 Welcome everyone. Thank you for coming tonight. My name is Hillary Bassett. I'm the Executive Director of Greater Portland Landmarks and I'd like to welcome you to the 2016 lecture series. Our mission at Greater Portland Landmarks is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. And I'd like to thank you for joining us this evening. We have had a very busy year at Landmarks. We've been active in research, education, and advocacy. This summer we conducted an architectural survey of over 350 properties in the Oakdale neighborhood, which is the area just beyond USM. And the interns were so enthusiastic they did research, deed research on 350 properties for you researchers. You will appreciate that. That's quite an undertaking. You may have heard about a lot of the projects going on in the India Street neighborhood. That area was just designated an historic district back in 2015. There are many projects that have already gone through historic review. And our city council actually expanded the district in order to include additional properties that would benefit from historic tax credits. So our work in promoting historic districts has had an important impact. We are also very active right now in the discussions of the Master Development Plan for the Portland Company site, which is underway currently, and will be slated for approval, final approval by the end of the year. I'm also very pleased to announce that the Portland Observatory has had its absolutely best year ever in terms of attendance. It's also a great year in other ways, but we've had over 14,000 visitors to the observatory. And it's just been an extraordinary year. Those of you who are docents, thank you. It has just been a great, great season. For the off season, we're actually working on some exciting programming, which will include workshops, tours, and special lectures that focus on the theme preservation and action. And you'll be getting information on that soon in the mail. Now, we'd love to be in touch with all of you for future programs, so if you aren't yet on our email list, make sure you give us your email address. And if you aren't already a landmarks member, I would like to personally invite you to join. There's information on the table as you came in. Now, we're also trying a new thing this year, which is some evaluation forms, and I will credit architects. I want to show you these little cards. There's some cards on the table, and there's a green thumbs up. Green thumbs up is for good. Red thumbs down is for needs improvement. So we'd like to get feedback from you on how you like the lectures and how we could make it even better for you, and also any ideas you have for future programs are welcome. Now, I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank our sponsors, Ocean Gate Realty, and Ed Gardner is here. Thank you, Ed. The Portland Public Library, who generously offers us the use of the room, which is fantastic. And also to CTN Channel 5, this is going to be broadcast as being recorded as we presented tonight. And I'd like to mention also that we have our next lecture in the series, which is going to be on November 15th. It will be by Bill Culina of the Booth Bay Botanical Gardens, and the topic will be Why You Can't Buy a Forest in a Can. So put that on your calendars. And also, as you're leaving, if you haven't already, please consider a donation to cover the costs of producing and promoting this lecture series. I'd like to thank also our landmark staff members who are here, Alessa Wiley, who has greeted you at the door, who's our education manager. Julie Larry, our director of advocacy, and not here, but also very appreciated. Kate Lewis, Lorena Coffin, and Chloe Martin. And I'd also like to mention Ruth Story, who over the years has been primary organizer of the lecture series. She unfortunately can't join us. Now to introduce our speaker, Lucinda Brockway is an award-winning historic landscape specialist, residential landscape designer, and author. And she lives just right down the road in Kennebunk, so Maine has got incredible treasures of people who are within our borders. Since in 1988, she has been the owner and principal of Past Designs, a firm which specializes in creating attractive outdoor spaces for working, living, and recreating. Her firm is dedicated to protecting the environment and preserving the rich landscape legacy that defines the Northeastern United States. Since 2011, Lucinda has served as the program director for cultural resources for the trustees of reservations in Massachusetts. And in that role, she is responsible for the organization's 111 properties and more than 26,000 acres of Massachusetts cultural landscapes, including five national historic landmarks. So it must be quite a fascinating role. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Rhode Island and Boston University. And her work with Past Designs, her firm, includes such well-known public projects as Fort Ticonderoga, Newport's Public and Private Bellevue Avenue Estates, the Fells in Newbury, New Hampshire, the Battle Green in Lexington Mass, and several projects for the National Trust, including the opening of Philip Johnson's Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Her private residential designs have won recognition throughout the country. She's written two books and numerous articles on popular and professional journals. And she is a strong believer in the principle that most successful designs are built out of collaboration between client, contractor, designer, and resident. Please join me in welcoming Lucinda Brockway. Thank you so much. You know, I was worried I was competing with dinner and I'm hopefully glad to see you all coming and holding off your dinner for a little while. So we'll take a journey and then maybe you'll be really hungry after all this gardening and you can go find a wonderful place to eat and all the great, the restaurants that are here in Portland. I am really, really glad to be here tonight and I'm glad to share a little journey with you. There's a couple of things that I want to do with you all tonight and that is I want to look a little bit at our backyards and I want to talk about what that tradition is of our residential gardens and how it's evolved over time. And then as part of this journey, we're going to look at some contemporary designs that were inspired by some of that legacy. I really feel that there is a nice symbiotic relationship between the past, the present, and the future. And a lot of our historic gardens are never static, especially gardens, unlike buildings that always want to change and Mother Nature has her own idea about what she really wants to do with them all. So I really want to be able to have you feel comfortable when we leave tonight with the possibility of going out, looking at your own backyard, and then maybe being inspired by some of these things that I'm going to show you, or going and looking at places like the Longfellow Garden here, the cemetery here, and really understanding that these are three-dimensional textbooks for you that tell