Lenox Library Association, 1981). race with the lake shining palely through dark trees." In 6. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 25 February 1901 and I response to an allusion to his Albany relatives, his "laby- July 1901, CFMC, box 50. rinthine cousinship," someone asked Henry James to 7. Daniel Berkeley Updike. quoted in Percy Lubbock, Por- "tell us about the Emmets--tell us all about them." trait of Edith Wharton (New York: Appleton-Century, 1947), Edith Wharton at The Mount 217 17-18; EW to Sara Norton, 23 August 1905, folder 6, Edith 33. Jane Brown, Beatrix: The Gardening Life of Beatrix Jones Wharton Papers, Beineke Library, Yale University. Farrand, 1872-1959 (New York: Viking, 1995), 79. 8. Richard Guy Wilson, "Edith and Ogden: Writing, Dec- 34- EW to Sara Norton, 9 August 1903, folder 4, Wharton oration, and Architecture," in Ogden Codman and the Decora- Papers. tion of Houses, ed. Pauline C. Metcalf (Boston: Boston Athe- 35. EW to Margaret Terry Chanler, 7 September 1902; naeum, 1988), 164. EW to Sara Norton, 5 June 1903, 23 September 1906, 26 Oc- 9. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, I7 February 1901, tober 1906, folders 4 and 7; EW diary, 24 October to 5 No- CFMC, box 50. vember 1906, Wharton Papers. IO. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 7 February 1901, 36. EW to Morton Fullerton, 3 July I9II, in The Letters of CFMC, box 50. Edith Wharton, ed. R. W. B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New II. EW to OC, 25 March 1901, CFMC, box 84. York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1988), 242. I2. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 3 March 1902, CFMC, 37 Judith Fryer, Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures box 50. of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather (Chapel Hill: University of 13. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 5 October 1902, North Carolina Press, 1986), I75. CFMC, box 50. 38. EW to Sara Norton, I7 June 1905 and I4 June 1906, 14. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 8 June 1905, CFMC, folders 6 and 7, Wharton Papers; 3 July I9II, No. IOI5, Nor- box 50. ton Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. I5. Updike, in Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, I7. 39. Edith Wharton, Summer (New York: Signet Classic, 16. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 8 October 1902, Penguin, 1993), 33-34, I22. CFMC, box 50. 40. EW to Morton Fullerton, 3 July I9II, Letters of Edith I7. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr., The Decoration Wharton. 242. of Houses (1897; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 22, 4I. EW to Sara Norton, 2 August 1906, folder 7, Wharton 49. Papers. 18. Updike, in Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, 20. 42. Henry Dwight Sedgwick, The New American Type and 19. Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904; Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 73. reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1988). 43. Hildegarde Hawthorne, The Lure of the Garden (New 20. Edith Wharton, "The Line of Least Resistance," in York: Century, 1911), 135-36. The Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. Anita Brookner, (New York: 44. Elizabeth G. Norton, quoted in Lubbock, Portrait of Carroll & Graf, 1989), 2:35. Edith Wharton, 40. 21. Wharton, Italian Villas, IOI. 45. Mrs. Daniel Chester French, Memories of a Sculptor's 22. EW to OC, 29 July 1901, CFMC, box 84. Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), 205. 23. EW to Sara Norton, 7 June and + July 1902, folder 3, 46. EW to Mrs. Alfred Austin, 14 August 1906, Letters of Wharton Papers. Edith Wharton, 107-8. 24. OC to Sarah Bradlee Codman, 8 October 1902, 47. EW to Sara Norton, I2 July 1904, folder 5, Wharton CFMC, box 50. Papers. 25. EW to Sara Norton, 30 September 1902, folder 3, 48. EW to Sara Norton, 24 January 1904, folder 5, Whar- Wharton Papers. ton Papers. 26. EW to Sara Norton, 5 June 1903, folder 4, Wharton 49. Henry James to Jessie Allen, 22 October 1904; Henry Papers. James to Edmund Gosse, 27 October 1904, in Henry James's 27. EW to Sara Norton, 23 July 1905, folder 6, Wharton Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- Papers. sity Press, 1984), 4:329. 28. EW diary, I5 August 1906, Wharton Papers. 50. Wharton, Backward Glance, 176. 29. Updike, in Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton, 19-20. 5I. EW diary, 27 August and 29 October 1905, 29 June 30. EW to Sara Norton, 26 October 1907, folder 8, Whar- 1906, Wharton Papers. ton Papers. 