Dumbarton Oaks
The ultimate power play
23 January 2024
By: James Lennox
How do you project status in a city (Washington DC) dedicated to the pursuit and exercise of power? You could certainly do worse than buy a mansion on top of a hill surrounded by a 53-acre estate in an upmarket neighbourhood and then employ the most fashionable and accomplished designer of the age to transform the unpromising site into a high-society showcase.
That's just what Robert and Mildred Bliss set about doing when they bought the Dumbarton Oaks estate in 1920 and engaged Beatrix Farrand to design the 16 acre garden at its heart. For almost 30 years, Farrand, in collaboration with Mrs. Bliss, designed every detail of the garden, from the layout to the planting, benches, ironwork and ornamentation.
And so came to pass the Hanging Gardens of Georgetown. It's undoubtedly a masterpiece of design ingenuity, cleverly coping with steep falls and an urban location. It does however contain some areas that are less successful, if not downright problematic. All of which makes a visit that much more enjoyable.
I was predisposed to being harsh on this garden. I'd just spent an entire month visiting gardens up and down the East Coast, exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure. The heatwave that had dogged me throughout was still clinging on. Traffic and parking were troublesome to say the least. Open hours were severely restricted and tickets could only be purchased online, tricky for those of us still resisting the all-conquering march of the smartphone. You could say I was feeling slightly irritable.
But once, eventually, I made it through the gate, all mundane irritants just melted away. For the East Lawn alone Farrand deserves to be congratulated. A lush green swathe falls gently away from the entrance drive, established trees screening out the city. It's the ultimate urban buffer, a demilitarized zone to keep the hoi polloi at bay.
More than that, it's a nod to the great English eighteenth century landscape tradition, rolling acres offsetting the new house, with a clear line of sight on any trespassing miscreants. Here, the open private space subtly signals wealth, the freedom from having to make a precious commodity (undeveloped land in a capital city) earn its owners’ keep.
With a mind cleared of quotidian clutter, the visitor steps from the palate-cleansing lawn into the amuse-bouche of the Orangery, the walls and rafters of which are clothed in Ficus pumila, the climbing fig.
Where the East Lawn demonstrates a skillful illusion of naturalism, from here on the garden is a showcase of man's mastery over nature. Where God created a steep hill, Farrand and Bliss engineered a series of expansive terraces, mighty retaining walls, vistas and borders.
Of all the American gardens I visited, this was the most reminiscent of our old friend, the English Arts and Crafts garden. Just like Hidcote, Sissinghurst and hundreds of other lesser incarnations, Dumbarton Oaks is made up of separate, relatively compact rooms divided by hedges or walls (weathered bricks, dry stone), with a keen eye for a good, safe plant. The balance between hard and soft landscaping is assured, transitions between rooms accomplished. Over the course of the garden's development, tweaks were continually made, wrinkles ironed out. Well, almost all…
For those of us fortunate enough to garden on a steep slope, to terrace or not to terrace is a no-brainer. At the very least, an area immediately adjacent to the house should be levelled. At Dumbarton Oaks, it stops you from opening the back door and falling off a cliff; at La Corolla, it stops me from walking straight into a near-vertical hillside. The question really is just how many walls to build before either the money runs out or the entire garden starts to resemble a partially-excavated ziggurat. At some point, the natural slope has to be allowed to re-appear.
Farrand contented herself with a mere four or five terraces of varying heights and widths, falling away on two sides from the Green Garden (the fulcrum of the garden immediately outside the Orangery), a space dominated by a single southern red oak. To the north the land drops away to a swimming pool, the Pebble Garden, the Ellipse and, beyond, the naturally sloping Forsythia Dell.
To the east, formality is the name of the game, with first the Beech Terrace, then the Urn Terrace, Rose Garden, Fountain Terrace and Arbor Terrace before the slope returns.
As a general rule a terrace should be at least twice as deep as the height of its retaining wall. Otherwise, you could end up with a mere collection of walls and steps overwhelming the softer elements. And in a garden open to the public, it's best to avoid vertigo-inducing sudden drops. Only on the Urn Terrace do the walls dominate, but here the designer clearly wasn’t above resorting to the shiny bauble school of distraction and, lo! an urn appeared to draw the eye.
