News and Views

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

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.

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

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!

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.

Fighting for Authenticity

What is authenticity and how far should we pursue it? If a park or garden was designed by a famous landscaper but has matured and evolved over the years, do you simply keep it refreshed or do you strip it back to the original design? This perennial dilemma is nicely illustrated by a controversy that has broken out in the affluent town of New Canaan, Connecticut, which is the fortunate possessor of an Olmsted park. In the early years of the last century Lewis Lapham, the founder of the Texaco oil company, acquired the Waveny estate in New Canaan, building a large mansion and calling in John Charles Olmsted (one of the sons of the designer of Central Park, NY) to design the gardens. In 1967, Lapham’s daughter, Ruth Lapham Lloyd, gave the gardens to the municipality to be a public park, and the citizens now regard it as one of the town’s major assets. Recently, the upper or ‘parterre garden’ was felt to be in need of remedial work and the New Canaan Garden Club produced a plan for the its redesign, involving new box trees and benches and some new shrubs in the north of the site.

Pitted against the Club was a firm of landscape architects, Keith Simpson Associates, which proposed a return to the original Olmsted plans of 1914. The Club countered by pointing out that the gardens had been developed over the years by Mrs Lloyd with help from Olmsted’s successor practice. The National Association of Olmsted Parks urged caution, but in December 2017 the Town Council voted 7-3 in favour of the Simpson proposal. The bitter divisions over this restoration highlight the conflict so often confronting those with the care of historic parks and gardens.

Dairy Free?

ere are sudden new signs of life at one of France’s most remarkable 18thcentury landscape gardens: Méréville, the country seat of marquis Jean-Joseph de Laborde, banker to the court of France, who met his end, like so many other great financiers, on the guillotine.

e gardens of Méréville were begun in 1784 and largely designed by François-Joseph Bélanger, the architect of Bagatelle. In 1786 Bélanger was succeeded by the landscape painter and designer Hubert Robert, who, in close cooperation with the marquis and a host of architects and sculptors, developed many remarkable fabriques, most notably the Laiterie, or ornamental dairy, and its temple – a remarkable reconstitution of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli.

By the late 19th century Méréville had fallen on hard times, and many of its most remarkable architectural features – the Rostral Column, the temple, the cenotaph for Captain Cook, and the façade of the Laiterie– were transported to the nearby domain of Jeurre, where they remain. e photo (right) shows the Laiterie being rebuilt at Jeurre. After a long period of neglect the estate was purchased in 2000 by the Départementof the Essonne, but restoration progressed only in fits and starts because of limited resources. In recent months, however, Méréville has been a hive of activity. In addition to a major planting campaign, the pathways have been reconstituted in their original positions, which has added a new sense of coherence to the site, and visually anchored its many

graceful bridges. Two of the bridges, long in a perilous condition, are also shortly to be restored, which will allow the public into many more areas than had previously been possible.

From May 2018 visitors will once again be regularly welcomed into the garden. See www.tourisme-essonne.com.