52. Lewis, Wharton, 291. 3I. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905; reprint, 53. EW to Margaret Terry Chanler, 18 July 1903, Whar- New York: New American Library, 1964), 52. ton Papers. 32. Edith Wharton, Sanctuary (New York: Charles Scrib- 54. Wharton, Backward Glance, 192-94: ner's Sons, 1903), 86. 218 8 THE GREAT GOOD PLACE SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIVERSITY 26 December 2003 Ms. Alan Emmet 224 Concord Road Westford, MA 01886 Dear Ms. Emmet: Nini Gilder suggested that I contact you regarding your research on Edith Wharton at the Beinecke and its relationship to my own inquiries. For the last three years I have been involved in research for an intellectual biography of George B. Dorr. My research is focused on the manuscript collections that have been almost entirely ignored by others who have written about the founder of Acadia National Park. While the National Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, and other repositories have been expansive in documenting the last forty years of his life, Mr. Dorr's first fifty years are more challenging to the biographer due to the paucity of surviving documents. Ms. Gilder's e-mails over the last year have been enormously helpful in tracing the Lenox connections between the Dorr and Wharton family. In her October 7th e-mail she mentions your interest in the Mt. Desert Nurseries and alludes to your investigation of the Dorr-Wharton correspondence at the Beinecke. I plan to travel to New Haven in the next few months to pursue this matter but I wondered whether you would share with me any insights and impressions drawn from your inquiries into Mr. Dorr. Has there been an archivist at the Beinecke that has been most helpful to you? In turn, I will gladly share with you any documentation I've gathered of the Mount Desert Island gardens developed by Mr. Dorr and his mother Mary, Beatrix Farrand, Abby Rockefeller, Charles Savage, etc. I'm wondering whether you made use of the 1881-1901 gardening committee minutes of the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Society at the Jesup Memorial Library for your So Fine a Prospect which I have not yet consulted. Wishing you holiday greetings and best wishes for the New Year. Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. Director of the Shapiro Library e-mail: r.epp@snhu.edu Home phone in Merrimack: 603-424-6149 New Hampshire College is now Southern New Hampshire University Harry A. B. & Gertrude C. Shapiro Library 2500 North River Road Manchester, NH 03106-1045 603-645-9605 Fax 603-645-9685 ALAN EMMET 224 CONCORD ROAD 27 Jan. 2004 WESTFORD, MASSACHUSETTS 01886 (978) 692-8329 Ronald H. Epp, Ph. D. Director, Shapiro Library Southern New Hampshire University 2500 North River Road Manchester, NH 03106-1045 Dear Dr. Epp, Finally, in response to your 26 December letter regarding your research on George B. Dorr. Perhaps my suggestions are by now superfluous. 1. Regarding the Wharton collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale: YCAL 42 Box 24 Folder 753 Correspondence between EW and GBD, 1902-1906 Dorr visited Lenox in 1904 and 1905. She sought his advice; refers to the "George B. Dorr path," the new pond and other improvements, suggested, I gather, by him. She asks him to have his manager send her the name and colour of good new varieties of phlox. My duplicate copy of one letter is enclosed. 2. See (as you probably have) The Story of Acadia National Park; Memoirs of George B. Dorr (reprinted). 3. The Bar Harbor Historical Society has Dorr's papers, but from two sources I was told they contained no references to Wharton. 4. National Geographic 26: 74-89 (July 1914) "The Unique Island of Mt. Desert", GBD et alia 5. Nature Magazine (May 1929: 315-18 & 345, "Acadia N. P.", GBD 6. I suggest calling Partrick Chasse, Landscape Design Associates phone 617-628- 1757 or 617-628-9238 Through him you might see a Mt. Desert Nursery catalog or other helpful material. I never saw the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Society's records. This is really all I can offer, but I wish you luck in your research and with your biography. His early life is a blank to me, but well worth finding out about. Sincerely, Alan Tenmet 21 Fenruary 2010 Ms. Alan Emmet 224 Concord Road Westford, MA 01886 Dear Ms. Emmet, In Massachusetts Audubon's Connections, I ran across an all too brief article on the generosity of the Emmets in establishing the lovely Nashoba Brook Wildlife Sanctuary. It reminded me that I had been remiss