history that you can go and explore and enjoy and maybe find out a little bit more about the details around them. So to start with, I love this quote because history is always in the eyes of the beholder in many, many ways. And what we want to talk about, we tend to focus on, and what we want to ignore, we do. And so sometimes we look at the past and we want to really remake it in our own desirable way, and over the years we end up preserving those legacies and those stories that we all want to be able to remember, and we forget the bad parts or the things that we choose to ignore, and sometimes they're not so pretty. So sometimes when I was doing just design work, and even now when working for the trustees, I'll have people that say, oh, I really want to have a historic garden. I have a historic farmhouse, and I really want a 19th-century garden to go along with it. And so I show them this picture because this is really what a 19th-century farmhouse in Maine really looked like. And so there's a lot of artistic license when it comes to looking at some of these historic gardens, and so being able to really understand fact and fiction and tradition and legacy and inspiration are a very important part of this journey we're going to take. If we start in the 18th century and the early 19th century, a lot of the early gardens that were here in New England, especially in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and on up into the southern parts of Maine, they all began with this simple garden design, and it's still a great garden design for today, because these beds are designed to be six feet wide and 12 feet long. If you reach into a garden bed, you reach in three feet, so you can stand on either side of those raised beds and you can reach into the middle without having to step into the garden. You can fill it with all the greatest compost and the greatest soils that you can find, so you're guaranteed to have a really good garden. And if you get older and your back starts to go because you've been gardening your whole life, you can build up the boards two or three times higher and then turn them into a table garden and you can still have a great garden in your backyard. But this is a classic image and this actually comes from an early 17th century gardening book, so you can see how sometimes our traditions really don't change all that much. Now if you want to wander over to the Art Museum here or you want to go down to the MFA or even down to New York, you can start to look at American paintings and you can really see a whole wealth of information about gardening in them if you start to pay attention. This one happens to be a picture of a woman sitting in a chair in front of her parlor window, but if you look out the window into her parlor garden, you will actually see one of those simple rectangular bed designs that was so typical here for the 18th and early 19th century. If you want to go back into the archives in Sacco, here is what a main version of that garden looks like. This is a really wonderful picture of what the ferryman's house looked like in Sacco and he was the man that would get in his boat and go to Bitterford and row you across the river before I-95 showed up and you could just take your car and zoom all the way to Augusta. But here you see this combination of working landscape and garden and if you pay attention to the words that are in here, you see garden down on that lower right hand side down in this corner here. But you also see the wharf, you see the goose yard, you see his warehouses, they're all jumbled together just like that 19th century farmhouse picture I showed you where the laundry yard and the garden and the fields and the work yards mix themselves together throughout most of the 18th and 19th century. So this notion that we have about pleasure gardening is something that comes along mostly in the early 20th century with the colonial revival because we were looking backwards. And so our thinking is that this is really more what an 18th century garden looked like. This still has some of the plant contents and some of the arrangement that I was showing you in those other things but you can see that it's been refined and dressed up a little bit in order to really be a welcoming entry into this 18th century house. The contents that are in here are a lot of herbs, a lot of really hearty plant material that will survive almost anything that you throw at it. And in many ways the nice thing about these board edged gardens is that you don't have to edge the edges. And one of my gardening friends who was taking care of a big estate for years always had the garden looking beautiful and I asked her how with so little staff she could always make the garden look great and she said it's all about the edges. If the edges look neat everybody believes you've done a lot of work in the garden. So you could have a lot of weeds in this garden and you would never know it because the edges are nice and neat and they look really great. Now this happens to be a garden that almost 30 years ago we discovered through archaeology. So this is a 1690 Portsmouth backyard and we did have the archaeological documentation to go with it. But interestingly enough as we were looking at those gardening manuals from England and from the early years here in America but mostly English gardening manuals and they were giving you instructions on how to lay out your garden. And then we looked at the archaeological record without telling the archaeologists the record matched what was going on in those gardening manuals. So again 12 by 6 foot beds raised high. These happened to be 12 inches. Good soils on the inside and then a path around the edge. And in this case there's a small 3 foot bed that ran around the inside of this tiny backyard in urban Portsmouth. This happens to be at Strawberry Bank. And you'll notice that the fence is sort of an interpretation of a board fence but a lot of the fence advice that you were getting and in fact if you go through the early records in Portland or Portsmouth around fights about fencing and keeping your animals out or your garden in you'll find that there was a lot of descriptions of early fence styles and in fact in Portsmouth we could go all the way back to the early years of the city and find good references to what the fences all looked like. In this case this is a solid board fence but it's got a very crooked top so that chickens wouldn't sit up on top of the fence and then jump down into the garden and get at your garden plants. Always something fun. Now if you have a home today and you don't want to have a pure museum garden you might want to be able to look at that 18th century plant pallet and put it around the edges of your yard and just create a very simple almost vernacular style garden that fits with one of your 18th century houses. This is in Ipswich, Massachusetts but it could be in many streets and communities along the sea coast here in New England all the way up into Maine. And you'll recognize a lot of the plant material here. There's peonies, there's