The speaker at the Garden Club of Harvard’s April meeting was landscape designer Laura Bibler, who spoke about the boom in gardening at the turn of 19th-century America and the women who wrote books on their observations. Bibler’s slides of the text and photos of their gardens show that many of our “modern” ideas came from our grandmothers and great-grandmothers who followed the advice of these writers.
The inspiration for Bibler’s talk, “Our Grandmothers Knew What They Were Doing,” came from her work restoring the gardens at the Coolidge-Stevens Place in Andover, now owned by The Trustees of Reservations. The former owner, Louisa Stevens, left meticulous documentation of the 1907 design of her perennial garden. Such records allowed Bibler to replicate the garden; the project also spurred Bibler to research garden books of the early 20th century, written mostly by women. She said people liked the new look of English gardens, and they were clamoring for advice on gardening in the places they lived.
A 1904 edition of Helena Ely’s revolutionary garden design book. (Courtesy photo)
Bibler cited “A Woman’s Hardy Garden” by Helena Ely, written in 1904 in response to her friends’ request to write down her gardening advice. A wealthy woman, Ely spent six months in the country and established her garden, Meadowburn, in Vernon, New Jersey, close to the New York border. Her book began a revolution in the gardening world: She advocated for the more natural, informal perennial garden rather than the formal one of geometric shapes filled with bright annuals, called “bedding out,” that had been popular in the Victorian period. She knew the secret to flowers is in the rich soil in which you plant them, and she dug deep holes and layered them with good dirt and compost. Ely had the idea of moving shrubs away from the foundation of the house and never planting them in a stiff line.
Ely introduced the idea of a succession of blooms in the garden, something of interest from May to November, with taller things in the back of the border and bulbs at the front edge. She recommended plants she had observed doing well in her climate: Narcissus poeticus, peony, sweet William, foxglove, hollyhock, hydrangea, delphinium. And she said of phlox, ”I would certainly never have a garden without them.” One could achieve this continuous bloom even in a small space where “plants must be so closely set that when they are developed, no ground is to be seen.”
Horticultural advice
She gave horticultural advice, which Bibler said she totally agrees with: Pinch back chrysanthemums in spring; prune deciduous shrubs lightly right after flowering; cut delphinium stalks after bloom for a second flowering. And some philosophy: “Every owner of a garden has certain favorites; it really cannot be helped, although to do so seems unfair, like a mother who has a favorite child.” “A lesson must be learned from every failure; with renewed patience, persevere until success is reached.” And for the stressed: “Go to the garden. Though murder may have been in your thoughts, serenity will return.”
Karen Green’s cousins Lucy Ann and Marie Hermann pose with their dog in their grandmother Flora Hermann’s, garden at 90 Oak Hill Road. (Courtesy photo)
Bibler read a passage, which, she quipped, showed that even this wealthy woman with a fabulous property could have garden envy. Ely described how she always drove past the expressman’s garden in the village because she so admired his anemone japonica and wondered how he got such a beautiful display.
Next Bibler described a 1921 book by Mrs. Francis King called “The Little Garden.” King agreed with Ely about a succession of color and harmony in the garden, but she seemed more didactic in her advice than Ely. She recommended a border, “a line of enclosing green” because “all garden practices will thrive the better for the protection from the too curious eye.” She advocated for garden “rooms” but cautioned there must be few extraneous objects and those must be used only as accents to the whole. Her analogy: “No French woman would buy a hat unless she sees herself, under light, in a full-length mirror.”
A gardener should put the tall plants in the back, though not in a straight line, but King allows that one can sometimes be toward the front “as if it had escaped from the group.” She orders a buyer to “never regard only the one plant at a time;” one must imagine the plant in groups and with companion plants.
Color my garden
“Color in My Garden” by Louise Beebe Wilder, published in 1918, was the third book Bibler discussed. Wilder introduced the rock garden and said that a number of different “pictures” should comprise a garden, each one charming in its own right. In talking of color, she said blue, more than any other color, needs vivid reds or white to bring it out. And Wilder had this to say about white: “White used in broad masses has dignity and a serene beauty but spotted all about the garden is simply a stirrer-up of factions, setting flowers against one another instead of drawing them together.”
