GARDENING: A Cultivated Gentleman

"It is but the simple truth to say that one lives in the Berkshires for the outdoor beauty and not for the elegance and costliness of the houses,” sculptor Daniel Chester French declared. “For six months of the year, I am in heaven.”

French contributed to the area’s outdoor beauty with a heaven of his own creation, a studio garden and grounds on his gentleman’s farm in Glendale, a hamlet of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His wife, Mary, named their estate—modest by their era’s standards, if not by ours—Chesterwood.

Best known for his 1920 sculpture of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., French was the foremost sculptor of the American Renaissance. Chesterwood serves as a glorious 122-acre time capsule: the house remains furnished as French had it, the studio is still filled with his work, the landscape adheres to his original design, and the gardens are brimming with the flora that he so carefully planned and planted. It is also the nation’s only artist’s residence and studio that is owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

“Chesterwood gives a wonderful appreciation of French, not just as a man and an artist, but also as an individual interested in nature and beauty and garden design,” notes the museum’s executive director, Donna Hassler.

When he purchased the eighty-acre Marshall Warner farm in 1896, French, then forty-six years old, was already one of the nation’s leading sculptors. His career began with a failure: at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he flunked freshman science and math, and this freed him to embark on a creative journey, studying sculpting with various teachers in Boston and Europe.

French was well connected socially and, being acutely tuned to the values and tastes of the era, built his career on public commissions. At age twenty-four he unveiled his first commission, The Minute Man, in Concord, Massachusetts, to national acclaim; eighteen years later he created The Republic, the sixty-five-foot-tall centerpiece for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Having grown up on his family’s Concord farm, a small commercial business producing asparagus and strawberries, and having studied in Europe, French understood how to shape a garden. His father, Henry Flagg French, was a prominent judge who also served as president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College at Amherst for two years, authored the book Farm Drainage, and penned articles for The Horticulturist, a magazine founded by early-nineteenth-century landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing.

While studying sculpture in Italy, French lived in a Renaissance villa with the family of the late sculptor Hiram Powers and visited important English and American expatriate artists. In a letter to his older brother William, an engineer and landscape architect in Chicago, he described one artist’s home as “a pretty Italian garden with a studio at its foot.” French later incorporated this unity of art and garden into his vision for the life he created at Chesterwood.

During the summers of 1891 and 1893, while visiting a Cornish, New Hampshire, community of notable intellectuals and artists including sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and landscape designers Charles Adams Platt and Ellen Biddle Shipman, French expanded his view of the garden as an art. In Cornish, houses boasted expansive vistas and, though influenced by formal European design, their gardens were more naturalistic, borrowing from English tradition via exuberant flowerbeds overflowing with color and texture.

French’s great sensibility as a sculptor, his appreciation of natural settings, and his love of plants all contributed to his design of the Chesterwood landscape. Using the same method he employed for his sculptures, French planned the property using three-dimensional clay “sketches,” molding clay models of the terrain and its features. “If you got your essentials right, your foundations, if your skeleton and bones were in the right place, then the chances were that you would have a statue—or a garden—that would stand up and look well throughout the years,” his daughter, Margaret French Cresson, who established Chesterwood as a museum, recalls him saying.

Embracing the spectacular southward views of Monument Mountain and Mount Everett, French built his studio, and a few years later, when the original farmhouse became too cramped for the family and their many summer guests, he replaced it with a neoclassical Colonial Revival villa that incorporated interior architectural details salvaged from its predecessor. Both the house and studio were designed by architect Henry Bacon, whom French met while working on the Chicago World’s Fair.

French, who had great respect for traditional art forms, drew upon the formal structure of classical Italian and French gardens in creating his own studio garden. He conceived of the studio and the studio garden as a whole, laying out the garden and planting perennials three months before construction of the building was finished.

“Our goal is to keep the garden exactly as French had it when he first laid it out,” says superintendent of grounds and buildings Gerry Blache. Visitors to Chesterwood still see the gardens as the sculptor created them.

On the sloped site of an old apple orchard north of the studio, French used tall brick and stone walls and hedges to create a formal enclosure, setting off the garden as a private oasis and incorporating some of the property’s original trees. Just outside the studio entrance, he created a semicircular, pebbled court with an exedra, a long, curved marble-composite seat. Ensconced in simple beauty, the space is accented by brilliant hardy phlox, golden glow, larkspur, poppies, and lilies, balanced by a small, square lily pond with a white marble border.

Punctuated by vibrant, elongated English-style perennial flower beds, the intimate garden rooms are connected to the larger landscape by sequences of increasingly tall plants and woodland shrubs. From the exedra, marble steps rise to a straight path bordered by peonies, high-growing lilies, tree hydrangeas, clematis, and poplar trees. Extending to an apple orchard, the path is bordered by large ferns, mountain laurel, and low hemlocks before it enters the dense woods.

