Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
the architects were inspired by the Grand Trianon at Versailles to design a garden pavilion facade of arched niches and Ionic pilasters to surround the garden.
During the planning stage of the Frick Garden, Page was introduced to Powers Taylor of Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne, New York, who had already been involved in other plantings at the Frick. From this meeting came one of the most important partnerships of Page's career in America. The men would spend hours roaming the acres of gardens at Rosedale, where Page learned about the hardy plants and trees of the region. For his part, Taylor enjoyed the challenge of working within the rigid architectural framework composed by Page. At the Frick, trees—like the Sophora japonica and the Koelreuteria paniculata—were placed and rotated into position for the best view from the street. A Metasequoia commands the northeast corner, linking the lower garden with an upper planter of pear trees that were intended to conceal the Frick's library building next door. And in the niches, dark green trellises support wisteria and clematis vines.
Although the border plantings change seasonally to introduce new colors and textures, what makes the scene alluring even in winter snow are the strong forms that Page cherished in his gardens. During recent warmer winters, the beds are carpeted with blue pansies that make a strong contrast with deep evergreens like the Cryptomeria japonica ‘Lobbii' that grow in the foreground. No doubt Page also saw his enclosed design as an antidote to the rustic openness of Central Park across the street.
He used similar motifs in designing a sculpture garden in 1978 for the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio—only here the inspiration was Italian. Taking into account the museum's building in the Italian Renaissance style, he wrote in his comments, “I have therefore thought it best that the whole effect of the gardens…should reflect the garden developments which such a building might have acquired over the last three or four hundred years.” And in suggesting an eighteenth-century landscape treatment along the main facade, he cited Veronese and Giorgione as two Renaissance painters who used “romantic landscape elements in relation to classical buildings.”
In 1984, Page was finally given the opportunity of designing a monumental civic landscape when he was engaged by the Friends of the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., to select the site and design the installation for twenty-two Corinthian columns that had originally supported the east central portico of the United States Capitol building, where the presidential inaugurations take place. Although the architect B. Henry Latrobe incorporated these columns in his 1806 plan for the Capitol, their design was derived from Sir William Chambers's 1759 Treatise on Civil Architecture. Chambers himself had borrowed the motifs from a sixteenth-century Italian book illustrating the combined capitals of columns from the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Pantheon. Carved from local sandstone, the Capitol's columns were dismantled in 1958 and replaced with marble.
In a sense, the project was like creating a ruin as grand as the Roman Forum, since the columns' formation in a rectangle with the hint of a portico suggests the remains of a grandiose building. He selected a vast knoll with a prospect overlooking the surrounding meadows, and a rill from a low bubbling central fountain in the marble floor of the structure cascades down a rise into a reflecting pool, thereby echoing the settings of other great monuments in the nation's capital. Herbs were planted in the interstices of the marble floor. Once he drew up the plan, only the first column had to be sited and the rest could be mathematically deduced, not unlike the formation of the pleached linden trees at L'Ecurie.
In many ways, all of his work—including the country houses of England—served as a prelude for his most ambitious achievement in America—the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens at the PepsiCo World Headquarters in Purchase, New York. In an effort to pull his company together under one roof, Donald M. Kendall, who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of PepsiCo, gave up the company's several offices in New York for a rural location, thus spearheading the creation in America of the corporate park. He had achieved two major goals before he met Russell Page—the first was the completion in 1970 of a new low-slung building of inverted ziggurats designed by the architect Edward Durrell Stone, and the second the accumulation of a major collection of contemporary sculpture that was placed both in courtyards framed by wings of the building and in an open landscape. These outdoor areas had been designed by Edward Durrell Stone, Jr.
When Kendall first saw the gardens Page designed for Augustine Edwards in Chile (where Edwards had worked for PepsiCo), he realized the greater possibilities offered by the 168 acres of former polo grounds surrounding the headquarters. They now include more than forty sculptures by twentieth-century artists. There was an opportunity in the New World for corporate America to replace the landed gentry of the Old World in the scope of cultivating the landscape. This was the ideal canvas for the kind of eighteenth-century landscape devised in England by “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton.
When Russell Page began working at PepsiCo in 1978, the team included Powers Taylor and the Carmine Labriola Contracting Corporation. Like the historic circuits that were established in Romantic folly gardens in England, he laid out a winding “golden path” that linked the sculptures and the plantings he designed to complement their forms and sometimes their colors, as in the case of a stand of blue spruce positioned behind a red Calder. He became enamored of American trees and once wrote to a friend: “We're using American trees of course. Your Northeast has some of the most beautiful forests I've seen in my life. I'm using pines and cedars and junipers, lots of maples, liquidamber, called sweet gum here.”
But the jewel of this extravagant landscape with ornamental grass and woodland gardens were the mirror-flat rectangular lily ponds bordered by a sloping perennial garden in a right angle of the building. Richard A. Schnall, now vice president for horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden, remembers the day when Page arrived to plant this perennial bed. Schnall was working for Labriola and was at the garden to receive the order from White Flower Farm. Page directed him to lay out the plants in strict alphabetical order; and when he arrived, he began with “A,” pointed his cane for the placement, and went on to the next letter until they completed the alphabet. “He was simply the most knowledgeable plantsman I have ever known, and he could visualize exactly how the border would look in every season,” recalls Richard Schnall. On one of his PepsiCo plans, Page drew a pedimented trellised arbor taken from a drawing by Humphry Repton and wrote next to it: “I'm tired, it's raining and I am not a waterlily.” Page worked at PepsiCo to the end of his life; after he died, the corporation built the arbor with the inscription in his memory.
During most of the years Russell Page worked in America, his correspondence and plans bore the London address of his flat near Sloane Square at 12 Cadogan Gardens. This charming residential enclave around a garden is well known to American visitors who frequent the hotel around the corner at 11 Cadogan Gardens and share what must have been his own pleasure in the garden's year-round interest. One cannot help but think of him when the winter flowering cherry is in bloom and how a cloud of gray-pink blossoms would have filled his window.
When he published the new edition of The Education of a Gardener in 1983, he gave a copy to Powers Taylor with an inscription that sums up their long collaboration: “To my friend Powers Taylor, who over the years has taught me the ins and outs of making gardens in America.” It is a story simply told. For many years now, Powers Taylor and other gardeners, designers, and contractors who were devoted to Russell Page have maintained this peripatetic British garden designer's rich legacy in America.
Russell Page: Ritratti di giardini italiani, American Academy in Rome and Electa, 1998
Profile of Dan Kiley
NEARING NINETY, Dan Kiley has lost none of the irreverence (nor the long hair) he acquired at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, 1936-1938, when he rebelled against professors in the landscape architecture division who showed reams of slides turning students off European garden history. Instead, he and fellow students James Rose and Garrett Eckbo looked to the architecture department, under Walter Gropius, for inspiration and fresh breezes blowing across the Atlantic from the Bauhaus.
Kiley was raised in an old quarter of Boston, and his earliest experience of landscape was roaming alleyways between houses, crossing the Arnold Arboretum on his way to school, and ambling through Frederick