Immersion. Living and Learning in an Olmsted Garden by Nola Anderson

IMMERSION Living and Learning in an Olmsted Garden

N OL A AN DERS ON

Photography by Clint Clemens

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THE CHIMNEYS

The original property, the first summer residence in Manchester-by-the-Sea, was purchased in 1845 by Richard Henry Dana Sr., a Harvard-educated lawyer best known as a poet and literary critic. He was a founder of the North American Review, America’s oldest literary magazine, with contributors including John Adams, William Cullen Bryant, and Daniel Webster.

His son, Richard Henry Dana Jr., also a Harvard Law graduate, completed the purchase, noting in his journal that his father “seemed to think the owning of it would be almost too much delight for him to enjoy.” Additional journal entries mention selecting a house site “commanding a noble view both of sea & shore,” and, after the two-story clapboard house was built, spending weekends at the idyll they dubbed “The Shore”: OPPOSITE: Richard Henry Dana Sr. was the first summer

Delightful bath in the surf, tea, walk, & enjoyment of the pure air, the piney smell of the

resident of Manchester-by-the-Sea. In tribute, the

woods, the rolling sound of the surf, & the cheerful ray of the lighthouses lying over the water.

stretch of white sand below is now known as Dana Beach.

Dana Jr. was an abolitionist lawyer, sailors’ advocate, and author of the influential

of American Authors (New York: G. W. Putnam & Company,

book Two Years Before the Mast, which recounts his experiences as an ordinary seaman aboard a mercantile ship from Boston to California. The book, published in 1840,

ABOVE: An engraving of the Dana house from Homes 1853). BELOW: An unknown boy and his best friend play in front of the Dana house.

led to a landmark reassessment of seamen’s rights, and inspired twenty-one-year-old Frederick Law Olmsted to sign on in 1843 as a “green boy”—a sailor who had never been to sea. Olmsted’s year-long trip to China was harrowing, and upon returning home the next year he went to Connecticut to study farming.

Over the course of several years, R. H. Dana Sr. added six parcels to his property, ultimately creating an estate of approximately one hundred acres. Upon his death in 1879, the land was divided, and his daughter, Ruth Charlotte Dana, inherited the original property, which was sold to Gardiner and Emma Lane in 1902. The Lanes tore down the Dana summer house and built the seven-chimney Georgian Colonial Revival house that gives the estate its name.

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Even before purchasing the property, the Lanes began a relationship with Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architecture firm established by John Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., sons of the great nineteenth-century parkland pioneer Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. Initially the firm was asked to help site the new house, but the scope of the work quickly expanded to the design of the entire estate.

In his plans for the approach to the house, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. gave visitors to The Chimneys an unfolding sense of arrival; the half-mile-long driveway winds through sweeps of rhododendron, mountain laurel, rock outcroppings, and sun-dappled woods. At the driveway’s final bend, the house appears across more than an acre of rising lawn; a peastone driveway arcs toward the home whose entry is shielded by a porte cochère fringed with purple wisteria.

Only when visitors enter the front door and mount four steps to the foyer do they realize that the house is oceanside, with commanding horizon-to-horizon views. An Olmsted-designed balustrade bounds the southern lawn and frames the ocean islands.

The development of the Italianate gardens at The Chimneys is well documented.

The earliest Olmsted Brothers schemes, dating from August 1902, depict a simple “flower garden” to the west of the house. After many variations, a plan was developed in 1905; a year later, work commenced on a large, formal perennial garden with a Pergola, an ocean-view Overlook House, and a 2,800-square-foot water garden with five pools and a fountain. It has become known as the Water Terrace.

Three additional gardens were built between 1912 and 1914, flowing in an architectural response to the downward sloping topography, and forming distinct sequential terraces. From the Water Terrace high on the oceanside bluff, a series of granite steps descend through the newly created garden rooms to the Vegetable Garden and a concurrently created Wild Garden.

