I was looking through some decidedly non-GCA materials when I stumbled upon something which you may - or may not - find worthy of a glance. Actually, I was looking up the phrase "it is difficult to tell where nature stops and the work of man begins". It's one of those expressions that has lingering appeal - even years later. I'm still not sure where the phrase originated. However, the front page of the internet inadvertently pointed to a story which bears more than a measure of corresponding relevance to our interests in this cloistered realm. I'll spare you my thoughts regarding the article - for now. Maybe we can discuss it later - if you care to.
The following is not my writing - but excerpts from a piece written by Judith Lang Day. The original article is much longer - in an Edith Wharton sort of way.
The American Gardens of Nims
She began her landscaping at Bee Tree in the 1920s and continued to refine her designs into the late 1950s. On both of Nim's estates, the houses sit high on a hill dominating the surrounding area, but in her gardens it is difficult to tell where nature stops and the work of man begins. They are carved out of the shape of the land, their boundaries are the natural growth, and the two tend to meld together. Her massed fields of flowers are the perfection of a natural meadow. Her woodlands were finely honed to emphasize the shape of a tree or the character of a rock and her paths curved through patterns of light and shadow. Lotawana emphasized plants that were indigenous to the area and highlighted native rock with imagination and dignity.
Her estates were not to be the formal showplaces of the wealthy, but fields and woodlands that elaborated on nature, never obviously controlling it and never completely subjugating it to the will of man. The gardens were just separate spots where bramble had been cleared and splotches of color substituted.
Naturalistic Design in the Country Place Era
The Country Place Era (1880-1940) in the United States was a time when the greatest American gardens of this country were created. The wealthy built great houses away from the dirt and noise of the city and surrounded them with luxuriously landscaped spaces.
Most often, these new American millionaires wanted to emulate the highly structured formal gardens that they had seen on their European tours. English parks, Italian fountains and French parterres all found their way to the estates of the newly rich. In the midwest, however, and scattered throughout other areas of the country were designers who were creating uniquely American gardens. They fought against straight lines and called on the forms of nature, not man, for their inspiration. They abhorred the Victorian use of bedding out annuals and heralded the use of native plants.
This naturalistic trend in landscape design was encouraged by Andrew Jackson Downy (1818-1852), continued in the work of Frederick law Olmsted (1822-1903) and culminated in the designs of Jens Jensen (1860-1951) and his work in the Prairie Schoo!. Jensen's designs concentrated on the juxtaposition of light and shadow, irregular axes through meadow-lands, water elements and an emphasis on local flora.
It is not known if Lotawana Nims knew the work of Jens Jensen. She was not a client but may have seen his designs in the parks of Chicago. It is remarkable, however, how closely her work expresses his theories. Traces of her work show Italian influence, and her use of annuals was extensive, but in her overall designs she worked in harmony with the natural setting. Few straight lines marred the curve of a hill or the edge of a field. Her wide paths curve through light and shadow and her garden beds flow into natural backgrounds. Her love of rocks and water, her massing of single plants, and her use of native material all closely relate to Jensen's work. Like the woman herself, Lotawana's gardens are truly unique and express a sense of the exuberant American frontier.
Bee Tree Farm
When Eugene Nims lived in Oklahoma he had been involved in the highest circles of the government: helping to establish laws, write the constitution and set up statehood. When he moved to St. Louis, he was no less active. Bee Tree Farm, the Nims estate outside of St. Louis, was a showplace to entertain the important people of Missouri as well as a retreat from their demanding city life. Weekends were spent there from October through June. The large stone house was located high on a bluff above the Mississippi River. Lotawana designed the surrounding 192 acres with all the elements that she felt were essential to landscape design. Wide trails for walking and riding were cut along the natural contours of the land. Clearings exposed majestic views of the river or highlighted a particular tree or rock formation. Irregular fingers of woodlands melded into the lawn and open fields. These were edged with native shrubs and trees that flowered exuberantly in the spring. At their feet were carpets of wild flowers, day lilies or bulbs. Far below on the river, the boat captains would blow their horns in appreciation.