iris, there's foxglove, there's some lavender and some herbs in here. There's simple bushes, junipers, blueberries, berry bushes, some roses once in a while but a real combination just very subtle and very simple. This is literally all the yard that this house has and so in fact one of the requirements that the clients had was they wanted a place to be able to sit but they didn't want to sit on a bench that looked right at the street with everybody going by and so over in the corner here where you see the lilacs and things there's actually a little nested spot where we put a bench so you could sit out there in the garden and not have everybody looking at you as they went by. Here's another one. This is a historic New England house and this is in Ipswich. It's on Water Street in Ipswich. A wonderful, wonderful early house that had its own version of gardening going on in the front yard and the clients when they called me said I really want something that looks nice but this is just a mess. My poor garden has just gotten overgrown and I can't figure out what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of but they also lived close to the street and they wanted to be able to feel like they had a little bit of privacy if possible. So we tried to figure out how to make a landscape that was sympathetic. They were also much older and had a hard time with walking so needed solid surfaces everywhere you went. So that's why this brick walkway went in. In a true museum garden this would not have had bricks on the ground. It probably would have had either hard-packed sand more than anything else. But again, this is a summer pallet so you'll see things like Aster's and Black Eyed Susan's and Bella Ward coming into bloom here but simple borders on either side of this pathway and then making sure that the furnishings fit the house we came up to a stone yard that has antique stones in Elliott Main and found a wonderful cap for the well that was still sitting out in front of the yard. And honestly this became the real garden art for this garden and it fits so beautifully with the period of the house that it really helped in the furnishing of the garden and how we pulled it all back together again. We also put little slats over it so nobody would fall in. And here's one of these little sitting spots on the other side. So as this garden grows up these are very tall plants and we did put a hedge around the front edge so that this has now grown up and the hedge is about three and a half feet tall and you can sit on that patio and again be near the street but feel like you're in the middle of a tiny enclosed garden space. And a lot of the plants that you see here are a mix of 18th century and 20th century plants that fit with some of that 18th and early 19th century pallet. One of my particular favorites is there on the far left and you see a little bit of it even here on the right hand side. That little blue flower that you see wandering through the other things is a little geranium called Roseanne. And it's a perennial geranium that blooms literally all summer and it's got a beautiful blue flower to it. So very dependable, usually very small and in this case it's wandered through and mixed itself with some of the stackies and again the Rudbeckias that are here. But a good combination of solid hardy plants to be able to pull you through that still have that look and feel of an 18th and early 19th century garden. Here's another example. This happens to be again at a museum down in Rhode Island but you can see not only a beautiful spot to be able to have a garden but also the same themes that are running through this. And now this is moving up into the early 19th century. You can see the fence is becoming a little bit more refined. There's a lot more garden beds in here and a lot more space around you where you can have the larger field crops and garden crops or large pleasure grounds as we move into the 19th century these become much more typical. But again, this is still a pallet of really hardy sturdy plants. When I was doing the garden at Fort Ticonderoga it had not been garden in 25 years and I was out there in November to see it and said, oh yes this is a fabulous garden even though it was all falling apart. And then in the summer when I went back to take an inventory of what might still be surviving in there the hardiest plants were still coming up in that garden and they included the peonies were still there, there were some irises, there were some really early basic green hostas that were coming up in the garden, there were a couple of roses, a frowed damask rose was coming up and there was hollyhock still coming up in the garden and then a lot of helianthus. And helianthus for any of you that want something that blooms beautifully in the summer with a pretty yellow flower on it, it's a good solid hardy, fill the spaces kind of a plant to be able to use in your garden. Here's another combination of things. These are starting to move more into the mid 19th century now. More rather than basic herbs and even vegetable foliage in the 18th century garden we've used sometimes. This is much more in what we think about now is even colonial revival gardens with the hollyhocks and the butterfly weed and asters and a lot of bellwort, pearlwort, boltonia, asters all coming up now in the early to mid 19th century in the door yards of New England. Just for fun I wanted to show you an 1804 print from a gardening book and I bet you everybody that's here can name every tool that is in this plate because you can see that in many ways except for our new motorized weed whackers and our lawn mowers and our leaf blowers these are still the basic gardening tools that we use all the time and our best gardening tools are often those that we inherit from a parent or grandparent because they have the original wooden handles and really sturdy iron ends to them. They can really do the job and get the job done but really remarkable that for more than 200 years here's the kinds of things that we find in our shed. Again as you move into the 19th century you can start to look at portraiture. This is a wonderful painting of a garden in Newcastle, New Hampshire. Right on the, if you go to the Wentworth by the Sea at all or you play golf down there then you look across at this island and this in fact is a small gentleman's estate and those terraced gardens that you see there were full of grapes. So this idea in the 19th century of fruit becoming an active and really viable and passionate part of gardener's lives feeds its way into everything from putting grape vines on your hill and Portsmouth to planting pear trees in your garden that you might have bought from a nursery outside of Boston and you've maybe read about them in the proceedings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society who were really convinced that if we planted pear and apple trees they could be the stalwart plants of any orchard or any backyard garden and still provide you both beauty and pleasure and food in combination. Again here's another picture from the 19th