I just started reading a garden book first published in 1923 called The Spirit of the Garden.
1923 Edition of The Spirit of the Garden Photo credit: Sue Libertiny
The book was written by Martha Brookes Hutcheson. After leafing through it, I think it can help me design Sugar Hill.
Martha Brookes Hutcheson was born in New York City in 1871, at a time when landscape architecture barely existed as a profession and certainly didn't exist for women. She studied at MIT, one of the few programs that didn't exclude women. She graduated in 1902 and built a practice designing country estates across New England and New York. In 1923 she published The Spirit of the Garden, a book that was both a critical and commercial success and is still in print today.
Martha Brookes Hutcheson Photo credit: Public Domain National Park Service
It wasn't her credentials that it impressed me. It was her words.
"So let us all have gardens, for we shall be but following in the footsteps of those of past ages, and but expressing the love of the garden that has been in our hearts for generations."
When I looked up her garden, Merchiston Farm in Gladstone, New Jersey, which is now open to the public as Bamboo Brook Outdoor Education Center, I was inspired. The photographs showed stone paths winding through sloped ground and terraced rooms.
Near the end of the book, Martha Brookes Hutcheson wrote:
"The garden is not only the exquisite playground of the home but a place of inspiration and promise, of tranquility and intense personal calm. And we are held and inspired by it."
"And we are held and inspired by it." I love that.
Garden Moxie Field Notes is a record of my Kentucky garden as it unfolds. Every other week I share the design principles guiding my choices, the plants being trialed, the failures and the keepers, and whatever else the season brings.
