NAUMKEAG

Three pioneering figures in the history of landscape design within the United States are forever linked for their influence on the modern landscape-- Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley and James Rose. While enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the 1930’s, the three students became disenchanted with and rebelled from the status quo design aesthetic and conventional Beaux-Art teaching of the era. 

However, Fletcher Steele (along with Walter Gropius) were the only designers they respected for their development of modernism within the American garden.  Garret Eckbo remarked that Fletcher Steele was 'the transitional figure between the old guard and the moderns.”

Steele's work is considered by many to constitute the essential link, the transitional figure between nineteenth-century Beaux Arts formalism and the modern landscape design that Eckbo, Kiley and Rose ushered in.

Kiley states 'Steele was the only good designer working during the twenties and thirties, also the only one who was really interested in new things'.  Of the hundreds of gardens Fletcher Steele designed, Naumkeag remains his most written about creation.

map from Naumkeg website

Prominent attorney Joseph Choate hired Stanford White of McKim, Mead, White to design his 44 room “cottage” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts that he entitled Naumkeag (the native American name for the indigenous people of Salem, Ma.). Nathan Barrett developed the original design of the landscape, or Master plan. Mabel Choate (Joseph’s daughter) inherited the property and in 1926 began the famous collaboration with Fletcher Steele to create this most famous garden. This collaboration lasted thirty years as Mabel Choate and Fletcher Steele became close friends.  Within the mansion there was a bedroom maintained solely for Fletcher Steele, drawing table included.

Legend has it that the two of them (Mabel and Fletcher) were fond of a good martini and would spend many a day in the afternoon garden (which he designed) in a pair of stone chairs (at left in following photo) imbibing and collaborating… eventually they’d come to an agreement on their next project after several martins, and before the day was done Mabel would summon her staff for her checkbook and so began the next project.

Afternoon Garden – this is the first project Steele created at Naumkeag.  The brightly painted Venetian gondola poles around the perimeter of the garden frame views and give the garden a sense of enclosure.  The black obsidian oval within the two scalloped fountains mirror the infinite sky.

Fletcher Steele reclining in stone chair, afternoon garden

As an aside…Choate had originally approached Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to design the master plan. When Olmsted expressed his thoughts that the house should be situated at the bottom of the hill, Choate realized he had approached the wrong designer, as his attraction to this parcel of land was the grand view of the Berkshire Mountains and the valley below from the top of the hill. 

Perugino view – located at the south end of the top lawn, the view was named after the Italian painter Perugino.   The dramatic vista through the gardens and orchard is framed by Monument Mountain.

Of all the grand gestures at Naumkeag, The iconic Blue Steps are perhaps the most celebrated. Simply breathtaking,... every connoisseur of garden design should experience them.  But what I found of special interest are the grand views, the linkage between spaces, the changes of perspective, the intrigue and sensorial journeys you embark upon as you move from one space to the next.

As you leave the Afternoon Garden, you traverse the Pyramid steps down to the Water Runnel or “Rill” which was created to link the fountains of the "Afternoon garden" to "The Blue Steps”

To one’s left is the South lawn where a curving line of Robinia pseudoacacia ‘umbraculifera’ define the west side of the lawn, while along the east side, a double hemlock hedge (Tsuga canadensis) separates the lawn from the driveway above.  The undulating shape of the lawn echoes the shape of the distant mountains.

A cast iron pagoda house is framed by Japanese maples (Acer palmatum), In the first photo of these photos an allee of Linden trees (Tilia occidentalis)  are in the distance, reminiscent of the strolling walks taken in Berlin.

The “Ronde Pointe”-- a low hedge of clipped arborvitae, (Thuja occidentalis) with a long teak bench and intricate patterned brick wall become “a gathering of paths” which lies adjacent to it.

Below the South Lawn is the Oak Lawn, which dominates the terrace.  This tall Oak (Quercus bicolor) that the family would picnic under was one of the primary reasons Joseph Choate purchased this parcel of land.  The vast area and orchards below/beyond the rock outcrops were used as farmland. Crops grown and harvested there supplied the cottage and the New York apartment in off-season.