century I really love the midwives tale book and if you all are gardeners and you want a good book to read by the fire this winter this ballad of Martha Ballard who was living on the frontier in Augusta, Maine at the turn of the 19th century is rich with a lot of her gardening details and this is one of the quotes we did a history of gardening in Maine and looked at some of the things that she was finding so in May just to make you feel better May 10th she said a heavy frost but we planted beets, parsnips and onions I removed my garden roots we washed seven pounds of cotton boiled 40 skeins of lining yard and I had felt fatigued so at least we don't have to do all the spinning and weaving after we finish in the garden these days. Now if you understand some of the furnishings and some of the basic arrangement of elements in a 19th century garden you can create something believe it or not this house is an early 19th century house it's a simple little cape it sits just above bath on the river there on the Kennebec River beautiful, beautiful maple tree in the front yard but all the landscaping here was put in in the 1970s and it was put in by an owner who was a set designer who understood the value of simple things in order to be able to create a picture that of what she really wanted it to be and so if you put up a roll a rod fence, a rail fence why don't you buy the green pieces of wood not the good ones because then they sag that much more quickly and they give you that feeling of antiquity that you might want even out of a simple fence that you put in your yard and the other thing that I love that she did here first she just framed the yard this is not a huge garden it's really just about creating the door yard and framing it in such a way that it feels like it's a landscape statement amidst the larger spaces that are all around you and so it's in keeping with the scale of the house but she bought these old orchard ladders that you see here there's a couple of them and then there's an iron trellis that you see leaning on the other side of the fence and those became she's got rose vines and some of the things that grow in the garden and they just climb up those orchard ladders but it makes it look like somebody came in from pruning the apple tree and just left the ladder by the side of the fence and yet it becomes part of the furnishings here so sometimes it's not as much about how many plants you have in your garden but how you use the elements and put them all together and here's her little door yard garden a very vernacular very simple garden so perfect for Maine where it's not too overdone and kept very simple and in fact the gas tank is right there in the corner and it's just hidden by a little bit of lattice as practical and as basic as we all want things to be here in Maine sometimes also it's just about one moment in one season and so here's just a combination of those old orange day lilies and some Queen Anne's lace all blooming together in a giant bed in the middle of this yard and it makes an incredible statement for one moment for about 10 days in the middle of July and yet what a moment it really is here's another example of just using those elements in simple ways and deciding where you want to mow the lawn and where you want to let the lawn get long and really appreciate this incredibly beautiful landscape that we have up here depending on whether you have a tiny little urban garden or lots of space around you you can do some simple things in order to be able to create the feeling that this garden has been here for a very very long time now as we move into the 1830s and the 1850s right before the Civil War we had celebrated the revolution we'd celebrated the victory of the revolution we were beginning to establish ourselves as a new country and we were looking to our friends in France and saying I wonder what you're doing over there that looks interesting that we can bring back into our gardens but because we're New England and not New France we like to take those French ideas and then fill them with perennials and fill them with some color and not have just the simple Italian or French parterre gardens but fill them with some of those English perennials in the middle so we created a garden of our own that was really this combination between the English heritage and the French fashion that we were so passionate about at the time these are a couple of wonderful sketches by Arthur Scherkliff who was the landscape architect that did all of Colonial Williamsburg in the 1930s but before that in his early years of his career he lived in Ipswich and he was documenting some of these gardens that he called true New England colonial gardens but they were really these gardens that were built between 1830 and 1850 and you can see there's a very simple arrangement here with the house at the bottom of both screens and then you see the parterre it's fairly small and very intricate and very geometrical and then you move from that to the cut flower garden and then eventually to the vegetables and then off to the fruit garden where the flowers get stabled in a paster in the very back. Now the one here on the right is very narrow and very long because many of our federal houses and this is very true on high street in Newburyport they had a big box of a house that they built in the federal period usually between 1800 and 1820 with a front door on the street but they also put two side doors on either side and if you picture those big box houses if you have another generation and you have two sons and they might want to both inherit the house you can run your property line right up the middle of the front path right through the front door right down the hallway out the back door and split the barn in half too and so in Newburyport you get these gardens in these houses that are very dynamic they're almost the ultimate duplex because you can divide them in half or if you have another generation where there's only one family you can open them back up again and narrow gardens with these pattern designs in them and here's a picture of one of these gardens this happens to be the garden that was in that photograph on the right hand side this pattern if you want to do a traditional New England garden and even a traditional American garden whether it be tiny scale or large scale you will see this circle in a square design whether it's a plantation in Tennessee or a little backyard garden here in New England very simple arrangement and in the early years this center bed often was a water cistern or a collection spot for water and you could dip your watering can into it and then have it ready and available to water the plants that are on the four squares around it later it becomes the spot for the Victorian urn and then in the Colonial Revival the B-Skept gets put there but it's a very simple design and it's very dynamic it can grow and it can shrink based on how big or how small your gardens are so you'll see that a lot when you look here's another good example the other thing that's really interesting about this what I