in keeping you abreast of my progress in completing the biography of Acadia's founder, George Bucknam Dorr. Two months ago the final half of the manuscript was delivered electronically to the publisher, Robin Karson at the Library of American Landscape History. I'm now responding to chapter- by-chapter editorial revisions and selecting illustrations. After a decade of research and writing I feel much relieved to have it out of my hands. In our earlier communications we had speculated about lunch in Westford at a place convenient to you. As Spring approaches, I am renewed with hope that we can realize this objective. I'm free most days in the last two weeks of March, if you'd like to propose dates and location. I'd like to show you a copy of Edith Wharton and the American Garden, the fruits of the conference held at The Mount three years ago. I look forward to hearing from you. Do you have email? Most Cordially, Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. 47 Pond View Dr. Merrimack, NH 03054 603-424-6149 Eppster2@myfairpoint.net you about the date of Patrick March 28,2010 Chasse's talkat the Gardner, which had already occurred. Dear Dr. Epp, I'M sorry. I'm still reading your It was a great pleasure copy of the new book on to meet you, and enjoy Edith whaton but will lunch with you. Thank mail it back soon. you so much. we I hope you weren't too had so much to tack shocked by my tale of about. I look forward to being kicked out of your book on George Memphis! at least my Dorr. what fascinating two boys did not turn paths he has led into handened criminals. you down! Sincerely. I realize I misled Alau Emmet Page 2 Westford Conservation Trust Newsletter Fall Walk Dick S. Emmet 1924-2007 Saturday, "Go forth, under the October 20th open sky, and list to Nature's teachings, 9-11am while from all around-- Richard Emmet Conservation Land, Trailside W ay Earth and her waters, Join Trust Directors Lenny Palmer and Paul Cully and the depths of air- comes a still voice". - on an exploration of this beautiful area of protected Thanatopsis by open space. This should be a wonderful walk, at the William Cullen Bryant height of fall foliage. Wear sturdy shoes as the area is relatively flat but rocky. This walk is appropriate In memory of Trust member and Vice President for all ages, but area is not suitable for strollers. No Emeritus Dick Emmet, we mourn the passing of dogs, please. Park at the Town parking area off the such a wonderful intelligent, talented and engaging cul-de-sac at the end of Trailside Way. For more naturalist and human being. Dick was a friend, law- info call Marian at 978-692-3907 yer, veteran, coach, philanthropist, teacher and lov- ing husband and father. An enduring part of his Winter Walk legacy remains his preservation of many acres of land in Westford. As Vice President and founding member of the WCT, we will always remember his calming and sage advice and hard work on may con- Saturday, January 5th servation and town environmental issues. An excerpt from his book, Westford Bird Notes, 10am - noon 1951-2002, advises us to stay vigilant about declines Richard Emmet Conservation Land, Trailside Way in our local bird populations, and how we plan for the future: "The general pattern is clear enough. The Enjoy the beauty of this Conservation Land in the increase in the number of houses has led to a corre- Silent Season with Trust member Kate Hollister. sponding increase in the number of domestic cats Sociable dogs on leashes are welcome. Be and raccoons that prey on ground-nesting birds. The prepared for snow! Please park at the end of Trail- reduction in the number of orchards has led to a side Way, off Powers Rd., in the Emmet Land park- corresponding shrinkage in the number of holes for ing lot. For more info, call Marian at 978-692-3907. cavity-nesting birds. The loss of dairy farms has *All walks are free, no signup required. brought about a corresponding loss of barns and sheds and pasture land and hay meadows, the nest- ing sites and feeding grounds for many species. The Project Bird Sleuth fragmentation of woodlands has had a very negative The Trust continues to support the school effect on species that can raise their young success- bird feeder program developed by Cornell Labs. fully in large, uninterrupted blocks of deep woods". Feeders are up and running at all Westford schools, He further reflects that we need to "stimulate the and speakers are setting up times to present to all interest and awareness of Westford's present and 4th grades classes. We now have a wonderful future