When Jim and I purchased The Chimneys in the spring of 1991, the Dana and Lane histories were mostly unknown to us, and we had yet to develop a full understanding of Olmsted’s contributions and artistry. The property was stunning, but we knew that it would require extensive renovation after forty years of neglect. What we did not appreciate was that our immersive experience would come less from the physical reconstruction process than through the unfolding of more than a century of history.

We discovered that The Chimneys and its gardens held a story of cultivated passions born of Gardiner and Emma Lane that, with inexorable insistence, would eventually become ours. This is a personal narrative of how, in the early twentieth century, one couple transformed a rustic oceanside property into a great work of art and, a century later, another respectfully reimagined it.

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PAGES 16–17: Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed the Italianate framework between 1903 and 1914. A series of terraces, flowing in an architectural response to the sloping topography, were conceived as distinct garden rooms. The names have changed over the years, but this 1913 plan accurately depicts the garden spaces. PAGES 18–19: Olmsted’s winding half-mile driveway provides an unfolding sense of arrival.

PAGES 20–21: Presiding over an acre of lawn, the 1904 Lane house was painted white. In our 1996–98 renovation we chose to paint it gray, the preferred color of FLO Jr. THIS PAGE (ABOVE): Only when visitors step into the foyer is Olmsted’s secret revealed: The Chimneys is on the sea. OPPOSITE: Olmsted-era wisteria embellishes the porte cochère. PAGES 24–25: The setting sun creates a golden hour on Massachusetts Bay, viewed above the original Olmsted-designed balustrade. PAGES 26–27: Clint’s sweeping drone shot of The Chimneys captures the house, carriage house (far right), Greenhouse (center top), and the large Water Terrace.

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FOOLS RUSH IN

Barely two weeks after Jim and I purchased The Chimneys we received an intriguing letter. Arleyn Levee introduced herself as a landscape historian and designer, and vice-chair of the Massachusetts Association for Olmsted Parks. She was leading a tour for the Massachusetts Preservation Conference and hoped to include The Chimneys. We demurred, explaining that we had just bought the place and it really wasn’t suitable for company: the garden paths were pure mud, the stone steps and walls had eroded or collapsed, the pools were rotted, and the remaining plants were either derelict or dead. Arleyn reassured us that she was well aware of the property’s condition and enclosed some irresistible bait: photographs of the garden in its prime.

It was the first time we had seen images of the original garden, and it was even more splendid than we had imagined. Immediately we wrote back, giving permission for the tour and asking if she might be willing to help with our restoration of The Chimneys.

Using historical plans and photographs obtained from the Olmsted archives in Brookline, Arleyn provided important perspectives. She explained that the garden was designed not, as we thought, by the man famously responsible for Central Park, but by his son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. I confessed I hadn’t known there was a “Senior” and a “Junior” or that the firm was called “Olmsted Brothers.” I was that ignorant. Arleyn, always gracious, did not laugh.

She went on to say that Gardiner and Emma Lane had initially asked Olmsted to consult on the house site, but in the end the firm’s work touched every part of the estate, from the nearly half-mile-long driveway to the seaside bluff, and included not only the Italianate garden framework but the garden structures, fences, lattice work, benches, and that balustrade we loved. After Gardiner Lane died in 1914, some planned projects, including a large extension to the west side

OPPOSITE: In pre-digital 1991, I taped together

of the house, were canceled. Emma continued to maintain the gardens, although

snapshots to create “panos” of the Lavender and Tea

less intensively, right up to her death in 1954. Daughter Katharine, known as K., was focused on her sculpture, and the garden received little attention.

Terraces (above) and the Vegetable Garden (below).

ABOVE: A thicket of forsythia was chainsawed to open the main driveway.

