LESSONS IN DESIGN LEARNING FROM LOST GARDENS by PATRICK CHASSÉ The garden at Blair Eyrie, with dragon fountain in center. Note grass-edged beds and basin. Blair Eyrie garden plan, showing Italianate layout. Planting Tea House Scale Rome wasn't built in a day, SO the old BLAIR EYRIE The summer home of New York banker De- maxim goes, and-except for the new "makeover" Witt Clinton Blair, Blair Eyrie was bought in 1901 and transformed with his design team house and garden television shows-gardens aren't into one of the most renowned gardens of its day. It was designed by distinguished either. They are products of careful planning, experimenting, refinement, landscape architect James Greenleaf, to ac- and hard work. Neither are they as durable as the wonders of the ancients, and most gardens company the house wrought by the Boston do not even survive their creators, or the houses they enhance. Rapid development-and architectural firm of Andrews, Jacques & redevelopment-of residential properties has led to the destruction of many gardens old Rantoul. The place was razed around1935, and new. The memories and the documentation of these gardens are slipping away, deplet- and a nursing facility now stands on the site. ing our culture of these creations. These gardens, though lost and often unrestorable, have The house sat on a promontory with a much to teach us. Garden makers have made inspiring innovations unknown today, as we commanding view of Frenchman's Bay, struggle to reinvent some of those very concepts. If we had a record of them, we could be with the garden set below to one side. The building on this rich past. garden was laid out in an Italianate plan, I've been collecting fragments of garden images from lost gardens in my part of the with a Moorish-inspired pool basin in the world, Mt. Desert Island, Maine, for more than 30 years. Gradually, bits and pieces of gar- center that contained a Japanese bronze den puzzles-photos, plans, articles, postcards, oral histories-have come together to re- dragon fountain. The fountain seems to veal amazing places that have vanished from our community. I've assembled a little virtual have made a powerful impression, and the "tour" of three of these Bar Harbor gardens, pieced together from disparate sources, and garden was often dubbed the "Japanese demonstrating how exciting and inspiring they can still be. Garden" by visitors, despite its European in- 40 JULY/AUGUST 2004 Site plan for Blair Eyrie, by Andrews, Jaques & Rantoul architects. The dragon fountain at Blair Eyrie, which prompted some visitors to dub the garden "Japanese," even though the layout was Tree planting at Blair Eyrie in winter. Note the fur-coat-clad crew, and clearly European. team of six horses to haul the frozen tree and root ball. spiration. From a teahouse at the north end, WINGWOOD HOUSE the garden focused southerly on a spectacu- The second garden offers a brief but telling lar mountain view, and was structurally de- story of the rise and fall of grand houses, and fined by cedar hedges and precisely placed their gardens. (Only two photographs of this large pines and spruce trees-all of which garden have been found.) Wingwood House, had been brought in from some distance by the summer residence of E. T. Stotesbury, was sled in the winter. (It was said at the time purchased from the Cassatt family (relations that some of the largest trees cost $1,500 of the American painter Mary Cassatt) in each to install-a staggering price for 1923, and transformed through the talents of 1901.) The plantings were orderly in care- the architectural firm Magaziner, Eberhard & fully edged geometric beds, much like Harris into an extravagant 80-room Colonial parterres, and consisted of popular flower- Revival "cottage." Famous for its 52 tele- ing plants: delphiniums, dahlias, astilbes, phones and gold-plated bathroom faucets, it hollyhocks. It is evident from photos that sported a surprisingly modest garden by over the years, different planting schemes, Beatrix Farrand, comprising white trellis- from bedding to herbaceous borders, were fenced rooms filled with orderly beds of The trellis garden at Wingwood House, tried in these beds. The garden served for perennials and annuals, and decorated with showing the open structure of the intimate and grand entertainments. The tea architectural fragments. The scale of these square lattice high fence and arbor. house, with its fireplace for foggy Maine af- rooms could well fit a suburban backyard, Nicotiana and climbing roses inhabit ternoons, was a refuge for both family and and seem unusually