Lotawana created Bee Tree for the nine months the Nims were there. Its exuberant spring show ended at the beginning of July when the family left for Cape Cod. It resumed again with the magnificent colorations of the fall. Even in the winter the structure of her design could be appreciated when no foliage decorated the plantings. The curving of the trails and the shaping of the woodlands alone exhibited the strength of Lotawana's plan.
The Larches at Woods Hole
Woods Hole is a most unusual summer community. Until the 1880s the town had been the home of the Pacific Guano Factory, not exatly a place for the stylish rich. By the 1920s, however, large homes were being built and the summer community was well underway. Unlike other resort areas such as Bar Harbor or Newport, Woods Hole did not attract the people who wanted to continue their city social life during the warm months. Instead, the Woods Hole summer community was largely composed of mavericks, the people who wanted to get away from society for a time. It was not a fashionable resort, but a quiet and conservative one.
The property had been abandoned since the early 1880s, and when the Nims bought it there was only a small patch of grass at the entry way. The rest of the land was a mass of brambles and poison ivy. Many of the old trees had been killed by Gypsy moths. There was a single track running through the center and no one dared venture from it into the jungle. Mrs. Nims began clearing brush around the house and called in a landscape designer from Boston by the name of Sheffield Arnold. In Mr. Arnold's plan, much of the land was to remain wild, except for the area directly around the house and across the driveway. The old eight foot wide drive was widened to sixteen feet and extended, curving down
Mrs. Nims rejected this garden room plan of Mr. Arnold. The nouveau riche of Newport might want the formal beds of the English great houses, but this was not for the lady from the American Midwest. It was too formal, too structured, too un-American for her. Arnold's garden was not about nature but about man's control of nature. In her mind, man's hand should not be so obvious. His garden would destroy the natural, wild land she so loved, and she rejected his formal ideas.
Mr. Arnold was let go and with few exceptions, Mrs. Nims turned her attentions to carving out a site to the northwest. The underbrush was cleared on the outer edge of the slope and only a few black pines remained - limbed up on the east and west sides of the slope, they framed the water view perfectly. The feeling is both Italian and natural.
A solution was designed for the eastern slope. The privet hedge along the bluff was to be removed and the lawn extended to a retaining wall. A shrub border below would begin at the porch line, go along the wall and curve to the south. Elegant stairs would circle down from the lawn to the base of the berm. The southern slope was to be regraded, softened and integrated into the western lawn. Mrs. Nims primarily objected to this because she felt that "cutting off the sharp top of the bank and rolling the slope down over to the existing surface tended to bring more foreground into the picture and thereby tend to throw the pond further in the distance."
Except for the minimal staking of the paths, nothing of the Olmsted plan was actually executed. Mr. Zack was discharged as Mr. Arnold had been. In 1930 Mrs.Nims took over the planting of The Larches herself. No professional would be hired again. For the next twenty-five years she would clear the brush, sculpt the land and paint it with the colors of a thousand flowers.
Many gardeners would help her in this endeavor but they all worked under the expert guidance of the head gardener and caretaker, Gabriel Bettencourt, who was hired in the early thirties. He tended The Larches in the nine months that the Nims were away and worked with Mrs. Nims when she was in residence. He put up with her whims and fiercely defended the greatest of her apparent eccentricities. He seemed to have understood her concept of design and would help her execute the smallest detail. Gabe loved and respected the soil and knew how to care for it. In the clay soil of the vegetable garden he incorporated hundreds of truck loads of sea weed and sand and sowed green manure crops over the winter. The soil is still extremely fertile, the best possible loam.
It is unclear in which order Lotawana created her gardens but it is clear that her greatest love may have been clearing the paths through the brush. Nothing pleased Lotawana more than creating views by judiciously trimming limbs and cutting trees. She was proud of these views in which no evidence of man's manipulation was felt. She could often be seen high in a tree, saw in hand, straw hat on her head, telling Gabe to cut the path in a certain direction.