call the New England antebellum period is that often there's a small orchard on the side of the house and as these pleasure gardens start to come into our vocabulary they move in under the orchard trees so sometimes these ornamental trees that you see that are standing in the middle of the garden are really small pairs or cherries or apples that had been growing there all along and the garden has just split itself in and moved underneath the small family orchard there here's some examples in real life so you can see how very dynamic they are these gardens are very interesting because you know since we have almost nine months of no gardening and about three months of good gardening weather because of their geometry and their patterning and if you do use any kind of evergreen edging to them like these small boxwood you don't notice the geometry when the garden is all in bloom and then when the garden goes red the geometry pops itself back up and you still have something that is really enjoyable and beautiful 365 days of the year but it changes its character and its dynamic and these are beautiful gardens in the snow and the snow lays itself down and rises up over these boxwood hedges and it never hurts if you want to have a nice little garden house with a little Victorian flair to it to be able to add one of these into it as well I mentioned this passion for the fruit industry and there was a garden that was operating in Newton Massachusetts from 1790 until 1870 that was growing almost 400 varieties of pears and William Kendrick prided himself on these Belgian pears that were being developed bringing them over as science growing them in his nursery and then offering them for sale in simple catalogs like this and you can find these catalogs at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society plant palette from the 1830s you can go and pick up one of these gardening catalogs and leaf through it and you'll recognize a lot of the plants that are here but you'll see there's a much heavier emphasis on fruits and fruit trees and dahlias believe it or not so lots of dahlias coming in at the same time but he's offering these plants through the New England Gardening Journals and through the rural farmer and so there's a very active trade mail order trade that's coming through for sale and was another one that was very prolific and very well known and the shaker industry here in Maine also offered a lot of seeds and a lot of plants for sale and so there's wonderful catalogs through the Maine Memory Network here at the Maine Historical Society that you can see and images of some of these shaker buildings and shaker gardens all part of that rich heritage of being able to sell seeds to Maine gardeners now as a modern version of what one of these shaker gardens looked like. And it was a work that as they say was very charming when it was bought. It was very tired and it had a lot of work that needed to be done but still a wonderful spot on the corner of a street right in a very, very busy part of Kennebunkport. But thinking about those geometric gardens and those combinations of heavily flowering plants and boxwood edging we began to arrange a garden for these owners who had come up and tried to take that vocabulary and put it into these little spaces around this house. So what you're seeing here is a space that's probably 15 or 18 feet wide from the front of the house to the edge of the sidewalk but it's the fencing that helps to give you that little bit of a barrier to all the pedestrians that walk by that sidewalk on a regular basis. And then again simple hedges, they happened to really like these round boxwoods so we kept the boxwoods round rather than trimming them into small hedges which is what this looked and then we filled the beds with some roses and dahlias and bigger flowering plants that could get up over the top of the boxwood hedges. On the back of the house there was literally six feet between the wall of the house and the back of the garden and so this is a little tiny two foot path with very simple combinations of bleeding hard and ferns and some small spring flowering bulbs and then shady perennials for the summertime here that don't take up a lot of room so stay small. It's mostly a spring garden. The other thing that you have to think about when you're designing gardens is that spring flowering plants tend to be small and mid-summer plants tend to be bigger and then fall plants tend to be very big because they've had the whole season in order to be able to grow. So this is not a place where we would put a lot of asters or heliathas or things that bloom later in the season because they just would have been too big and you would have to beat your way down this path here through this tiny little space. This is a really fun garden and one of the things that I love about gardening, whether it's New England or anywhere in the country, is that your personality comes through in your own backyard and in your own spaces and so it's a combination of your own history and the history of your house and the history of your space and the things that you like that combine to really make these very special places that you're so fond of and this happens to be a Chinese puzzle garden. They call it this is a garden in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and the grandfather in this family was a sea captain and he had brought back one of those little tannogram puzzles that you may have played with your children that are just seven tiles with different shapes and you have to make different pictures with them and so these garden beds are all the shapes of those seven tiles in that game that was very much a part of their own legacy and their own history. This was a late 19th century garden. The Victorian period just like Victorian houses gets big and splashy and bold and romantic and dripping with everything. As many urns as you can put into a garden as many pieces of garden art that you can fit in a garden and almost as many kinds of textures and colors of flowers and foliage that you can find go into these Victorian gardens. So here's one, I'm trying to just pull examples anywhere from Portsmouth all the way up north here for you. This is a garden plan from 1860 of a garden in Portsmouth. It happens to be part of Strawberry Bank and then the garden itself is down here in the lower right-hand side but you can see that those geometric beds that we were looking at that were smaller now get opened up a little bit and the paths get wider and the planting combinations in the beds the hedges go away and the planting combinations become a riot of color and often they're heavily dependent on annuals because it was very easy to find seasonal annuals whether it was spring flowers or summer flowering annuals and then fall mums. You could get color in your garden all year long by just replanting it and you often had a gardener to be able to help you do that because you made all of your money either in shipping or in industry. Here's another example this is the house in Springfield Massachusetts and you can see