A ‘Japanistic’ garden off the coast of Maine
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Like their plants, gardens’ styles cross-fertilise. Italian gardens outside Italy are not exact copies of Italian gardens within it. A jardin anglais in France is not a green park as England’s Capability Brown would have designed one. Gardeners adapt and misunderstand.
As the autumn colours begin, I am reflecting on the historic gardens of Japan, exquisite in their use of trees and leaves. Their makers had a special appreciation of fleeting beauty, none more transient than the beauty of trees in autumn. Japanese gardens have been laid out elsewhere, sometimes with the personal involvement of Japanese masters.
In Britain they range from the Kyoto garden in London’s Holland Park to the Japanese garden at Tatton Park in Cheshire. In Ireland’s County Kildare there is a garden in a Japanese style beside the Irish National Stud. In New York the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has a Japanese garden and famous flowering cherries. Japanese gardens outside Japan are not strictly Japanese: I think of them as “Japanistic”.
This summer a Japanistic garden in the US took me by surprise. I was visiting Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine in order to honour the landscape designer Beatrix Farrand, who had gardened there for more than 40 years. During a busy schedule, I walked across the road past my hotel, the Asticou Inn, and checked out the Asticou Azalea Garden, now run by the island’s Land and Garden Preserve. I expected nothing much, but its water, paths, stones and plants entranced me. It is in its 66th year, but is not about to retire.
I entered it beside well-pruned rhododendrons and followed the curving lines of a gritted path whose surface patterns were freshly raked, like the patterns raked daily in some of the great gardens in Kyoto. I looked across the clear water of a lake and sensed that the adjoining trees and shrubs had been planted by artistic eyes. I then met the garden’s manager, Mary Roper, who helped me to understand what I had sensed. The raking is her daily labour of love, like so much else in the garden for the past 34 years.
This Japanistic garden is based on a design by a hotel owner. For decades Charles Savage, like his forebears, ran the nearby Asticou Inn and had never made a major landscape, let alone one based on Asian prototypes. He admired other gardens on Mount Desert, including nearby Thuya Lodge, where he had served as a trustee for nearly 30 years. In 1955 Beatrix Farrand decided to demolish her summer home on the island and move to a smaller site. Savage agreed to buy her fine azaleas and rhododendrons: where best could he put them, he wondered, and how could he afford to move them?
He was helped by America’s first billionaire. John D Rockefeller was a great patron of the island and its landscape and appreciated Savage’s talent. They had already exchanged letters and conversations about Asian art, a topic well suited to Mount Desert: landscapers and rich owners compared its features to ones known in Japan. They already used pine trees and local rocks to give their gardens a Japanistic style. Some of them had planted smooth carpets of green moss along their driveways, an echo of Kyoto off the coast of Maine. This moss-carpeting is still fashionable, but it has to be weeded repeatedly and irrigated from local wells.
As Farrand’s shrubs were derived from botanical families in Asia, a Japanistic setting would suit them. Savage devised a congenial one by reading and study. He visited the Japanese rock garden at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and studied the pond and hill of Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese garden too. He read Osvald Siren’s book, Gardens of China, notable for its early photographs. He never visited Japan but as Mary Roper explained to me, he studied Jiro Harada’s book The Gardens of Japan. It was first published in 1928 but was usefully reissued in 1956, when Savage was setting to work.
His commitment was exceptional. When he decided to imitate a rocky shore, illustrated in pictures of Japan’s Katsura Imperial Villa gardens, he searched beaches in Maine for the type of pebbles he wanted. He even took stones and tiles from holiday homes that were being demolished, including slabs from the terraces of John S Kennedy, the railway tycoon.
Impressed by his plans, Rockefeller helped to pay for the transport of the shrubs and materials. First, Savage sent his daughter to make exact sketches of the colour of each azalea’s and rhododendron’s flowers and then, after surveying alternative sites, decided to integrate them into a Japanistic landscape on swampy ground just opposite his hotel. It was an unpromising site but he was fortunate in his collaborators, a local landscape gardener and a stone carver.
In 1979 Savage died from a heart attack, but Rockefeller’s wife Mary made a gift of $50,000 to stop the garden from declining. The harmony of Savage’s design, his lake, his stone slabs for bridges and the lines of his paths still testify to his remarkable vision. A fine weeping hemlock tree, the brilliant colours of a katsura tree, or cercidiphyllum, and a brilliantly placed Japanese malus tree are among those which still survive.
Part of Roper’s task is to reshape trees that have grown far beyond Savage’s expectations and to replace those that have died out. She and Savage’s immediate successors have shown admirable sympathy, helping the garden to evolve. This weekend, its autumn colours are at their best.
In the 1980s a talented professor first carried Savage’s legacy forward, Thomas Hall from St Louis, who summered on the island and was also a poet and zoologist. He even invited two Japanese masters to shape, prune and add more rocks to the hotelier’s design.
Other talents followed, especially Beth Straus, a lover of Asian art and influential vice chair of the New York Botanical Garden board. Roper, from Alabama, had been working locally with a nursery but swiftly picked up the Japanese style with Straus’s help. “I am anti-tropical here,” she told me, banning banana trees and frowning at my proposal of a hybridised magnolia Star Wars with giant rose-pink flowers.
Savage designed the garden to be a drive-past garden, bounded on two sides by the road from which it could be viewed from car windows. Mugo pines later blocked one side of the view, but now that they have died, the original vision is clear. So, inside, is a puzzle, now solved.
On a special hill, Savage used his fine white sand as a setting for groupings of weathered rocks in a dry garden. He plainly had Kyoto’s great Ryoan-ji garden in mind. Rocks in Japanese gardens sometimes refer to real or mythical landscapes, but any such reference intended by Savage was lost. However, in 2019, Roper was standing at Mount Desert’s famous view, on the cliffs at Cadillac Mountain, and realised to her delight that the rocks in Savage’s dry garden referred to the Porcupine Islands beyond. The dry garden, locally grounded, has become a priority.
A novice designer with a bold design and a historic collection of Asian shrubs found financial backers, talented collaborators and sensitive and able heirs. It is a good story, unique in my experience, and the results are heavenly.
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