The gardens

Magazine Antiques, March, 1995 by Robin Karson

While William Gwinn Mather hired Charles A. Platt to design his house and gardens, Warren H. Manning's role was initially less specific. Mather wrote to Manning on May 28, 1907, in the matter of planting [Platt] will seek advice. Mr. Platt and I will both be pleased if you will collaborate with him in this matter.(1)

If Manning, one of the country's leading landscape architects, was disappointed in his role as an adviser to Platt, he did not express it. However, he did write to Mather,

I am sure that [Platt] will feel as I do that neither one of us can consider any of the details of the proposed plan unless each one is in close touch with the other from the beginning.(2)

Mather's diverse tastes in landscape design were inspired by the separate but equal muses of art and nature. His preferences resulted in a most unusual collaboration between Platt, who embraced formality, and Manning, who preferred naturalism. Both schools of landscape design had passionate followings in America during the period.(3) The partnership of Platt and Manning exemplified a schism of unusually broad proportions while offering a rare opportunity to bridge it.

In contrast to Platt's early exposure to European art and ideas, Manning's aesthetic developed during a bucolic New England childhood and early training with his father, Jacob, a nurseryman.(4) Warren Manning's horticultural skills were further nurtured by a six-year apprenticeship with Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) in Brookline, Massachusetts. During his tenure Manning designed plantings for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina, the estate of George Washington Vanderbilt, which was Olmsted's last commission. Throughout a career that included residential, park, and institutional design and planning, Manning came to believe in the presence of the spiritual in nature, and in nature's redemptive powers.

Over time Manning's responsibilities increased at Gwinn, and he was asked to design plantings throughout the estate; locate healthy, mature plants; salvage and improve existing trees; and prepare the difficult clay soil for new trees and shrubs. His supervisory relationship with Mather's first head gardener, George Jacques, and Jacques's successor, his daughter Lillie, occupied considerable time.

One of the most complex tasks in designing any estate is to create graceful transitions from one plant group to another. With Manning's vast plant repertory and thorough understanding of how plants grow in nature, these transitions seem almost inevitable.

Platt's challenge as the garden architect was altogether different. He relied on paths, walls, gates, and other architectural features to define and link disparate garden spaces, most of which he sited in relation to Lake Erie and a grove of mature trees near the northeast corner of the bluff top. The gardens reflect the proportions of the house, which also served as a controlling element for their placement. In his ingenious layout, open, sunny spaces contrast with more intimate, shady spots, while disappearing paths and half-glimpsed vistas offer a series of shifting scenes and a range of experiences in the Italian tradition.

Visitors arrive via a long drive on the western boundary of the roughly rectangular property. A right-hand turn in the drive leads to a large forecourt and entrance at the western end of the house (Pl. VI). A gate in the forecourt gives access to the formal garden to the south, and a path leads north to the lake front. From the house, access to the landscape is gained through French doors in the library that open onto the porch and lawn beyond, and from the central hall to the portico.

Platt's decision to situate the house at the edge of the bluff looking north over the lake not only capitalized on the drama of the water view but also left a large, undisturbed stretch of land to the south of the house. This he divided into three distinct areas. A broad, central lawn is flanked on the east by a wild garden sited to take advantage of the existing grove of mature deciduous trees. To the west of the lawn is a formal garden with a pool, a pergola, and a teahouse (see Pls. VII, XIII, XVI, XVII), behind which are the cutting gardens, greenhouses, and the gardener's cottage (see Pl. XV).

The restrained elegance of the lawn and adjacent gardens offers an unexpected contrast to the dramatic lake front, which led one critic to write,

Think of having a lake of your own a hundred miles long the boundaries of which no eye can determine, and to know that it is yours for ever, and that it cannot be taken from you.(5)

The sea wall (see Pl. I) emphasizes the natural cove that led Mather to purchase the property in the first place. The system of terraces, stairs, walks, and gazebos physically connects the house to the water while framing the view from the house. Mannings bold plantings further enhance the lake front. Japanese barberry along the sea wall gives the long curve a richly upholstered texture and a vivid streak of color in autumn. Manning flanked the steps down to the lake with white fringe (Chionanthus virginicus), a dark shrub with leathery foliage that explodes with delicate white blossoms in early summer. Silvery spires of Lombardy poplar frame the portico and repeat the strong verticals of its columns. When Platt and Manning could not agree on a type of tree for the curving allees leading to the gazebos at the ends of the sea wall (Pls. III, XIV), Mather proposed a compromise. The pollarded Norway maple (Acer platanoides) resembles neither the topiary conifers Platt recommended nor the wind-blown spruce Manning wanted. However, it proved to be a more evocative alternative, quickly forming enticing green tunnels to the wave-swept gazebos.