residents in the local natural surroundings cleared trail adjacent to Abbot school for science that remain". walks - we need volunteers to help with these walks. If interested, please call Marian at 978-692-3907. Their Love of the Land by Bob Wilber, Director of Land Protection T he connection between people and knew that it would otherwise be easily Family Roots land can be extremely powerful developed. "We never intended to build Dan and Peg Arguimbau of Sharon are and take many different forms. The ourselves an empire," said Alan. Indeed, profoundly tied to their land, and worked relationships vary-from properties retained they never intended to keep it just for with Mass Audubon to protect it. The for generations in family ownership to themselves, recognizing that opportunities Arguimbau family has farmed the land those that provide unique experiences to experience nature are an essential part since the early 1930s. It contains woods, with nature, hold special memories, of life for people in their community. wetlands, and fields with productive or rejuvenate one's soul. The common Their values and generosity are directly agricultural soils, and provides protection thread: how people and place interrelate responsible for more than 270 acres of for the Massapoag Brook-a tributary and define each other. A person's identity what is now Mass Audubon's Nashoba to the Neponset River. It also includes may be defined in part by an affinity with Brook Wildlife Sanctuary. land, and a special place may in turn be defined by the human values attributed Love of Wildlife to it. Mass Audubon has had the pleasure Bob Minery feels a deep to work with many landowners who care connection with his land deeply about their land, both for the role in the Berkshires. He has it has played in their lives and for how it lived for more than 50 years benefits other people and nature. Following in a modest home with no are examples of generous people who electricity, telephone, or have left a legacy of land for all to enjoy. running water. He gathers water from a spring at the Preserving Nature base of the hill each morning In 1951, Dick (who passed away in and is fully in tune with the 2007) and Alan Emmet moved from rhythms of nature around Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the then him-often recounting his latest wildlife portions of a townwide hiking trail corridor agricultural community of Westford in sighting, or observations associated with known as the Massapoag Trail. Dan and central Massachusetts because they wanted the changing seasons, or sharing stories his uncle, Lawrence Arguimbau, granted to live where they could regularly enjoy of rambling the local woods in his youth. Sharon's first conservation restriction nature walks. In the ensuing years, when His conservation ethic allowed him to in 1971 on a small portion of the farm. neighboring farmers retired, Dick and Alan reject numerous offers from developers to Today, more than 35 acres of the farm would purchase the land because they buy his land for its "million-dollar view," are permanently protected. "Next to and instead to sell my family, this land has been the great 55 acres of it to Mass love of my life and it was an easy choice Audubon in 2005 for to preserve," says Dan Arguimbau. less than its appraised value. It is now part of The Emmets, Arguimbaus, and what will eventually Bob Minery-different people from become the Cold Brook different places-fortunately for all Wildlife Sanctuary in of us share a common bond in their western Massachusetts. enduring love for their land and in their commitment to protect it. For more stories, visit www.massaudubon.org/land SMILE! SEE WHAT'S ON DRUMLIN FARM'S WILDLIFE CAMERA educate others about for viewing through a new interactive the natural world. kiosk at Drumlin Farm scheduled to "There is gratification open this spring. The videos will also in using my skills to be available on the sanctuary's website help Mass Audubon for viewing in classrooms and homes. staff implement "We are giving people broader access technology that will to the farm by using technology to let improve the services visitors see what happens when they they provide," explains aren't here," says Renata Pomponi, Kevin Shaughnessy, visitor education and interpretation Intel Massachusetts IT coordinator for Drumlin Farm. operations manager and a Intel employees have supported member of an Intel team Mass Audubon's mission in more that helped select and ways previously. Last year, a team of test a high-tech motion- 13 Intel engineers