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Then Arleyn said something I always will remember: “This is not Colonial Williamsburg. The Lanes changed the garden all the time and you should feel free to change it, too.” I had never been to Colonial Williamsburg, the eighteenthcentury living history museum, and the idea of changing the garden just seemed bizarre; we hadn’t even fixed it yet. But I began to understand as she showed us a series of photographs made after the garden was built in 1906 and in subsequent years. While the architectural framework of the garden remained constant, the plantings changed dramatically. The Chimneys was a historic garden but, unlike Colonial Williamsburg, it was not stuck in time.

Plans were now available to start rebuilding the hardscape and Jim hired a premier New England construction company, Connolly Brothers, to manage and perform the work. Shortly afterward we learned this was a stroke of serendipity: owner Steve Connolly’s great-grandfather and namesake had built the gardens under Olmsted’s direction.

As construction started on the hardscape, we hired a landscape architect, an Olmsted expert, to address the plantings. The first steps were to review the historical documents and inspect the existing vegetation to determine what to keep, transplant, or remove. Walking out from the oceanside porch to the garden, we began tagging shrubs and trees for removal. After ten yards we turned back and started over, this time marking the keepers. With the exception of the mature trees, most of the existing plants were diseased, overgrown, or dead. Remaining trees were in dire need of pruning. Oddly, there was one stark exception to this motley collection: along the path adjacent to the vegetable garden were ten beautiful, healthy boxwood topiaries, pruned as balls. The caretaker for K. Weems told us that they had been planted a couple years earlier by a neighbor—perhaps as a temporary holding spot while a permanent place for them was located on his property.

We phoned the neighbor and asked if he intended to use the boxwoods; if so, they should be removed before we began construction. No, he said, we should feel free to use them, if possible. We did.

During the next two months the property was a demolition zone. All I remember is a lot of guys: guys with chainsaws mowing down sad old trees and the forsythia forest along the driveway; guys on small tractors rolling over the gardens—even up on the ocean wall—to yank out stumps, bittersweet and other invasive vines, as well as the summer’s occupational hazard, poison ivy; guys on big tractors tearing out the rotted concrete lily pools and excavating tons of dirt and debris; guys in hazmat suits constructing a plastic tent over the Pergola in order to contain chips while they stripped the lead-based paint. A second legion of guys continued to renovate the other garden structures in place but removed the arbor, fences, and garden benches to be repaired and repainted indoors. Remarkably, the century-old cedar panels of the original Water Terrace fence were in good condition and only

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had to be stripped and repainted. The fence posts were rotted and had to be rebuilt, but the original post caps could be reused. Everyone was delighted to see on the bottom of one cap the scribbling of an original Connolly carpenter: “1906.”

In the lower gardens there was far less noise and much more finesse on display as two expert masons realigned three flights of Rockport granite steps, using their hands and an assortment of hammers, chisels, crowbars, and what looked like miles of string. Every afternoon I checked on their progress and, when I got the nod, Jim and I took a test walk, first stepping gingerly, then practically bouncing down and up, down and up. The steps were perfect and stable yet retained their beautiful Olmsted-era patina. We were thrilled to see one thing finished. But then the masons brought in a Bobcat and started dismantling the stone walls. * At this point, I did the only sensible thing: I left. Recently retired from the advertising business and not yet settled into consulting, I grabbed the chance to take my dream vacation: a master class with the legendary cookbook author Marcella Hazan in Venice. After a week of cooking with the most delicious, freshest possible seasonal ingredients, I came back to Massachusetts inspired to grow my own vegetables and herbs. The Chimneys originally had an enormous vegetable garden, but that was not in the scope of the summer’s construction work.

I started by surveying the area where the vegetable garden had been. It already was densely planted with leafy, knee-high . . . things. Beans? Tomatoes? Or were they flowers? As I stood in the middle of the field, puzzled, I sensed that someone was watching. I looked up to see one of the construction workers. He had stopped on his way to the demo zone, probably concerned that I needed some sort of help.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know what these plants are?”

“Yes.” He nodded slowly. “They are weeds.”

