Although each garden or landscape she creates is as distinctive as the person for whom it is designed, Mellon envisions them all as one immense garden of her own. And where are the horizons of this garden? As far, indeed, as her imaginative inner eye can see.
New York Times, June 3, 1982
“Make the Land Work for You”: Russell Page in America
In the United States a limited and provincial European culture was already outdated a hundred years ago by the rapid growth of a new people in a new continent. Now styles from all over the world chase each other through the American scene, to be tried, accepted, modified and then discarded.
—Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener
WHEN RUSSELL PAGE began his travels to the New World, he brought with he mental images and experiences already accumulated in a lifetime of planting and design. Once in America, he found fresh challenges and a variety of opportunities that spanned the public and private sector and that also introduced him to an intriguing array of new plant materials—and new friends. Like an itinerant salesman or a magician with a bag of tricks, he had ingenious solutions to offer from abroad; but at the same time, he embarked on an important learning process that remained in force until his death in 1985.
Page's commute to America commenced in the fifties in the years before publishing his book, The Education of a Gardener Among the more than twenty-five gardens and landscapes he designed in the United States only a handful remained as unrealized projects. In viewing drawings of this latter group in his archives at the Kalmthout Arboretum in Belgium, one realizes how his ideas on a grand scale would have permanently changed the face of many American institutions. For example, in 1966, at the behest of Mrs. Vincent Astor, he made a Beaux-Arts elevation sketch in pencil of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art embellished with elm trees and lawns, low ilex hedges, and magnolia trees surrounding spouting fountains. A railing detail of a bronze owl was modeled on an Athenian coin from 400 to 500 b.c. By the next year, the museum's director, Thomas Hoving, launched the proposal for the Metropolitan's master plan, and Page's gardenesque Fifth Avenue facade disappeared into oblivion.
Years before he advised Mrs. Albert Lasker on her gardens in Greenwich, Connecticut, she asked him to draw a new fountain to be placed at the end of the Central Park Mall in New York. The result in 1969 was a simplified version of a fantasy fountain from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, with pink plastic parts that would have added a delicious touch of humor to the park. And, near the end of President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration in 1968, Page proposed a National Rose Garden for Washington, D.C.'s West Potomac Park, with three hundred geometrically shaped planting beds and over a hundred thousand roses, that would have been a major contribution to Lady Bird Johnson's movement to beautify the cities of America. In all of these projects from the sixties, Russell Page was ahead of American planners in his thinking about civic landscapes, but fortunately he remained on the scene into the next decades and the revival of interest in greening American cities.
In the meantime, there were his private clients, the first of whom was Mrs. William S. Paley, at her Long Island residence, Kiluna Farm. The design received its greatest accolade in a 1980 article titled “Water in a Woodland Setting” that appeared in the British magazine Country Life, written by Lanning Roper, an American who made his career in England as a garden designer and journalist. He described the large oval pool in a natural setting of trees and shrubs and the grass steps that rose gently through a wooded area under a canopy of dogwood trees. Barbara Paley's daughter, Amanda Burden, remembers walking from the house and looking over a mound and down the incline of steps to the surprise view of the still pond that reflected a rare assortment of pale orange azaleas. On the far side was a woodland walk lined with fritillaria. Regrettably, under its recent ownership the garden has reverted to a jungle of trees with little evidence remaining of its romantic setting.
Thomas and Iris Vail, who live in Hunting Valley, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland, first contacted Russell Page through William Paley, who was a former chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Thomas Vail himself was the publisher and editor of a prestigious newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. After a first meeting with the Vails in London, Page began to work at their home, an old stable block called “L'Ecurie” that had been moved to the top of a hill from lower in the valley where they had originally lived in it. As was Page's custom, he stayed with the Vails while he designed the garden at various stages, and in his working habits—taking long walks in the morning and then rapidly drawing in the late afternoon (always with some time out for tea)—can be found the secret to his extraordinary productivity. His focus and concentration on the land and garden at hand would yield the creative idea within a day rather than later in an office somewhere. Sometimes the moment of inspiration and decision would come when he was actually working with the bulldozer driver shaping the land, as he did in flattening the Vails' front courtyard. This efficiency made it possible for him to move quickly and unfettered between commissions, always retaining his clarity of thought for the next place.
The Vail garden, composed of eight garden areas surrounding the house, incorporates images Page had retained from various European garden traditions, and yet reduced in scale, they blended perfectly with the typically American wilderness landscape viewed in the distance. In creating a gravel courtyard, he treated the stable block as if it were a small rustic chateau, say in Normandy. One day, after driving up and down the access road with Iris Vail, he conceived the idea for an entrance allée of a double grove of clipped and pleached linden trees underplanted with myrtle. Viewing them lined up on a grid, they are as satisfying in appearance as the long rows of clipped lindens at the Palais Royal in Paris, and yet they retain a domestic flavor.
The regularity of these trees is reflected in the swimming pool garden behind the house by twin rows of clipped hawthorns and by tall hemlock hedges that enclose garden rooms with long beds of roses or lilacs planted with peonies. Reflecting their mutual interest in Spanish gardens, outside the library window he designed a rill garden with fountains at either end bubbling away to his specifications, which were always explicit on this matter. Among his drawings for this garden is a sketch of a water jet shaped in wood on a lathe to be used as the form for the final jet in beaten copper. Thanks to a rigid maintenance program, except for occasional storm damage, these gardens have matured over the years without losing any of Page's precision or inspiration. Within the last year, the Vails planted the last segment of his original plan—hemlock hedges in U-shaped patterns enclosing single dogwood trees. Thomas Vail recalls the time they planted seventy thousand white pine seedlings on open land beyond the house according to Page's directive to “make the land work for you.”
Paris was the inspiration for Russell Page's best known urban garden in America, the small enclosed terrace on East 70th Street behind the Frick Collection, the choice museum of old master paintings located in the Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City that once belonged to Henry Clay Frick. Nothing is more tantalizing or inducive to fantasy than a beautifully trimmed garden with a refreshing fountain in an enclosure that no one may enter. Passersby pause and press their faces against the iron gates to enjoy this quiet respite from the noisy streets. Because Page understood that people cannot judge distances over water, the rectangular lily pond that stretches across the central lawn creates the illusion of great depth in this shallow space. With its low green hedges, balls of box, and asymmetrically planted trees, the garden is not unlike one he designed on the rue de Varenne in Paris and evokes the same sense of catching a glimpse of a private French garden. New Yorkers consider it as one of the masterpieces of the Frick Collection.
“He regarded this garden as his calling card,” says Everett Fahy, the former director of the Frick Collection who oversaw the garden's installation in 1976 and 1977. The opportunity for the garden presented itself when the Frick purchased and dismantled the last of three town houses adjoining the museum. Although there was talk of a temporary garden and future expansion, the garden has in fact become a permanent visual amenity. Reassembling architectural fragments that had been removed