The Life Cycle of a Secret Garden Home By Alma Smith
It was a cool summer morning when I first walked into the James Rose Center for Landscape Architectural Research and Design. James Rose was the wunderkind of landscape architecture in the 1950s and is best known today for his Japanese-inspired garden designs. Yet, like many unlucky visionaries, Rose became an artist obscured by time and circumstance, buried behind more famous colleagues. I had been hired by the James Rose Center as an intern, my first office job aside from answering phones and sorting upholstery for my dad over the summer. My tasks would include maintaining the gardens, archiving all of James Rose’s personal papers, and learning everything about the home’s history. Easy enough. The home was a forest of walls, rocks, and trees, with two main suites, which made me second guess where the front door was supposed to be. You could walk left, to what I came to know as the North Studio, or right, to the suites that Rose had built for his mother and sister. Every path around the home was encrusted with golden pine needles and obstructed by rhododendrons. The light filtering through the trees was superbly green. James Rose hadn’t seen this light for 30 years. I circled the house twice before I resigned to sit on a bench and wait for someone to find me. It turned out that
the suite of Rose’s mother and sister was also where my coworker George was staying for the summer since he lived abroad. Modernity was all around. The living room was full of gridded planar surfaces made of tiles and wooden screens. The hearth stretched into a kitchen and a breakfast nook with low seating and an old French-looking kitchen armoire, which belonged to Rose’s mother. It was around the 1960s when Rose transformed the house into what it is today: a fluid terrarium of fountains and flora. He added his famous roof garden under a fiberglass and wooden trellis, an A-frame to divert rainfall from the flat roof, and a meditation room over his sister’s living space, which he dubbed the Zendo. This is where he sat, day and night, visualizing his creative ideas. Those first couple of days, George had me dig up ivy from the knots and mounds on the outskirts of the property, which I brought up in buckets for him to plant on the rooftop. It was almost comical, with two large obtuse-angled beds lined with nothing but stringy ivy. Blank spaces abounded. George made his opinions on the choice clear and lamented that our director preferred English ivy to grasses and shrubbery. We did most of our office work over the summer at a small corner desk in the living room. An impressionHeadwaters Magazine 26