In time, she would create four miles of paths, many more than Mr. Zack had suggested. Each had its own character created by the position of a rock, a view of the sea or the top of a hill. Curved and wide, the paths urge the walker onward into sun spots or shaded nooks, toward a perfect beech tree or around the comer to a view of a garden bed. Some paths were lined with Clethra alnifolia that perfumed the air in August, others with Viburnum that glowed in the shade in July. Blueberries (Vaccinium corymbosum) and Azalea viscosum grew wild with the shadblow (Amelanchier aroorea) and wild roses, usually the scourge of the Cape Cod gardener, were made focal points in their uncivilized June display. Maples and beeches shaded areas while bayberry (Myrica pensylvanica) flourished in the sunlight. A dirt bridge was created through the swamp and led to a path along a ridge that was covered with a moss floor. Its brightness glowed in the damp shade. All of these plants were native to me area, but the woodlands were as tended as me most formal of gardens. Tree pruners were brought in every year and a crew would work up to two months, clearing, shaping and perfecting the natural wonders.
On a hill above Fresh Pond and me marsh two paths converged on a clearing created to expose a most unusual tree, known to me family as the Climbing Tree. In fact it was an oak whose branches crawled (whether by heritage or environment) out from me main trunk for twenty-five feet into the clearing. Twining and slimering along the grass the massive limbs were a delight for anyone, but it was me children who enjoyed it most. Mrs. Nims felt that it deserved a place to itself. In 1943 she wrote to Donald Wyman at me Arnold Arboretum who came to The Larches to see the tree. In a letter after his visit he states, "The oak tree, which I was so very delighted to see, is a real honest-to-goodness black oak, Quercus velutina. If, as I suspect, the habit is natural and not a forced one, as Wilfrid Wheeler suggested, then it is a new variety which, as far as I know, has not been described." Its age was unknown. Gabe and his workers lavished the oak with fertilizer and water,
Being New England, almost every clearing revealed rocks and Lotawana loved these even more man the trees and flowers. Perhaps it was just to her own sensitivity to nature. Never was she happier than when she had unearthed a new rock that could be moved to the perfect spot or left in place and set off by its surroundings.
Although the spectacular nature of the show began to dwindle in August, the flowers in and next to the vegetable garden would take over the display. And when all else was gone, and the lilies were cut to the ground, a landscape of rocks was revealed in the lily beds providing a slightly mysterious winterscape seen against the background of an enormous beech (Fagus grandifolia) that stood guard over all.
Clearly charmed by the strength of their color, she brought them into the interior of the property as well. Behind the hybrid borders the wild orange day lilies were allowed to sprawl at will and in the fall, goldenrod (Solidago) glowed in the afternoon sun. Oaks and maples dotted the meadow.
Behind and below these modest beds Mrs. Nims created the major focal point for the interior of the estate. Once the brush was cleared it became evident that the topography of the land to the east was most irregular. Mrs. Nims took advantage of what could only be considered an impossible situation. She dug out the low spot, creating a large bowl in the ground. An old dead tree, covered in ivy, was allowed to remain in place providing a sense of perspective to the surrounding garden. Any feeling of the picturesque is overwhelmed by a sense of exuberance and lushness that luxuriated in color. Even in the depth of winter, the terraces and shape of the beds have their own integrity and charm devoid of blooms.
Lastly, there was The Grove. Not strictly a garden, this was the grove of Larches after which the estate was named. This became the picnic area, a gathering place for the family at Sunday suppers. Even after family members had moved to their own homes around Woods Hole, all would return here for large collective dinners. The lacey limbs of the trees filtered the sun and provided shelter.
Today Bee Tree Farm is a public park. It was bought by the County of St. Louis in 1972 and was the last open river bluff area in the county. The master plan to convert the private estate to public use was designed by Robert Goetz of St. Louis. Although overgrown and untended since Mrs. Nim's death, the structure of her design and her careful plantings were still intact. Bee Tree needed little alteration to convert it to a magnificent park for the public. Although the exuberance of The Larches may have died with her, many of the gardens did not.
Landscape design is an ephemeral art. Unlike a great painting, gardens often disappear at the death of their owner. After 70 years, Lotawana's gardens continue to flourish. Although details have been altered in many ways, the basic outlines are still visible. Brambles exist in place of cultivated woodlands, but the design of the paths through them has not lost its grandeur. The land she sculpted, the ponds she created and the curvilinear shapes of her flower beds still live as a testament to her natural design genius. In every rock, so carefully placed or highlighted, one senses her spirit and the story she had to tell.