built more than triggered video recording 100 American kestrel nesting boxes for system. Packaged in a use with Mass Audubon's Birds to Watch weatherproof housing, citizen science program. And another Intel workers James Bellemare (behind tree) and Kevin Shaughnessy install a motion-sensing camera with Mass Audubon's Renata Pomponi. these unobtrusive digital 90 Intel volunteers cheerfully spent a video cameras capture day planting a native wildlife garden- W hat started as a neighborly wildlife movement and sound in full with 13 trees, 128 bushes, and more conversation between Intel color during daylight and infrared at than 450 perennials and native grasses- Massachusetts Corporate Affairs Manager night. Last fall, members of the Intel along an all-person's-accessible path at Ann Hurd and Drumlin Farm Volunteer team helped to install the cameras, Drumlin Farm. "The Intel volunteers Coordinator Pam Sowizral has blossomed and Drumlin Farm staff experimented are wonderful," says Sowizral. "They are into a perfect partnership: Intel with cameras in different locations energetic, enthusiastic, and willing to employees are working with Drumlin Farm staff to improve educational services "By building a relationship with Mass Audubon, Intel has engaged and bring visitors closer to the natural world. "By building a relationship with our employees in appealing volunteer projects and we have an Mass Audubon, Intel has engaged our opportunity for greater impact in the community." employees in appealing volunteer projects -Ann Hurd, Intel Massachusetts Corporate Affairs Manager and we have an opportunity for greater impact in the community," says Hurd. As part of its Intel® Involved program, around the sanctuary to capture footage work hard. And I imagine it's a nice Intel Massachusetts awarded a grant of roaming mammals and birds. change of pace for them to get out of to Drumlin Farm that provided for In this "high-tech meets farm-tech" their offices and into the fresh air." mobile wildlife cameras and related project, wildlife footage from the cameras technology, habitat enhancement, and will be coupled with educational videos a visitor viewing station. The company of seasonal farm activity, such as sheep has also donated the time and talent of shearing or COW milking. The resulting many personnel to help Mass Audubon library of film clips will be available ALAN EMMET 224 CONCORD ROAD WESTFORD, MASSACHUSETTS 01886 (500) 692-8329 978 NOV.10, 2004 Dear Mr. Epp, I read your paper on Dorr with great interest. Congratulations on tracking down The life story of Qu amazing man whose contributions to Maine's remarkable natural environment in foundury Acadia National Park, and in his own garden and nursery. someone like that cau after fade from public knowledge gradually and subtly. I wonder whether Re Park Service has, over The years, appreciated Dorr and his work. He obviously knew a great deal about Maine's native plauts, and learned about what might flourish there. I all so glad you met Patrick Cha SSE and I am sure be must have been glad to talk with you about old Farm, in particular. Thank you so much. I admire all your research efforts, and the paper that has come as a result. Sincerely. Alau Sunnet P ROSP E C T Historic New England Gardens Alan Emmet University Press of New England Hanover and London GARDENING / NEW ENGLAND STUDIES H ERE IS THE STUFF of real garden history interwoven with the sociological and com- mercial fabric of post-revolutionary America. Alan Emmet has skillfully portrayed those whose landscape passions and obsessions formed an important part of the horticultural legacy of a nation. There is much that is new, informative, and entertaining in So Fine a Prospect for horticultur- al and garden history enthusiasts." -Francis H. Cabot, Chairman, The Garden Conservancy S INCE THE HEART of garden history beats in the details, there should be a regional guide like this for each part of the country: well-researched, accurate, intense, quirky, focussed on individual gardens-and immensely readable." -Mac Griswold, coauthor, The Golden Age of American Gardens "Oh, the comfort, the delight I have had in my garden," an octogenarian grande dame of Ports: mouth, New Hampshire, recalls in an I888 memoir. Alan Emmer's glimpse into more than two dozen gardens that graced New England's towns and countryside from just after the American Rev- olution into the twentieth century has delights of its own. Drawing from diaries, correspondence, historical records, sketch maps, and paintings, Emmet treats the garden-ranging