When Gail Wittwer-Laird and I finally settled down to design the garden at 71 Livingston Street, we were already deep into the context of Rhinebeck’s historic district. We had done our research and set ourselves a commitment to honor the Hudson River’s landscape past.
In my Rhinebeck neighborhood – the residential streets of the historic district – two-story houses with a basement, attic, small front and large backyard are common. The most important houses often anchor the corners, with the exception of Chestnut Street with its grand houses and very deep setbacks. The largest houses in the village probably sold off surrounding land at one time, the only remaining evidence being the occasional adjacent barn.
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| A House On Chestnut Street |
Livingston Street is a typical mid-19th century village street. A scattering of houses – some earlier, some later, some modest, some more affluent – line both sides of the street. The houses may differ, but most lots are uniform. They are long rectangular plots, the house set close to the street, perhaps a barn, shed or garage tucked in the rear. Because this pattern was ubiquitous in the mid-to-late 19th century, there is a body of literature both of the period and later to guide our thinking.
We started with the earliest 19th century designer of houses and landscapes, Andrew Jackson Downing. His books – A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Victorian Cottage Residences, and The Architecture of Country Houses – were enormously influential as the primary texts for the design and landscape of Hudson River country homes.
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| Downing's Victorian Cottage Residences |
By the late 19th century large landholders of great wealth were building elaborate gardens in the Italian style; gardens planned as outdoor drawing rooms, completely isolated from the natural areas surrounding the estate houses. Balustraded terraces rose four to five feet above the lawns below, which linked the surrounding fields and meadows.
The terraces were accessible only from several rooms of the house, and were to be used solely by family and guests. The remaining large open areas were approached through a gate, past a gatehouse and up a long drive.
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| A Grand Italian Terrace |
The landowners employed architects and builders, and their craftsmen learned new techniques and styles. Craftsmen and artisans employed in the creation of these gardens soon modified and reproduced them for village houses and began to work for village homeowners of wealth and substance.
Downing’s ideas eventually filtered down to owners of the smallest village houses. He would have had an even greater influence had he not died in 1852 at age 36 in a fire on a river steamer, leaving the field clear for Olmsted and Vaux.
Today, Downing is best known (and well loved) for Victorian Cottage Residences, first published in 1842 and succeeded by several editions. It became a guidebook for owners of small village residences, laying out in detail how the properties should be used, down to specific planting plans and maintenance expectations of family members.
The ornamental part of the garden would lie in front of planted trellises, with the working garden discretely in the rear. The vines he recommended for covering the trellis are ones we still use today: several varieties of honeysuckle, clematis, wisteria and roses. His lists of suitable trees, shrubs and flowers would still serve today’s gardener well.
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| A Downing Plan for a Village Garden |
The kitchen garden was hidden behind the trellis. Downing knew that the more common vegetables could be purchased as cheaply as they could be raised and recommended growing only the earliest and most delicate fruits and vegetables –strawberries, asparagus, peaches – and devoted less than one-third of the area of a standard lot to the kitchen garden.
In the early 19th century people of means bought their plants from nurseries, but many households depended on traveling salesmen. Flower agents used to canvas country towns from house to house. Sometimes they came with a catalog, but often they had only a single plant. Chinese wisterias and fringetrees were sold this way, as were clematis jackmanii, which could be seen to adorn porches up and down the block. In Concord, Thoreau recalled a certain rhododendron sweeping his village, sold to all by a single agent.
Downing was a proponent of bedding masses of low-growing flowers in patterns – a distinctly Victorian preference, now almost completely abandoned. You might still see it at classic racetracks like Belmont, where the bedding concept was in full force as annuals stayed in place for the duration of the racing season.
My first professional job was at Belmont, where I marked up huge rolls of plans with an X in color for each of the thousands of red, white and blue petunias which would then be grown in vast greenhouses in preparation for the June planting.
In the literature of village gardens, nobody superseded Downing until the1920’s when Fletcher Steele started writing about the small garden. As with Downing, this was not Steele’s primary work; he was a designer of very grand gardens with a distinct turn towards modernism. The stunning Blue Staircase at Naumkeag alone is worth a trip to the Berkshires.
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| The Blue Staircase at Naumkeag |
His wonderful 1924 book Design in the Little Garden positions the home garden as a withdrawal from the outer world. Seclusion is the first and most important of garden qualities; unlike Downing, Steele believed it was not possible to live at ease in a front yard. He could not conceive of anyone bringing a book and a rocking chair to a front porch.
Steele would be puzzled by the uses of front porches today and its public quality. In some Rhinebeck houses the steps of the porch is a like a city stoop; it is an invitation to stop and chat or a place to sit and watch the world go by. The raised porch however implies a degree of privacy; if you see a neighbor reading a book you would not be inclined to disturb her.
Gail and I were captivated by Design in the Little Garden; the example Steele uses could have been lifted straight from Livingston Street. He creates a fictional block, Maple Cove Avenue. Three imaginary houses, Numbers 11,13, and 15 are set on uniform lots, 75’ x 125’, but the landscape in each is treated differently.
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| Design in the Little Garden |
They each incorporate the necessities of the time: a garage sometimes in the front, sometimes in the back at the end of a long driveway; privacy; a drying yard; space for vegetables and fruit; an assortment of porches in front and/or back; some lawn with hedges and flower borders. No. 13 has a formal garden, No. 11 an informal garden and No. 15 an example of what not to do – the house set far back and too much of the lot opened widely to public view. Each house has its lessons about what works and what doesn’t.
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| A Dooryard Garden |
The front dooryard garden, almost an anachronism today, was a staple of early gardens. In colonial times the dooryard garden was always fenced and gated. It was carefully cultivated and enclosed the most prized flowers. Starting with early narcissus there were always a few red and yellow single tulips, followed by phlox, the only native American plant. The most glorious was often the early red ‘piny’ as peonies were then (and sometimes still) called.
There might be a few shrubs, a lilac and perhaps viburnum. By the 19th century spirea and deutzia had arrived from Japan as had flowering quince and cherries. Almost all these flowers can be seen in gardens today, but the spireas and deutzias have fallen out of fashion. In a dooryard garden like the photograph above, plants were left growing in one spot for a very long time eventually shouldering one another aside like children growing up in the same family.
Small gardens everywhere in the world are almost always hospitable. They are domestic in scale and tailored to the needs and wants of the owners.
This was our goal for 71 Livingston Street. If there was an early garden here, all traces of it were gone. It was a bare plateau with only a few of the easiest of plants to grow – hostas and daylilies. The maples and black walnuts planted at the time the house was built in 1865 remained on the perimeter. This was all we had. We started with a clean slate.