The owner of a local garden center was my lifeline. As a young man, Ray McGuire had worked as a gardener at a DuPont estate, and he is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about plants. I went in and began browsing through the colorful seed packets on display: tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, lettuce, basil. I wanted all of them, and—why not?—I certainly had the space. I took two fistfuls of packets over

OPPOSITE (FROM TOP TO BOTTOM): Glen McInnis (then a kid, now our Property Manager) spent weeks on a tractor, clearing tree stumps, brush, and invasive vines from the ocean wall. The Tea Terrace path was reset with the original bluestone pavers. Steps and walls, all

to the counter. “Let’s see what you’ve got,” Ray smiled, sorting the packets by price.

in Rockport granite, had collapsed from years of interior

He held up the tomato seeds. “Are you planning to start these now?”

plantings and soil erosion. Connolly masons Eusebio

“Yes, I can’t wait!” I beamed.

and pavers using the original stone, weathered side out.

Rico (left) and Steve Schaefer rebuilt the walls, steps, ABOVE (FROM TOP TO BOTTOM): This leaky 1954

Ray turned over the package and showed me the small print: start date, germi-

greenhouse served until we could replace it in 2003. A

nation time, days to harvest. He explained everything. It was June, already much

Bobcat was needed to move the heaviest stones. The 1991

too late to start those seeds, but he gave no indication that I was an idiot. He just said that I might be happier with seedlings and showed me some of his favorite

Connolly crew were delighted to see this fence cap, dated 1906 by a Connolly carpenter. Remarkably, the fence panels and caps remained in good, usable condition.

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varieties. That summer I saw Ray a lot. He always took time to answer my questions and provide tips and encouragement. I brought him diseased leaves and ugly bugs in jars and, at summer’s end, a box of beautiful tomatoes. * In July an asteroid crashed in the middle of the upper garden. Or so it appeared: the hole where the new pools were to be built was sixty feet across and six feet deep. In the middle, protected by a wood cover, remained the base of the original 1910 bronze fountain, designed by Olmsted and cast by the venerable Gorham Manufacturing Company in Providence. Happily, the fountain was in good condition and just needed new plumbing. It was removed and sent out for the upgrade and a thorough cleaning.

It was fascinating to watch the pool construction process over the next three months. First, Connolly’s crew laid a grid of rebar on the pool bottom and installed standing rebar around the outside walls. A week later, on the hottest day of the summer, a huge concrete truck rolled up the driveway and across the west lawn and parked just outside the garden. The concrete was pumped through a long tube, like an enormous fire hose, then placed on the pool bottom and raked smooth. This was followed by the form work, with custom plywood forms used on the radius and standard forms on the straight sides. It was done in stages: forms, rebar, concrete . . . forms, rebar, concrete. The process reminded me of an incredibly complicated Jell-O mold my mother used to make: the texture was similar (I wondered if the taste might be, too).

Great care was taken to replicate the pools exactly, except for the substitution of Carrara marble coping—which Olmsted had specified—for the less expensive Vermont marble the Lanes had preferred and installed. During construction, Steve Connolly came by with the firm’s copy of the original 1906 invoice: $4,810.

When the pools were finished, the adjacent beds and paths were dug and rebuilt. In the Olmsted scheme, six panels had been designated for annuals, and historic photographs showed they were planted according to the plan. But within a few years the Lanes converted the panels to lawn—a wise decision, we thought. The original design also included two beds, 450 square feet each, for a collection of Japanese iris. On our first visit to the property, the beds contained a dozen sad-looking shrub roses. We could have replanted different roses, or anything at all—even lawn—but the idea of echoing Olmsted’s choice, with the sheer, joyful extravagance of hundreds of iris, was irresistible.

Another easy decision was to replace the existing higgledy-piggledy brick edging and THIS PAGE: By 1991 the water-lily pools had crumbled and needed to be rebuilt. A protective crate surrounds the original fountain.