from small urban retreats to ornamental estates of thousands of acres--as an art form and examines its evolution from the utilitarian to the ornate. Along with the useful-greenhouses, peach walls, and pergolas-are found the whimsical and the idiosyncratic. She describes teahouses, topiary trees, fountains, mazes, marble nymphs, and a three-story viewing tower. And ever-present, of course, are the plants them- selves: roses, lilies, tree peonies, orchids, even southern magnolias as well as towering elms, massive lindens, peaches, pears, and boxwood. But as Emmet delves more deeply into who built these gardens and why, another story unfolds. The gardens, it seems, parallel their owners' lives, and embedded in their history is the saga of families and their rising and falling tides. We see great houses inhabited by gentle ghosts, the boom and sub- sequent decay of the port towns, the emergence of a mercantile class, the metamorphosis of the cities into sprawling urban centers, and the establishment of institutions like the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Carefully chronicled, entertaining, and generously illustrated Emmet's den tour is very much worth taking. ALAN EMMET has written on landscapes and gardens for numerous peri- odicals. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Garden Conservan- cy, and a trustee of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, for whom she served as a garden history consultant. She recently coauthored a historic landscape report for the National Trust for Historic Preservation on Chesterwood, Daniel Chester French's summer home and studio. FRONT COVER: Childe Hassam, Isle of Shoals Garden or The Garden in Its Glory. 1892. Watercolor on paper. 19 15/16" 13 7/8". National Mus of American Art, Smith- sonian Institution. Gift of John Gellatly. Reproduced by permission. Library England ISBN 0-87451-774-5 University Press of New England 90000 Hanover and London 9 780874517743 28 October 2004 Ms. Alan Emmet 224 Concord Road Westford, CT 01886 Dear Ms. Emmet, I thought you might be interested in an update to your January 27th letter to me. I've yet to travel to Beinecke to examine the relevant portions of the Wharton Papers in part because of time that I've spent at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Houghton Library researching Mr. Dorr's ancestry and Harvard College involvements. Of course I've read and re-read Dorr's Story of Acadia National Park, including tracking down historical and biographical information on the hundreds of persons cited therein. I've also created a Finding Aid to the George B. Dorr Papers housed at the Bar Harbor Historical Society. The museum curator would not allow me to organize the papers according to standard archival principles; consequently, the product is an inventory more than a collection of related manuscripts. If you want a copy do let me know, especially since a good portion of the manuscripts inventoried are horticultural in character. Patrick Chasse and I finally met in September when he kindly invited me and my wife to Garland Farm for a tour followed by several hours of delightful conversation and afternoon tea. He will be working with about two dozen of us on a Summer 2005 celebration of Mr. Dorr in recognition of the 125th anniversary of Old Farm from which Acadia National Park germinated. I've included the final draft of an article that which just accepted for the Winter issue of the Mount Desert Island History Journal, a companion piece to one that Patrick is writing on Mrs. Farrand; I'll send a copy of the journal along to you when I receive it. I do hope that we have an opportunity to meet since Westford is an area that I drive through routinely enroute to Worcester, Concord, and Boston. Most Cordially, Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. The Mount Desert Nurseries The Mount Desert Nurseries were founded in 1896, 1896 the direct outcome of the first pleasure garden on Mount Desert Island, that of Oldfarm. The Oldfarm garden in turn was the outcome of earlier gardens in Massachusetts which went back in long succession to Colonial times. The Nurseries had in these a dis- tinguished ancestry. When the Mount Desert Nurseries were started, conditions at Bar Harbor and elsewhere on Mount Desert Island were far different from the present. The simple fishermen's huts and farmhouses, collected around each sheltering harbor when the sea was the only highway, had grown, as the stream of visitors increased, into big hotels; while summer residences, simple or costly, were springing up on every available site along the shore. Flowers were in demand to make the bare hotel rooms beautiful and gardens around the new summer homes were everywhere in the making. It was a transitory condition but it was based upon a real and permanent an human need and opportunity for gardening which trial and experience had shown to be extraordinary. 