they love shrubs and trees and so there's almost any kind of shrub or tree in their yard that they plopped in all over the place but really fun to look at and then this is the ropes garden in Salem so you can see these combinations of color and boldness that come out of these Victorian gardens. Now if you happen to want to spend your time on your boat at your summer cottage instead of gardening in your backyard you can furnish your backyard like this. This is a picture from the York Historical Society and if you look at this this is again another case of good furnishings telling the tale so simple you know steam freight lounges and then a simple chair and a hammock and a few vines over the back fence and that's all you need to create your Victorian vignette in your backyard but if you want to do a little more than that and you want to do more than gaming then you can even look to create a small garden bed like this that's filled with this riot of color and combination honestly truly the bolder the better and some of the best Victorian combinations I've seen are bright orange impatience mixed with really deep crimson canna and a lot of blue lobelia just lots of color and lots of bold striking combinations this is not a period when the soft pink and the soft blue and soft white was preferred it was definitely a period where they like those heavier stronger colors and if you don't want to have all the annuals and you want to try to interpret the same using shrubs and foliage and perennials then you can really look to things like costa or hydrangeas and look for things that will have those big bold flowers and the big bold foliage that can really carry your garden through the Victorian period in another combination of things in the early 20th century we start to look backwards again and we look back and we start to reinterpret those colonial gardens that we were talking about but there is a period after World War I when the arts and crafts movement becomes very strong and we have some wonderful examples of arts and crafts architecture and equally good examples of gardening that was supposed to go along with these arts and crafts houses and so the craftsman magazine not only gave you the plans for a house but they also instructed you on how to be able to plant in that house and so you see in these gardens a real celebration of natural materials whether it be natural woods natural stone or indigenous plant material from any given region and that's what they're promoting lots of little these are called lynch gates they're just little arbors with a gate on them that allow you to have a little privacy from the street and open up and close your garden but you see a very different look to the fences here now and many of these were meant for you to build yourself so this was also a do it yourself time for gardening. The other thing that happens is that Gertrude Jekyll is an English gardener and she begins to write a series of books that become very popular both in England and in the United States called Wall and Water Gardens there's one on roses and her gardening advice is all about thinking about the tones of flower color and where you can garden so this happens to be an illustration of her wall garden it's essentially a rock garden with the plants planted in the crevices of the stone wall she was the woman that promoted tonal garden so a white garden or a blue garden or a yellow garden was part of her palette now I was lucky enough to be able to work in Newton and an arts and crafts house that really did come out of the pages of the craftsman magazine and so they had a huge vegetable garden on the side of the house which is a very much a part of this arts and crafts movement and they wanted to be able to enhance it and beef it up a little bit and they were sick of pulling all the weeds out of their lawn dirt and gravel paths that they'd put between their garden beds so we actually put grass back as the path material because if you were weeding in the garden bed and dirt got out on the path if it was a gravel path you saw the dirt if it was grass you didn't see the dirt anymore and you could easily clean up and these were paths that were just built for the width of the lawn mower so you could run down through and take care of your paths in the garden lickety split this rope business on the poles here is something again that came out of the craftsman magazine and out of another Gertrugico garden in England but it's meant for roses so climbing roses go up the post and they're trained along the rope and I actually bought all of this rope right here in Portland at the marine supply store I went in and asked them for the biggest natural hemp rope that they had and I think it's the rope that they put on the steamships that show up here in town but it was huge and it was perfect for what we needed to drape across those poles so here's some little scenes of that garden both pieces parts of the garden were there and then these little enhancements that we did to really add to it so we sort of massaged it back to life the garden itself is really full of vegetables there's a lot of broccoli in this garden there's a lot of beets in this garden there's a lot of tomatoes and then we mixed in some very strong zinnias and then this plant here is Nicotiana Sylvesteris it's a wonderful Victorian plant but it does beautifully when mixed with a lot of other larger vegetables in the garden and again blooms for a long period of time and smells so it was a nice addition into this arts and crafts style of the garden other simpler versions of this might be like this so a simple stone path with cobbles and then ferns on both sides and in this case pear trees that are going down that are left over from the back corner of this garden that have been here for about 80 years now this is another one this happens to be another small this is a crab but there were some apple and pear trees in this garden as well and then a couple of simple arbors that are sort of the remnants of the garden that used to be there and sometimes if you don't want to have a full-blown garden you can put in just remnants and you can say you know this is my interpretation of the ruins of the garden that used to be here but this is about as much as I want to take care of so it's okay if you're off in the mountains and you have if you're up in Boltonboro, New Hampshire here's another version of a rural kind of an arts and crafts garden these are very hardy very tough plants and if you look there's only about six perennials in this garden total and if you notice they're things like threadleaf choreopsis and sedum autumn joy and Boltonia is the little purple flower that's dancing across the top there it's an annual that seeds itself in the ground cover is low bush blueberry and then there's some time that's crawling along the ground in things like inkberry here so again these native plants getting combined with some good sturdy hardy perennials in seasonal color that can really create a simple garden out of some of these native materials and here's a rock garden I have yet to