In the European fashion, French deployed man-made elements to create distinct, quietly beautiful focal points including trellises draped with clematis that flanked the studio door, the lily pond, the exedra, stone benches, red terra-cotta pots he found on a trip to Italy, marble dolphins and urns, a pergola, and statuary. In his 1902 book American Gardens, author Guy Lowell describes this method as offering a pleasing contrast to the vegetation which, by continuing the lines of the studio out into the grounds, forms the garden into its own outdoor “room.”

“It is as beautiful as fairyland here now,” French wrote. “I go about in an ecstasy of delight over the loveliness of things. The walk leading from my studio door up to the woods ... is very effective, particularly in June and July when the peonies are in bloom and again in autumn when the hydrangeas flower. Here where the soil is especially suited to them, the peonies appear as handsome shrubs even when they are not in blossom.”

 The garden does not stop at the edge of the lawn and flowerbeds. French placed two tall Ionic columns and a classical sculpture by Henry Adams to mark the beginning of one of many woodland paths that lead through dappled clearings furnished with benches and statues to open vistas.
“Those spots had been waiting to be turned into a garden for a hundred years, and just that particular kind of garden, and no other!” Mary French exclaimed upon completion.

French’s goal was to celebrate and enhance the Berkshire scenery he treasured. During the thirty-five years between his purchase of Chesterwood and his death there in 1931, he continually added to the property, improving it by ordering his own plants each year, experimenting to see what worked (and what didn’t), pruning roses and fruit trees, clipping hedges, replacing storm-downed trees, and landscaping new areas. French also restored the farm’s fields, drained low land, and removed rocks to make plowing easier. He cultivated fruits and vegetables, kept utilitarian livestock, and managed his woodlands. Adding horticultural books to his library, he read, studied, and kept a garden notebook in which he tracked weather conditions, yields from the fruit trees, and gardening successes and failures. His apple harvest included Golden Russet, King, Baldwin, Fameuse, Rhode Island Greening, Sweet Bough, Alexander Hubbardston, Grimes Golden, and Bismark varieties. He rotated crops of oats, barley, and buckwheat and kept cows and leghorn hens, harking back to his farm upbringing.

“When he sold five tons of hay to a neighbor to be paid for in labor or manure, he was as pleased with the transaction as though he had just completed a statue,” his daughter once said. “Where other men played golf, he clipped the hedges.”

French reveled in his roses—his favorite was Frau Karl Druschki—and complained when he suspected mice of devouring the rose blossoms and the hollyhocks. He and Mary served tea under the large apple tree or the pergola, illuminated the garden with strings of Japanese lanterns for evening parties, and danced until the wee hours in the studio and on the piazza. Outside the formal garden, he planted trees in stately rows along the drive and Williamsville Road, writing, in 1907, “I am setting out shrubs and trees in the usual uncertain manner, liable to revision in future years.”

In 1904, French wrote, “I fear … I am gradually evolving into a gentleman’s estate which is not at all what I intended to have.” Two years later, he added, “Our place looks most too fine for a mere artist now.”

The sculptor often discussed gardens and landscapes with friends and neighbors, including Edith Wharton. At The Mount, Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, the pair would wander the grounds, exchanging ideas. As French’s reputation as a “landscape gardener” grew, other friends and neighbors enlisted his help. He designed the Lenox Garden Club’s 1922 show, the grounds of the Stockbridge Casino (now home to the Berkshire Theatre Festival), and six other Stockbridge gardens, in Glendale, on Prospect and Yale hills, and elsewhere.

Though most of these gardens are gone, French’s creation at Chesterwood survives. Blache concedes that French made one mistake—the use of invasive Japanese barberry—which the grounds crew is still trying to eradicate. But that is the only element that is not still celebrated and preserved. In fact, this summer the museum commissioned ceramist Thomas Mesquita to reproduce a Chesterwood jardinière, which will be offered for sale in the museum shop, and its annual outdoor sculpture exhibit will focus on figurative work, like the pieces for which French was most known.

By the sculptor’s own standards, Chesterwood’s gardens and landscape have stood the test of time. As French concluded in an article he wrote for International Studio magazine, “I think the test of a garden is whether you like to be there, and whether you feel like staying and enjoying it, instead of wondering at its magnificence.”

Gladys Montgomery is a Berkshire Living contributor and editor of  Berkshire Living home+garden.

THE GOODS

Chesterwood
4 Williamsville Rd.
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.3579

Picture Perfect: Paul Rocheleau
Known for his Berkshire scenes and stunning architectural photography, Berkshire Living contributing photographer Paul Rocheleau captures Daniel Chester French’s heavenly landscape in a summer photography exhibit at Chesterwood. Showcasing the home and gardens once so carefully tended by the famed sculptor, Rocheleau’s breathtaking images—which are signed and available for purchase to benefit the museum—complement self-guided tours at the historic property.—AMcG

Paul Rocheleau: Photographs of an Artist’s Landscape
Jul 17-Sept 19
Reception Jul 17 at 4:30-6:30
The Morris Center at Chesterwood
4 Williamsville Rd.
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.3579