The Blue Steps,  Rose Garden, Evergreen Garden, Chinese Garden to be continued in my next post…

*unless noted all photos ©ToddHaiman2014

GARDENS AS SCULPTURE

On a trip to the New Museum several months back I encountered the sculpture of Urs Fisher. 

The physicality of these pseudo-organic large objects and voids I passed thru evoked images of a surreal garden with these masses of space representing the hanging limbs of trees, shrubs, man-cured hedges or topiary as positive spaces to the negative i passed through.

One begins to notice that Installation art is going some way towards re-integrating sculpture with its surroundings as sculptors have for years taking an interest in garden design.

Perhaps this finds its suggestion in japanese garden design with an emphasis on abstract compositional harmonies, rusticity,  borrowed views and  assymetrical configuration of design elements.  patterns and textures play their part as well.. a Shinto shrine exists as a space in nature.

However, It could be argued that "traditional" sculpture is considered three-dimensional, yet landscape design or gardens are more complex in that they have a fourth dimension... time. 

Perhaps there is a category, somewhere in-between the two disciples, where you place installation art, experimental gardens, etc., where  they truly merge?

Herbert Bayer

was perhaps one of the first to merge multiple visual disciplines.

The Marble Garden, 1955.  Slabs of unpolished white marble, found in a nearby quarry are arranged on a 38' square platform with interesting spacial relationships created due to shadows, shifting wind patterns and a fountain jet of water in the center. 

Bayer's influence is evidenced in successive modernists such as Ernst Cramer's "Poet's Garden".  Within a decade after this garden was exhibited at the 1959 garden Exposition in Zurich Switzerland it had a profound effect, maybe a "tipping point" on landscape designers and architects who then began incorporating landforms + earth sculptures into their body of work.

NATIVE PLANTS

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) one of the seminal figures in 20th century landscape design, was the child of a Brazilian mother (Burle) and a German-Jewish father (Marx). His mother fostered his passion for gardening and his father in design. His father had immigrated to Brazil around the turn of the century.  Born in Sao Paolo, at the age of 19, (1928) Roberto moved to Berlin to study art while engrossing himself in the massive cultural revival of the Weimar Republic. (Burle-Marx left after a couple of years as the political climate had quickly changed, most obvious of which was the building anti-semitism). However, It was while studying painting in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as he would later tell it, that Burle Marx realized that the vegetation Brazilians then dismissed as "scrub and brush," preferring imported pine trees and gladioli for their gardens, was truly extraordinary. Visiting the Botanical Garden in Berlin, he was startled to find many Brazilian plants in the collection and quickly came to see the untapped artistic potential in their varied shapes, sizes and hues.

The irony here is that these native Brazilian plants were not as prized in Burle-Marx’s homeland of Brazil as they were in Germany. Yet the twist is that they were soon to disappear from the Botanical Gardens because at around this time the Nazi party was developing it’s “Blood + Soil” ideology. “Blut und Boden” ideology insisted on the close relationship between nature and the German people and with it, preached the crucial role of landscape in forming and preserving national culture. This included the banishment of all non-native plants and trees from the Fatherland (Germany).

Reich Minister of Food + Agriculture Richard Darre, 

one of the leading proponents of "Blood + Soil."

Tried and convicted at the Nuremburg trials, he died of alcoholism.

RUDYARD KIPLING

A prolific English poet and author, most famously known for The Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, who is often associated with romantic British Imperialism, specifically in the Indian subcontinent.

Kipling was a lover of gardens and a maintained a luxurious estate in England, presently preserved and part of The National Trust (as pictured below).  Homes in Vermont and Mumbai have also been preserved and turned into museums.

A favorite of mine, this poem attributes the garden as a telling part of the culture and heritage of the British Monarchy, it also remains inspirational to the present day reader.

The Glory of the Garden

,

Rudyard Kipling, 1911

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,

Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,

With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;

But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red wall,

You will find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart of all ;

The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and the tanks:

The rollers, carts and drain-pipes, with the barrows and the planks.                                 

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys

Told off to do as they are bid and do it without noise;

For, except when seeds are  planted and we shout to scare the birds,

The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,

And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;

But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,

For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made

By singing:--"Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade,

While better men than we go out and start their working lives

At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-knives

There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,

There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick.

But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,

For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,

If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;

And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,

You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees

That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,

So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray

For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!

And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!