find a property that went through the period from about 1910 to 1930 that did not have a pile of rocks in the corner somewhere and everybody wanted to have a rock garden or some form or another this one happens to be at Blythold in Bristol Rhode Island if you want to go see a wonderful period garden that is the place to go but any kind of pile of rocks became one of these rock gardens it was another theme for the early 20th century here's a tonal garden this is a new garden this was put in the 1980s but this is an interpretation of a salmon and a yellow tonal garden in the spirit of Gertrude Jekyll and then here's another double English border with the same kind of spirit to them and here's a simpler version of just a backyard with really a flower border that's combined to the edges and in this case it's mostly large hydrangeas and then a simple small boxwood hedge and the lawn but in this case again it's that art that just adds that accent that allows this garden to have just one step up from a simple lawn with a hedge and then the hydrangeas behind it I have to give tribute when I'm giving any gardening lecture to this the Stalwart Garden Club members that have really been the leaders in great gardening and great gardens in this country since the early 20th century this happens to be the Piscatica Garden Club and if you look at their mission when the club was founded back in around 1910 it was for cleaning up the roadside and picking up trash and so these are the women in their gardening talks out picking up trash on the side of the road so when you put on your jeans or your yoga pants and go out gardening think of what it was like to go out in this kind of an outfit to go gardening but really truly a remarkable legacy that these women left behind and some men for really setting the standard for good gardening and good horticulture in many ways in the backyard and you've got a great example of that right here in Portland at the Longfellow Garden as well these little door yard gardens again start to look back to those colonial gardens in the early 19th century and you see these small little grandmother cutting gardens now simple fences much more ornamental and a little more ornate from the posts themselves to the styles of the pickets that are there on the sides of the yard but nevertheless a small little walled garden full of things that remind you of your grandmother's garden sweet smelling things love lies bleeding irises roses lots of roses in these gardens lots of platycodon and bell flowers and things that just bloom for long periods of time they tend to get very leggy and tall but they always are this sort of romantic memory of what a colonial garden was really all about here's one believe it or not up in Platsburg New York so if you can garden in Platsburg you can certainly garden in Portland and here's another one you know wisteria is one of these things that either you love or you hate and it's often beautiful when it flowers but this is a garden down in Kennebunk and this wisteria had been planted on the side of a porch on the front of this early 19th century house and it had literally gone up gone under the eaves of the porch and was so heavy it was pulling the porch right off the front of the house and so a new owner came along and said I've got to get rid of this porch is leaking into my you know they expanded out the house they cut away the wall and all the water was just coming down through where the porch was separating from the house itself and she wanted to go back to the 18th century facade of the building so we took down the wisteria but you know those roots are in the ground and they're there to stay they're not meant to really be gotten rid of very easily so we got some umbrella standards and grew the vine on those standards and turned them into a standard tree form instead of something that grows on the house and they became a nice hallmark the community loved this wisteria when it came into bloom every spring it was something that everybody looked to see so we didn't totally get rid of it but we tamed it and we put it in a much more much easier format to deal with and this is a wonderful little colonial revival garden this is also in York this is the Elizabeth Perkins house and you can see here those raised beds again she's looking back at those earlier manuals but in this case rather than filling with herbs and symbols she's filling them with all of her favorite gardening flowers down both sides they all sweep at the end so very romantic long garden not very practical very beautiful but not very practical and when the York Historical Society was thinking about restoring this one of the members that had remembered this garden said well she was never a very good gardener and the garden always looked terrible why would we want to put it back so we had a lot of discussion around the value of this garden and you can see the old postcard up there with the roses growing over the simple iron arbors and again here's a wonderful picture with this arbor and this garden here in Portland is such a treasure just to go in and enjoy but also to really use as your textbook for what you can do with an early 20th century garden and here's another one this is the Hamilton House in South Berwick another beautiful combination of 1909 perennials and borders this actually had a wonderful huge pergola that went all the way around the outside of it it was there sort of nod to the Italian but it is the borders here again another good combination this is an earlier summer border so you see some early flocks and then daisies and some some lilies in this combination here this happens to be over at the Fells again another 1910 combination so visiting these museum houses and looking at their gardens as well as their antique collections is always a really fun thing to do this is just a smattering of some contemporary gardens but they're taking some of these ideas this set of stairs is actually old curbing that was thrown away in the backyard and we needed to go from one level to another so it's sort of a modern interpretation on that rock garden movement that we looked back to and then a little nod to the Victorian foliage plant garden over there and then some of these rose gardening, day lily gardening, iris gardens they all became part of this movement in the early 20th century so you can see some new contemporary interpretations of some of these movements in history and as you move into the early to mid 20th century I didn't want to forget about this mid-century modern movement and what that really is all about because it's becoming so popular now both for furnishings and for the styles of houses and we have such a plethora of houses that were built between 1930 and 1960 that are now all becoming part of our historic palette here it's important to really think about this very simple very plain very stylized easy landscaping that went along with these houses and also this idea that a picture window was put into these houses to create a picture that you looked out on in your backyard so very often some of the