2. The time was one of great activity along horti- - cultural lines. The flower shows of the Boston Horticultural Society were famous, the Arnold Arboretum, making trial of woody plants and spending great sums on expeditions for the collection of new species and varieties, was at the .zenith of its fame and books . by the score came from the press, telling of the plants in cultivation and their wild congeners. Most inspiring of all, the weekly publication, Garden and Forest, edited by leaders. in American horticulture, was telling constantly of others , experience with plants, their experiments and obser- - vations. As yet the automobile had not come along to take men far afield in summer and they were content to stay at home and cultivate their gardens. It was . the end of a great period, the beginning of another not yet come into its own. But whatever changes come, the need to make beautiful the homes of men is fundamental and abiding. "Among the manifold creatures of God that have in all ages diversly entertained many excellent wits and drawn them to the contem- plation of the divine wisdom, none have provoked men's studies more or satisfied their desires so much as plants have done." Gerard's Herball, 1597. The Mount Desert Nurseries, founded in 1896, sprang directly from my mother's Oldfarm garden, the first pleasure garden on Mount Desert Island, which had in turn a long and honorable descent from early Salem and Medford gardens. going back to the colonial period. My earliest recollections are concerned with gardens, our own and my grand- mother's, long before we ever came to Mount Desert. The whole country around Boston has been famous always for its gardens and for the fruit raised in them. So, as soon as our Oldfarm home was built, my mother set to work to make a garden, bringing to it hardy flowering shrubs and plants from our earlier country home near Boston. The garden flourished amazingly, the plants growing with a vigor and blooming with a beauty unknown in our experience. With its cool nights and long days of radiant 2. sunshine tempered by the sea, Mount Desert Island proved a wonderful home for the hardy herbaceous plants and flowering shrubs which make the beauty of a northern garden, while, unlike gardens in more southern climates, plant succeeding plant in bloom the summer through leaves no time when its gardens may not be fresh and beautiful with no dull season intervening. The Eighties and Nineties of the Nineteenth century were a great period in horticulture, in England and America alike; much was published on the subject and I grew greatly interested, with the result that, wishing to bring the beauty that lay so readily within the reach of all along our eastern coast more widely into people!s lives and homes, I founded the Mount Desert Nurseries, placing them on what had been the pastureland and cultivated ground of an early farm upon which we had built our summer home. In spite of difficulties created by the changing conditions of the time, they have done good service to the cause of horticulture and they may do a greater yet, continued through the future. ALAN EMMET 224 CONCORD ROAD WESTFORD, MASSACHUSETTS 01886 978-692-8329 9 March 2004 Dear Professor Epp. Thank you so much for Sending me your interesting articles on Mr. Dorr, and Dr. Qbbe. you have done a great deal of research. I hope you have a chauce to visit The Beinecke library as well. Thank you but you do not need to send we The Bar Harbor village Improvement society reports. ThaT was au interesting phase of our cultural history - Village Improvement Society's beginning, as I understand, in Stockbridge. Massachusetts I appreciate your invitation - a view of Horseshoe Pond! It Sounds as though you live in a 22 February 2004 Dear Ms. Emmet, Thank you for responding last month to my 26 December 2003 letter. I am usually quicker in my replies but we have a new University President who is making exceptional demands that can't go unheeded. To say the least, retirement next year looks all the more inviting; then I can commit myself wholly to the Dorr biography. Thank you for the additional information on the Wharton collection at the Beinecke Library. I plan a visit this Spring