intimate for SO grand an the arbor, and a stone basin resides guests-a refuge that is now lost for all time. estate. The use of graceful elliptically arched within. JULY/AUGUST 2004 41 LESSONS IN DESIGN LEARNING FROM LOST GARDENS arbors foreshadows some of the important ideas Farrand would later feature in one of her greatest works: Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C. The house was torn down in 1953, to become the site of the car ferry ter- minal to Nova Scotia. Asphalt is now the most conspicuous material on view. EDGAR SCOTT. esa CHILTERN The last garden is a great surprise, given the Scott garden plan (1909) with later hand labeling. Note size of the four-foot table, same community context of rather staid colored red, at edge of central lawn. The pond was visible over a boulder threshold summer homes. It was designed between from within the garden. 1901 and 1912 by Beatrix Jones (who be- that survive, we can get a tantalizing taste of came Beatrix Farrand in 1913) for Ambas- this garden experience. Chiltern was demol- sador and Mrs. Edgar Scott. One of her ear- ished in 1946, and Mrs. Farrand was sad to see liest and most innovative commissions, this it go. She salvaged four elaborately carved cor- garden brought the color and massing ideas nice sections from the house and transformed of Gertrude Jekyll together in a grand "or- them into panels for a small garden fence at ganic" plan, and produced what I call an Reef Point, her own home nearby. In 1955, "Alice in Wonderland" garden, dwarfing when she retired to a new home, called Gar- the visitor to childlike proportions. The land Farm, she brought this fence along and Scott garden view, toward bench and house, a large Tudor-style structure, was incorporated it into her new-and final- table. Note height of table (about 30 designed to stand on the shore and was garden, where it survives today. inches) as a scale for the height of barely visible from the garden, which was Were it not for surviving documents, we plantings. The delphiniums to left behind carved out of the native spruce and birch would not know about these gardens, or the the bench are about 7 to 9 feet high! forest behind the house. A roughly circular place they hold in American garden history. lawn formed the core of the room, with sin- The photos, postcards, articles, drawings, uous grass paths connecting out to the and manuscripts that illuminate lost gar- house and other destinations. The garden dens lie in attics, scrapbooks, archives, his- had a large semicircular bench, designed by torical societies, and landfills all over the Beatrix, with a table in front, where tea was country. Documents are discarded or lost served every afternoon during the summer daily, and the simple act of directing them (weather permitting). The original plan to holding organizations can preserve much shows this bench and table at the edge of of this heritage. Western societies strive to the lawn, but the amazing thing is the scale Scott garden view, with house behind. preserve the treasures of Rome. Let us pre- of the space. The table, highlighted in red serve these treasures of home-the garden on the plan, is four feet long. If one com- out plant names. The list has been lost and on- milestones of our communities. H pares this size to the planting masses, it is ly the plan exists in the University of Califor- evident that many of the drifts of plants are nia/Berkeley archive, where Farrand's papers up to 25 or 30 feet across. One plant type in reside. Anna Scott Kennedy, who was raised in one color forms each mass, a gigantic scale this garden, discovered fragments of a plan on for an herbaceous border. The whole gar- which her mother, weary of checking between den measures almost 300 feet long by 100 plan and list, had written in the plant names. feet wide, without a single straight line in it. This recovered information has allowed the The only color image found of this garden plant list to be reconstructed-90 years after shows the richness of these huge masses, and the garden was built. Mrs. Kennedy spoke the masterful vertical scaling of plants from passionately about how the family had lived in Anna Scott, planted among the flowers the center to the shrub and woodland back- that garden, with teas, birthday parties, and in her "wild rose" costume, during the drop. The plant list for the original design was children's pageants all leaving an imprint on annual children's pageant performance keyed to the plan, which was numbered with- their lives. Through the snapshots and stories in the Scott garden. 42 JULY/AUGUST