But in this sequence of garden rooms, it’s all about the Rose Garden.
It’s a generous space packed with yellow, orange, salmon and cream roses, rather than the more usual collection of reds and pinks. The Blisses regarded this as the very centre of the garden where they installed a stone bench carrying the family motto (the horticulturally apt “As ye sow, so shall ye reap”) and, ultimately, chose to have their ashes interred behind the plaque set into the retaining wall.
The lower Fountain Terrace, by contrast, feels slightly pinched, with two mean water features upstaged by a fine bench with its own baldacchino. Who wouldn't want one of those? Once more, the old shiny bauble trick comes to the rescue.
This leads on to the much more satisfying Arbor Terrace, a vaguely Mediterranean space where silvery-blue tones dominate. It was redesigned in 2016 to replace the original collection of potted plants with a more balanced arrangement of permanent beds and seasonal pots, all to be admired from the shady wisteria-clad arbour. It's an encouraging sign that the garden is not viewed as a static museum piece to be preserved in its original state despite any obvious shortcomings in the original design.
Other revamps have occurred in the Ellipse where a fountain was relocated in the 1960s and, more recently, box has been replaced by American hornbeams on stilts (yet to knit together fully) to form the enclosure, possibly another nod to Hidcote's influence.
The Kitchen Garden has also evolved from a purely productive space to a more ornamental mix, reminiscent of an idealised cottage garden overseen by Scottish-style ogee-roofed tool sheds. Decorative and useful - the perfect Arts & Crafts combination.
And the Herbaceous Border does exactly what you'd expect. With the backing of that staple, the yew hedge, it was still firing on all cylinders at the very end of summer - an English classic with American planting flair. Competent and assured, you can relax wherever you wander in this garden knowing you're in the hands of experts.
But, there’s at least one elephant in this collection of garden rooms: the North Vista. It just doesn't work. Farrand herself struggled to resolve this particular conundrum and successive designers have tinkered with it.
Subtly tapering side walls have replaced hedges, the lawn has been graded to provide a shallow fall leading to a decorative ironwork railing at the end. And still, the desired effect, a perspectival lengthening, fails to materialise. It's not helped that, instead of leading the eye upwards to the sky as at Hidcote, or out into the wide blue yonder with a dramatic drop as at Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, with this vista the ground falls a mere 10ft or so with a screen of run-of-the-mill American forest trees foreshortening, rather than opening up, the view.
Less of a structural elephant, more of a plant choice fail is the Forsythia Dell. A monoculture that presumably looks startling for a week or so in early spring, I'm not sure an acre of straggly green blobs for 50 weeks of the year can be said to be pulling its weight.
Almost as questionable is Cherry Hill right next door. Again, an area of such limited seasonal interest is perhaps more of an artefact of 1930s fashions than something we would want to emulate today. It’s a particularly pointless exercise in a city famed for its vast historic public plantings of flowering cherries. At least this and the Forsythia Dell are mostly hidden from view at the bottom of a steep slope.
So, three problematic spots in an otherwise exceptional garden. While the planting isn't necessarily as imaginative or as contemporary as at, say, Chanticleer or Hunting Brook (both subjects of upcoming reviews), nothing seems out of place.
At times, the planting just has to play second fiddle to the decorative hard landscaping. These can be playful, such as the figure of Pan pointing the way to the Lovers’ Lane Pool and the squirrel finials on a summerhouse.
Or there are demonstrations of a craftsman's skill, as with the Pebble Garden, an Italianate reworking of a redundant tennis court.
And then there are countless pillars, gates, stonework baskets and garlands, benches, intricate paths and outbuildings. It's quite the collection.
But there's no getting away from Farrand's superb treatment of an awkward site. It’s a veritable show-stopper to dazzle the capital's movers and shakers. And a source of inspiration for me to have a go at re-modelling my own Asturian hillside.
More information here: https://www.doaks.org/
