VIEWS
News and Let’s Drink to That! Last year was a year of hurricanes, and hurricanes are no respecters of historic gardens. Hurricane Irma raged from 30 August to 16 September 2017, breaking a number of records, and amongst its victims were the historic gardens of Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida. In the early years of the 20th century the Cummer family, who had made a fortune in timber, built three mansions along the banks of Florida’s St Johns River, and Arthur and Ninah Cummer created a series of magnificent gardens, calling in top landscapers to assist them. ey started with an English Garden
by Ossian Cole Simonds and moved on to a spectacular Italian Garden by Ellen Biddle Shipman with reflecting pools framing the view to a ficus-covered gloriette inspired by the Villa Gamberaia in Tuscany. When Ninah Cummer died in 1961 she bequeathed her property and art collections to create a museum. An adjacent Cummer property contained an Olmsted Garden and this became part of the museum’s estate in 1992. Hurricane Irma gave the gardens a good pasting and the entire site was submerged for over a day. A restoration fund was set up to repair the damage
and Jacksonville’s Bold City Brewery approached the museum offering to help. e upshot was the creation of a brand new beer – but not any old beer. e museum and the brewers came up with a recipe which would reflect the flora of the garden. Cummer is famous for its roses so rose hips and petals had to be included, but the glory of the garden is the Cummer Oak with its 150 feet (45m) canopy. So, amazingly, a block of oak forms part of the recipe. A good part of the proceeds of the beer’s sale will go to the restoration fund. And the beer’s name? Avant Gardener!
Painting and Planting J.M.W. Turner inspired many later artists, particularly the Impressionists, and Mike Leigh’s 2014 film Mr Turner brought the man himself to a wider audience; but the house he designed, perhaps with his friend Sir John Soane’s help, fell into decay, as did its garden.
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e 2-acre site in Twickenham, west of London, that the painter bought in 1807 was then in the country and Turner saw it as a retreat from the noise of the capital. It was 1813 before the house, named Sandycombe Lodge, was built and he could move in with his elderly father. After he sold it in 1826 much of the long triangular garden, which Turner had also designed, was built on. Over the years, the house deteriorated, not helped by the roots of yew trees planted too close to its walls. e house was restored and opened to the public in 2017, and now the garden has been
completed and will officially reopen this spring. Although the site is much smaller than in Turner’s day, the design has been informed by a drawing (left) made by William Havell in 1814 shortly after the house was built. e informal planting scheme has been a careful balancing act, looking at both historical precedent and today’s horticultural conditions. Spring will see a variety of historical bulbs including varieties of ‘broken’ or Rembrandt tulips, followed in May and June by roses chosen for their sweet scent and pink and white petals. See www.turnershouse.org. HISTORIC GARDENS Review
Issue 37