Bibler’s research was impressive, and the passages she chose from the three books provided wisdom and horticultural information. The women wrote about their gardens with love and wit, in very distinct voices. These well-to-do women were inclusive and wanted to share both advice and plants with any woman interested in gardening. It is indeed interesting to learn that what we think are modern ideas, our grandmothers already knew.
Laura Bibler’s talk inspired members of the Garden Club to look for photos of their grandmothers’ gardens and to call up memories of time spent in the gardens of these women who knew what they were doing.
Karen Hermann Green recalls the gardens of “Grammy Flora” (Mrs. Ernst Hermann):
“Flora began her garden at ‘Westward’ (90 Oak Hill Road) outside the kitchen door and then along a lattice fence separating the garden from an orchard. There were flagstone walkways surrounded by bulbs, perennials, trees, and shrubs. Today in the front yard there still remains a magnificent trumpet vine with a huge, winding trunk. At one time it climbed up the front porch. Over time, the porch deteriorated and had to be removed when Don and I returned to the farm to raise our family. In the yard where her formal garden was, there still grows a golden rain tree that stands at 30 feet and continues to seed itself in our gardens. I think it is safe to say that many of her garden ideas came from her years in the Garden Club of Harvard, of which she was a charter member.
“Flora and other members of the Garden Club organized flower shows to be put on in the upper Town Hall. Flora entered individual flower specimens from her garden and also entered arrangements. I can only imagine how elegant the ladies looked in layered white dresses, perhaps gloves, and most definitely beautiful hats.
“In 1952 Flora moved to the small cape with two dormers on Still River Road in the center of Still River. There she continued her love of gardening, creating perennial borders on three sides of the backyard with islands of perennials in the middle. This amazing yard hosted Flora’s daughter’s wedding reception in the early ’50s.
“Both of the houses that Flora called home have wonderful western vistas to this day.”
In talking with Green, who wrote this memory a couple of years ago, I learned the sad news that the golden rain tree had been lost in one of the late winter windstorms this year. The good news is that Green kept up Grammy Flora’s garden at the farm, and when she and her husband moved next door, divisions of Flora’s plants went with them.
A wheel from Kathy Hewett’s grandmother’s horse-drawn hay rake. (Courtesy photo)
Kathy Hewett recalled, “This is a small garden in my sister’s yard in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The wheel is from grandpa’s horse-drawn hay rake, and my sister got it from our grandmother, who had kept it in her garden in Farlington, Kansas, since at least 1900. In our grandmother’s garden, it was ringed with snow-on-the-mountain, euphorbia, “live forever” (sedum), zinnias, and a climbing rose. Behind this wheel was the smokehouse and, behind that, the outhouse that was still in use when I was a child. Nearby was a grove of small, sweet, red plums we made into jam; beyond that, grapevines on the fence, the vegetable garden, and cutting garden of gladiolas, zinnias, cosmos, bachelor buttons, and many other blooms. Everything she grew had a purpose. Grandma Dee lived next to the Methodist Church where she worshiped with family and 25 grandchildren, quilted twice a week, and always provided the sanctuary with flowers from her garden.”
Marijke Vallaeys remembers the garden of her grandfather in Wilhelmshaven, Germany: “a paradise for children … small paths, bordered with, among others, a bush with black currants. August apples under the tree. Fragrant roses, always one in a small vase in the sitting room. Enough room on the lawn to play, to sunbathe.
Painting by Suzan Osborn. (Courtesy photo)
Suzan Osborn painted the flowers in her grandmother’s garden at the age of 15. “It is a time capsule of some of the flowers that she grew in her mid-century garden. Her home and garden was in Hollis, Long Island, New York, and I visited her every summer for a week or two when I was a kid. In her company I was exposed to diverse artistic opportunities that greatly influenced my life. And her gorgeous garden with winding paths and a goldfish pond was a strong influence for my lifelong involvement in gardening and garden painting. She also had a compost pile, which was rather radical for its time, but that certainly encouraged the profusion of flowers in her garden.”
Betsy Morton recalled, “I heartily remember my grandmother’s two rose arbors (red and yellow climbing roses) with a swing attached to each of them. As a child, I used to swing and enjoy the fragrance of those roses. It must have been an inspiration to me to foster my own love of gardening.”
