All the Presidents' Gardens by Marta McDowell

Author:Marta McDowell [McDowell, Marta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2016-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Ellen Wilson was adept at art and garden making. While her husband was president of Princeton University, she created a new garden for their residence at Prospect House, then rendered it in oils.

It isn’t surprising that Ellen Wilson would want an Italianate garden, summering, as the Wilsons did, in a Cornish, New Hampshire, house designed by architect Charles Platt. Platt’s book, Italian Gardens, was distilled from his own travels in Italy in the 1890s. It would have been reasonable for Wilson to hire him for the White House gardens, as he also handled landscapes for his clients, including many around garden-rich Cornish. But for some reason, Beatrix Jones got the nod. Perhaps Wilson remembered her from Princeton. The two women had met at Prospect House while Woodrow Wilson was president of the university from 1902 through 1910. Or perhaps Ellen Wilson, an artist in her own right, simply wanted Jones, the only woman among the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects, to have the commission.

It also isn’t surprising that Colonel Cosby was less than thrilled with Beatrix Jones. His Office of Public Buildings and Grounds had its own landscape architect, thank you very much, the Mit-trained George Burnap. Burnap, experienced in park design, had created a sedate Italianate rose garden, ornamented with trellising and a statue of the god Pan, to flank the West Wing. It was installed without much fanfare in the fall of 1913. The White House grounds had long been under the aegis of the Army Corps of Engineers, in the War Department. The Colonel was an officer in the United States Army, first in his class at West Point, and unaccustomed, one supposes, to dealing with professional women.

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