Gardens, Grand and Glorious : In Washington, a secret oasis amid the bustle of bureaucracy
Quod Severis Metes read the wrought-iron gates of Georgetown’s Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, the Latin words arching gracefully over two gilded sheathes of symbolic wheat. “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
I first stumbled upon this intriguing entrance in 1977. At the time, I worked part time in the Georgetown district and often trekked through the neighborhoods that lie on either side of the commercial bustle of Wisconsin Avenue, admiring the riches in Federal architecture. I wandered in, paid a modest admission fee and began a quiet adventure of discovery.
From that spring afternoon when I first roamed Dumbarton Oaks, I have returned each season from my home in Virginia, giving myself the gift of one perfect unhurried afternoon inside its sheltering walls.
Certainly I go to see the tulips and the wisteria in heady bloom in April, the perennial borders in June or chrysanthemums in October. But I particularly enjoy being lulled into reverie by the tinkling of water in the pebble garden, or lying on my back on a bench under the hornbeams clipped into an aerial hedge rimming the ellipse, marveling at the swath of blue sky cut by their interwoven branches. And, on the best of days, I go to discover some new small wonder of this garden: a bench hidden behind a row of boxwood, an overlooked urn carved with lush fruit.
For residents of the nation’s capital, Dumbarton Oaks Gardens offer a retreat from Washington’s bustle. For the fortunate visitors to this city who happen upon them, they provide a generous measure of calm, a hiatus from the barrage of museums and monuments that beckon one tirelessly on.
In 1920, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss acquired the property, 16 acres of which is today open to the public as Dumbarton Oaks Gardens and Collections. They were inspired by what Robert, a career diplomat with family money, called “a dream during 20 years of professional nomadism of having a country house in the city.”
That country house turned out to be a Federal-style mansion obscured by 19th-Century renovations and additions and located on 53 acres of steeply sloping land lying between Wisconsin and Connecticut avenues in Georgetown. First named Rock of Dumbarton in the early 1700s, the property underwent several name changes until the Blisses christened it Dumbarton Oaks. Over the next decade they set about restoring the house to its original design and, working with their friend, renowned landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, transforming the grounds into a series of gardens.
When Farrand began to study the site, she had behind her 40 years of experience in garden design. Consulting landscape gardener at Princeton, Yale and Oberlin universities, her commissions included gardens for the residence of J. Pierpont Morgan (and later the Pierpont Morgan Library) and the White House.
Farrand’s style emphasized heavy walls, asymmetry and winding paths with progressively decreasing formality as the gardens extended outward from the house. Like her British contemporary, garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, Farrand favored native plants--oak, hemlock, holly, box, yew and the silver maple--over the exotic plantings that had been popular in the late 19th Century. But unique to Farrand was her sense of color. For Jekyll, color meant flowers, but for Farrand it was quite often foliage and the color of fruit, the property taken as a single visual entity.
At Dumbarton Oaks, as in all her designs, Farrand tried to make the plan fit the ground, not twist the ground to fit the plan. She also studied the tastes of the owner.
“Never did Beatrix Farrand impose on the land an arbitrary concept,” Mildred Bliss observed. “She listened to the light and wind and grade of each area under study.” Mildred worked with Farrand on the design by mail, from diplomatic posts in Sweden and, later, from Argentina, between 1923 and 1933. Mildred Bliss had asked that the gardens be essentially formal with an accent on design. She wanted year-round interest with a predominance of evergreens, both coniferous and broad-leaved. Trees and shrubs were to form a frame for flowers, but the view and the sweep of sky were also to be emphasized. Decorative architectural details and ornament--benches, arbors, urns--were to be included.
But it was the land with its series of slopes and sharply differing grades that would ultimately direct the gardens toward their unique character.
When the Blisses returned to live at Dumbarton Oaks in 1933 they found the country estate they had dreamed of.
The broad sweep of lawn at the south entrance opened out toward R Street, where a brick wall and shrubbery screened the house from the street. From the north, three rectangular lawns on different levels and of narrowing widths led to a steep drop where sky and the trees on the other side of the valley were emphasized. The small areas around the house--the star garden, the green garden--were divided by walls to create the sensation of private rooms.
Below, to the north, was the swimming pool, created on the site of an old manure pit. Built under the upper terrace was a vaulted loggia, with wisteria growing over its facade, and dressing rooms, which replaced the cowsheds of the former owners. A flight of steps leading down to the pool divided around a baroque shell-shaped fountain. At the west end of the pool, a wall fountain set in a niche was shaded by weeping cherries, behind which rose a tall cedar. A line of willows cast a reflection in the water. Just below the pool was the tennis court.
From the east side of the house, broad, graduated terraces extended outward, beginning with the Beech Terrace in which was centered a great purple beech. Next came the Urn Terrace, with a great stone urn standing in the center of box-edged parterres. To the left was the brick-paved box walk that led directly down to the ellipse of box surrounding a fountain. Twelve feet below was a rose garden, where nearly 1,000 roses were planted. A gate in the south wall led down to the wooded Lover’s Lane Pool, a Baroque amphitheater.