garden design that went with these mid-century modern houses was really designed from looking out the living room window out to what you were looking at in your yard that they were meant to be very simple and very straightforward not full of a lot of flowers and not full of these rides of color that you saw earlier in the century because they're really the counter point to that movement so almost as simple and plain as you can be and in some cases as simple as some evergreen shrubs like used and a green lawn and that was going to be the end of it but one of our best examples of really a high style work of landscape architecture is here in the Camden amphitheater and if you think about that arts and crafts movement and that use of natural materials and then you take that up to a level where a landscape architect is thinking about gardening as a fine art that is really what Fletcher Steele did here in this garden. The palette that he used here was birch trees some evergreens and then these beautiful huge stones and boulders that are brought in and create these sweeping seats and you see an example looking back to the this is an amphitheater he built outside of the library up there a really magnificent work of landscape architecture now a national landmark right here on our own backyard that is really worthy of going to see and you can see how stripped down and bare now some of these gardens are becoming in the 1930s and 1940s. Lastly I just want to say a little bit about invasives because it's hard to give a talk about historic gardening without really appreciating both the good and the bad things that we brought into our gardens over the years and so I call this the triumvirate of successful plant material in New England and that is poison ivy on the lower left, honey suckle on the upper left and then this is of course Asian bittersweet here on the big picture on the right and this combination you all know very well and I'm sure you've all fought back in your gardens in some form or another in some cases they were plants that really came to us as oh this is such an incredibly beautiful plant it has wonderful fall berries it you know it's very hardy it does very well and now we know when it's really happy where it really goes to or even some of our native plants like the poison ivy as simple as it is this time of the year when it turns that beautiful scarlet color is not necessarily something you want to put over your arbor in your door but I wanted to show you what happens with some of these when they're allowed to have their do and I also want to give a credit to this fellow down here in the lower right hand corner this cow this is star island out at the Isles of Shoals and so here you have a small island environment that we are so familiar with here on the coast of Maine and who is the gardener of this cow because he's browsing the little bits of grass that are able to grow between this rocky bony soil that is here on this island and yet he successfully gardened and kept things at bay while he was here but when he left this is a picture of star island island in the 1930s when he left what started to creep in was good old poison ivy because it loves that rocky bony soil it could come in either by seed because seagulls could drop it in or it may have come in as a cutting or something else you know that came off of a boat who knows how it got here it may have just been indigenous right from the very start but these dark patches that you see here are the beginnings of the poison ivy is it starting to move in and take over those old grasslands that now the cow is not here to mow anymore so this is 1960 and then here's the view from the mid 90s and you can see how the poison ivy is so successful and has really moved over and now what is what happened is that the seagulls love this habitat because it makes a nice protected area for them to nest and if you are one of the lucky folks that gets to go to star island for a week on a week long retreat or they have week long programs that you can go out and stay in the island for the week you don't want to go out here a because you're going to get poison ivy and b because the seagulls are going to dive bomb you when you're there and so you stay away which means that the poison ivy is what it takes over more and more and it's a little bit like this you know creeping halloween kind of a plant that has taken over this corner of the island and so the island folks said this is terrible we're getting too busy there's too many people coming to these conferences we've got to limit the number of people that are on the island and when we really looked at this series of pictures and saw what had happened it they actually had half the number of people on the island that they had in the 1930s but they were all sharing this little tiny space around the buildings because the poison ivy had taken over this island so it's important to watch that happen and watch that transition happen and it happens with old farm fields turning into forest it happens with gardens going into invasives there is always transition and change happening but by being able to look back and look forward you can almost anticipate where you're going so one of the recommendations for taking care of this landscape was to bring back goats first and maybe think about keeping a cow on this island because somebody needed to eat in order to keep some of these invasives at bay and goats have been used in a lot of places to really be successful about that so in closing I really just want you to be able to look around and A see how beautiful and how inherently beautiful the scenery is that we have here that we're so lucky to have and you can garden with as much or as little as your heart's desire and your back will let you but I really want you to be able to think about going and looking at these museum spaces going to the long fellow garden going to the cemetery here and looking at the trees and the fence styles and the other vignettes of a period of time that are right there in front of you that are three dimension you don't have to look up this all in a book and if you want to go through those archives in the main memory network or look here at the library or in the files of the greater Portland landmarks because there's a rich story to be told there that might inspire you for your own backyard in your own garden so thank you very much for having me tonight I enjoyed being here and I hope I've made you hungry enough to either want to go home and work in your garden or go to dinner have any questions we might have time for a couple of questions if anybody has any yes this is Chote Island this is part of the crane national wildlife refuge so this is this is an early 19th century house that's out there and probably one of the best moments to really be able to understand what the coast of New England look like in the early 19th century without a lot of other things in your way this is part of my day job anybody else alright well listen thank you very much I'll be here for a little bit if anybody has questions but thank you