but right now I am planning February and March visits to the National Archives regional center in Waltham the Harvard Archives, and the Massachusetts Historical Society where there are manuscripts that hopefully will fill in large gaps about Mr. Dorr's youth. Yes, I have read and followed hundreds of biographical leads from The Story of Aacdia National Park. I've reviewed my notes from the microfilmed Dorr Papers in the Jesup Memorial Library (originals at the Bar Harbor Historical Society Museum) and have no record of any Wharton references--although the gardening notes are quite extensive. I have see there a catalog of the Mt. Desert Nursery, circa 1930. I also appreciate your direction to the two Dorr articles in National Geographic and Nature Magazine; both were in my files. So too was a record of my contact with Patrick Chasse to whom I had been directed by the senior archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center. In October 2003 Chasse and I contacted one another and I was pleased to hear of his efforts on behalf of the Garden Conservancy to restore Beatrix Farrand's Garland Farm property on MDI. Perhaps we can meet one another when I visit MDI in mid-March. Would you like me to send you a sampling of some of the reports of the Bar Harbor Village Improvement Society Committee on Trees, where Mrs. Dorr had a prominent gardening leadership role as recognized in the BHVIS 1901 obituary tribute to her? I hope that you are receptive to a follow-up letter folklowing my visit to the Beinecke. If you travel north please contact me and have dinner with the Epp's overlooking Merrimack's lovely Horseshoe Pond. Do you have email? I very much appreciated your So Fine a Prospect. Cordially, Ronald H. Epp FOR article 47 Pond View Dr. Merrimack, NH 03054 603-424-6149 e-mail: r.epp@snhu.edu first, aobe Does Mrs. Edith Wharton to George B. Dorr September 3d, 1904. The Mount, Lenox, Mass. Dear Mr. Dorr, I found the book on the terrace just after you left, and it was sent to Boston in accordance with your direc- tions. I have been meaning to write and tell you this and also to say again how much I appreciated the trouble you took to help me in my gardening, or rather landscape gardening, problems. Your visit was SO helpful, and you left behind you SO many fruitful ideas that I often feel you are not really gone, and must be somewhere about, ready to answer the new questions which the solving of some of the old problems has already raised. Your path is finished, and the task of planting its borders now confronts me; and we are just about to attack the laying out of the path from the flower-garden to the little valley which is to be my future wild garden. I am in hopes you may really be able to spare us a day or two on your return, for though the autumn work Beinecke copied organit chron', 1904. ICAL 42 copy 2 Wherton Box 24. Folder 753 can 3 Yale (September 3rd, 1904) 2. will be nearly over by that time, there will be many future plans to discuss. My only fear is that my pigmy planting will quite vanish from your mind among the giant boles of the redwoods! The Vanderbilts want us to spend October with them at Biltmore, but the season is one of far too much in- terest here and I told them they must let us come in the spring instead. We have been off in the motor digging ferns for our rocky slopes, and now I have discovered a stony pasture near Great Barrington full of the "sweet fern" which is SO rarely found in this region, and am going to fetch a load of it tomorrow. It is all great fun, but I wish you were here to suggest and approve. Sincerely yours, Edith Wharton. C 224 CONCORD ROAD WESTFORD, MA 01886 YY COUNT 2004 Ronald H. Epp, PL.D Director, Shapiro Library Southern New Hampshire University 2500 North River Road ZIP 3106 manchester 17 404 911031 make lmli, 1014 ALAN EMMET 224 CONCORD ROAD WESTFORD, MASSACHUSETTS 01886 978-692-8329 1-1-04 Dear Dr. Epp, I was interested in your letter about your proposed biography of George B. Dorr. I can offer li H IR help right now as I've been very ill for The past two months, & am not back near any of my files or indeed aT any work. I can respond to two of your queries = No special archivist helped me at Re Beinecle - it was a white ago. Secondly, I did not See Re 1881-1901 minutes too much, however) that I can share with you in a month or two after I can reTurn to work- Do you know Patrick Chasse, landscape architect, of Bar Harbor & somerville - He is a I friend & helped me- 1 maybe later call put you on to him to Good luck you. if desired. sincerely Alau Emmet