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muddy dirt paths. The edging of the lower gardens was elegant spalled bluestone, so bluestone seemed like the appropriate choice for the upper gardens. The original paths were macadam; Connolly now recommended clean, fast-draining peastone.

In the lower gardens, the masons continued their meticulous work, rebuilding the walls with the stones’ weathered sides facing outward. The Bobcat did the heavy lifting but otherwise the men used the same tools they had on the steps: hammers, chisels, crowbars, string, and a whole lot of skill. The senior mason earnestly assured us that his walls would last much longer than a hundred years.

As in the upper gardens, the sickly existing plants were torn out and carted away, borders were dug, and the soil refreshed and regraded. The original bluestone edging and pavers were removed and reset at the proper grade. Steel edging was installed inside the long south and north borders to delineate the groundcover from the perennials. Meanwhile, the Olmsted-designed Tea House, smothered by overgrown trees, was repaired, reroofed, and repainted the original color, which we named Chimneys Green.

In July a landscape contractor was hired to carry out the work specified by the landscape architects. Looking at the bid sheet twenty-nine years later, I gasp at the amount of work and the number of plants. We really were crazy: —Bed preparation, supply, installation, mulching —8,000 perennials, 1,498 shrubs and trees, 152 roses and clematis, 1,466 groundcovers, and 1,260 daffodil bulbs —Lawns, 20,000 square feet —Rehabilitation of seeded lawn areas: 46,000 square feet —Construction items: a stone dust path at Pear Allée (adjacent to the Vegetable Garden); gravel driveway —Installation of irrigation system With the exception of the perennials planting, which was postponed to the spring of 1992, the construction, site work, and planting were all finished by the end of October. The boxwood balls, transplanted to prominent positions in the Lavender Terrace, Tea Terrace, and at the front of the house, were replaced

by Bradford pears to form an allée along a stone-dust path. As the legions of guys made their exits, just six remained to install a lattice fence around the Tea Terrace. There would be no more Bobcats.

TOP AND MIDDLE: The original macadam garden paths had disintegrated into mud and were replaced with peastone; the brick edging was upgraded with bluestone.

BOTTOM: The renovated Tea Terrace, waiting for plants, sod, and fencing.

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BECOMING A GARDENER

During that first winter I decided I should learn something about my plants, by which I meant the flowers that would be planted in the spring. They were my focus. As a child growing up in Minnesota, I spent part of each summer on my grandmother’s farm in the northern part of the state; one of my fondest memories is of the beauty and fragrance of the peonies and iris she grew around her house. From the time I began earning a paycheck, I allocated a couple of dollars every week to the purchase of a stem or two for my kitchen table. Of course, my budget increased over the years, but I remained keenly aware of the price of cut flowers. Now I would have an entire garden of them—free!

Since I knew so little—nothing, actually—the landscape architects had developed planting plans without my input or understanding. But they gave me a perennials reference book so I could start to get a sense for the plants on the order list. They urged me to ignore the common names and learn the proper botanical Latin, explaining that it wasn’t pretentious, it was practical: only with scientific names could one be specific in communicating about plants. Since I knew hardly any plant names, it was just as easy to start with the correct ones.

The book did not cover everything on the plant list, and often there were no accompanying photographs, so I turned to the library (remember, this was pre-Internet).

Over the course of several weeks I checked out such a sizable portion of the garden section that the librarian commented, “You must be putting in quite a garden.”

I just smiled, thinking: You have no idea. My reading expanded from perennials to roses and clematis and, yes, vegetables and herbs. Obsessed with flowers and food, I passed over the volumes on shrubs and trees. Soon I was hooked. I browsed bookstores and began my own library, starting with straightforward volumes— Peonies, The Iris, Japanese Iris, Roses—before discovering general gardening books

OPPOSITE: I snapped this picture of the Water Terrace just weeks after planting in 1992. ABOVE: Potting lotus was one of my first gardening tasks. Am I really wearing dishwashing gloves?

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