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 impressionistic painting filled with deep ocean blues and browns hung behind us. Outwards was a floor-to-ceiling window looking onto the reflection pool, with a copper statue spiraling over the water and hemlock bushes. Despite the heat outside, the home remained cool; George credits the fountains and tree cover for this blessing. The sun was diffused through the house into a muted glow, and I felt we were cradled by the light and leaves alone. It would have been easy to be rocked to sleep by the sounds of flowing water, singing birds, and rustling trees. I had many close calls with sleep in the early hours of my shifts there.

From 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., my life revolved around The James Rose Center. Three days a week, I would enter this sanctuary, log a hundred letters from Rose to his mother, point at plants and chipping paint with George, look at the trees and birds, eat my lunch, give one or two house tours, and then drive home.

When Liz, our archival godsend, made her return to the Center, archiving became more entertaining. Liz had been working for the Center for around four years. A year ago, she graduated with a B.A. in Architecture and has been attending to the James Rose Center ever since. She had taken up the task of organizing James Rose’s paper trail, a project full of waterlogged cardboard boxes and broken filing cabinets. With her help, we finished logging much of Rose’s personal correspondence and we got to the fun part—old film and pictures from the glory days of Rose’s home. She brought out a box of thick black binders with film arrayed inside plastic sleeves and showed George and me slide after slide of foliage glittering on the roof. She described to me the project she had been waiting to spring on an unassuming intern: the restoration of the roof garden. She said a proposal could be made showing what kinds of plants would do best in the open areas or alcoves of the roof and where to put them.

Naturally, I bit off more than I could chew and set to work drafting essays, rendering layouts, crafting a presentation, and assembling a document of notes on native plants that could be sustained in the home. The garden that was once filled in every corner with unfurling leaves still sits mostly barren, and my perpetual ideas are still a work in progress.

Rose believed change was the lifeblood of any project, design, or idea, positing in his writing that “change is the essence” and that “finish is another word for death.” He was adamant this be applied to his home, which he altered constantly until the day he died. Though people may visit and students of art, architecture, and environment like myself may sort through its papers in the summertime, the home has become relatively static. I couldn’t help but think that, try as we might, Rose would not have called this house ‘living.’ It is unchanged day after day, with no room to meander or shrink. So as I drew the new Hanging Gardens of Ridgewood, New Jersey, I pictured what Rose might have enjoyed seeing on top of his home. I proposed flowering shrubs (even though he used to prune off blossoms) and mostly native plants (even if Rose would have campaigned for English ivy).

It was odd designing this without James Rose. On tours, we recounted how he loved to argue and debate with his clients, pushing and pulling until they either broke or came up with a design to be proud of together. To complete that process on my own felt impossible, but it taught me how to create spaces with foliage alone by molding and rotating and pulling and pushing different species around the roof in my mind’s eye. I won’t be offended if my designs never leave paper. The exercise in creating an ecologically designed roof garden was enough for me. Besides, the summer was closing, I had to leave for Vermont in a week, and I was left to sit in the house alone. I raced to read as many novels and draw as many plants as I could stand to before school started and I would be too busy for leisure.

Ecological design and the practice of sustainable housing are both weirdly present in this home that was first built in the 1950s. It’s incredibly inefficient to heat and the way we fill the ponds every morning is definitely wasteful, but when Rose constructed his home out of secondhand scavenged materials, he was exhibiting the first rule of ecological design: keeping it cyclical. This was a practice he had started while enlisted in World War II. He took splinters of wood, metal flashings, and wire to construct tiny home models. This was the light that guided him out of the war, and it was there that the first version of his home was born. He maintained his house with similar practices, wasting as little as possible during the house’s creation. When an element of the house gave in, broke, or Rose just got tired of looking at it, its materials were redistributed throughout the house for various fixes or new implementations. When the second bridge to the north studio rotted away, he used the good pieces to replace other areas of wood on the roof. He carefully watched the resources of the land for waste, using rocks that were displaced in excavation as sculptures and displaced soil as a landscaping tool. No more would he tolerate unused spaces in setback homes with square footprints and flat lawns. Rose was creating spaces for people to feel safe and secure in nature.

Towards the end of his life, Rose became too ill to care for his home and a little too stubborn to ask for help from his friends or colleagues. His mother, sister, and partner had long passed, and he was content with allowing the home to decline. Even before he grew old, not all of his home could stand the tests of time and weathering. But I’m positive he meant it to be that way. He understood weather changed, rivers meandered, and trees were split by lightning. Why should humans brace against this when we could lean into it? When we could use it to our advantage in our art, structures, and philosophies?

Rose was not the easiest man to get along with, and he is nowhere near as famous as Frank Lloyd Wright or Pablo Picasso, but he was experimenting with ideas about sustainability long before the era of environmental awareness came to fruition. He proved a thesis long before anyone asked him to: what could suburbia look like if not Levittown? If we weren’t obsessed with the tamed and manufactured? If we focused on the environmental and cyclical? Rose is a testament to the possibilities of small-scale home sustainability. Done right, we could pull nature out from the peripheries, and create a more accessible, sustainable, and all-around creative future. H

Art by Ally Martin