To the west of the pool, a double staircase led to the Fountain Terrace, which opened on the north side onto an herb garden with a wisteria-covered arbor. From here, paths curved down sloping hills in various directions past the herbaceous borders, the cutting and kitchen gardens, on to the bottom of the valley to the meadow like naturalized gardens. By walking in one direction, the Blisses could experience the order of the formal garden; in another direction, the beauty of a woodland path.
In 1940, knowing that gardens often have a limited life span, the Blisses made a decision that would secure the future of Dumbarton Oaks. They conveyed 16 acres of property, including the house, gardens and their collections of Byzantine and pre-Columbian art, to Harvard University, Robert Bliss’ alma mater.
They bought another Georgetown house to live in and Harvard gladly agreed to let the Blisses administer Dumbarton Oaks, which they did in a very much hands-on manner. These 16 acres form what is today known as Dumbarton Oaks and includes 10 acres of formal gardens and museum collections contained within the house. The remaining acres of Bliss property went to the National Park Service and the Danish government, which purchased 10 acres for its embassy complex.
The Blisses wanted Dumbarton Oaks to live on, not as the showplace of a former residence but as a scholarly institution encouraging study in their areas of interest. They established endowments not only for the art collections but also expressly for maintaining the gardens and for supporting a program of research in landscape architecture.
In 1944, Dumbarton Oaks became the site for a series of informal meetings that would secure its place in world history. Those meetings were attended by representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and China, and they resulted in proposals that called for an international organization to help maintain peace and security in the world. These proposals became the basis for the United Nations charter.
While the Dumbarton Oaks that the visitor experiences today remains much the same as it was for the Blisses, there have been changes from Farrand’s original plan. The great purple beech died, and a silver-stemmed beech was planted in its place. The box planted around the ellipse was removed when it became overgrown and out of scale and a double line of pleached hornbeams was substituted. The tennis court was converted to a pebble garden in the late 1950s by Mildred Bliss, who also changed the herb garden to a paved terrace and pot garden. English ivy and pebble mosaics were added to the urn garden.
Overseeing the formal gardens, the pools, fountains and greenhouses requires constant renovations, beyond the routine chores of planting, pruning and propagating. One long-term project was redoing the pebble garden, which involved replacing the original latticework from the 1920s, as well as removing and cleaning all the pebbles and installing 34 new drains.
Attention is still paid to preserving the environs of the garden while continuing to use plants that were a part of the original plan. Some of the perennials, for example, are the same plants that have been growing at Dumbarton Oaks since the beginning. Each winter the plants are propagated in the greenhouse from cuttings, root sections or seed. Many of the varieties are no longer available commercially. There’s a pink chrysanthemum called Dumbarton Oaks that showed up in the 1940s as a seedling.
In early November, plants are saved from each of the older chrysanthemum varieties, including the pink Dumbarton Oaks. The mums go in the cold frame, and in late February, cuttings of each variety are taken to generate new plants. White Japanese anemones are propagated from short sections of root layered between soil. Seed gathered from perennials such as the hollyhock are grown as biennials: Last year’s seed will be planted in the greenhouse this month and the plants moved into the flower beds in November to bloom in the following spring. The same scented geraniums are kept in the greenhouse that were kept for Mildred Bliss--lemon and peppermint.
Thanks to the foresight of the Blisses, the gardens of this estate, considered Beatrix Farrand’s masterpiece, are one of Washington’s best-kept and, one might add, most-guarded secrets.
“No other garden in this country,” wrote Eleanor M. McPeck in “Beatrix Farrand’s American Landscapes,” “has the power to evoke on so many levels, other passages, other moments in time.”
Dumbarton Oaks is the chambered nautilus of gardens, suggesting at every turn deeper levels of meaning and experience. In the spiral of this experience the visitor finds total escape from the outside world. Seventy years after the Blisses and Farrand first began their alchemy, Dumbarton Oaks remains as they determined it would be, a country house in the city, where as Farrand once said, “thrushes sing and . . . dreams are dreamt.”
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GUIDEBOOK
Budding Into
Dumbarton
Dumbarton Oaks Gardens, 1703 32nd St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007; telephone (202) 342-3200.
Admission: Open 2-6 p.m. daily, April-October. Closed on federal holidays and during inclement weather; $3 for adults; $2 for children and senior citizens. November-March, open 2-5 p.m. and admission is free.
Transportation: Metrobus stops within a few blocks of the garden entrance.
Blooming schedule: (subject to nature’s whims)
Through April: Spring bulbs, cherry trees, forsythia, wisteria, azaleas, dogwood, lilacs, akebia, star magnolia.
May: Lilacs, perennial borders, clematis, roses, peonies, fringe tree.
June: Perennial borders, clematis, roses, grandiflora, magnolia, canna.
July and August: Perennial borders, day lilies, fuchsia, gardenias, agapanthus, oleanders.
Late September and October: Chrysanthemums.
For more information: Washington, D.C., Convention and Visitors Assn., 1212 New York Ave. N.W., Suite 600, Washington, D.C. 20005, tel. (202) 789-7000.
