The Wild Garden at Bellefield
Beatrix Farrand’s original plan for the Garden at Bellefield indicating a surrounding area labeled “Wild Garden”
When the Morgan Family donated the Bellefield Mansion and surrounding estate land to the National Park Service in 1975, the acquisition made many improvements to the Home of FDR National Historic Site possible. The Wallace Visitor Center would be built on the land, including improved site entrance lanes and parking areas, and the local NPS administrative headquarters could be moved out of Springwood and into Bellefield to help spare Roosevelt's historic home from excessive use and foot traffic. A third very important detail of the acquisition would not be appreciated for the next 20 years, until a local family with an interest in landscape architecture would uncover the jewel hidden beneath black plastic and surrounded by deer-eaten hemlocks on the southern side of the mansion.
The garden at Bellefield, designed and erected around 1912, was Beatrix Jones’ (Farrand) approximately thirtieth commission, completed when she was 40 years old and already a very well established and respected professional landscape gardener – her preferred term for what we would call a landscape architect. Unfortunately, the planting plan and horticulture records of the original gardens were lost to time, but we have the detailed drawings of Farrand’s designs for the garden bed layouts, walls, trellis systems, gates, and a southern summer house gazebo which was never built. Another key unfinished element of the Bellefield designs has beckoned to us from her handwritten notes on the garden’s original drawings: the labeling of an exterior portion of the garden walls and hedges as “Wild Garden.”
“Landscape design is a living art form, and as climate, tree canopies, and ecology change, Farrand’s aesthetic, as communicated in her writings and gleaned from archival materials, continues to speak to us from the past and guide the garden’s development.”
It has been a goal since the beginning of the interior garden’s revival to realize this wild garden as a way to accomplish three significant goals:
1. To display an example of a wild/natural design element very important to Beatrix Farrand’s historic aesthetic
2. To incorporate the use of native trees, shrubs and plants as a way of championing Farrand’s early use of these species and connecting her to modern horticultural trends, and
3. To connect the Beatrix Farrand Garden at Bellefield to the greater NPS site, both with increased accessibility and an improved visual desirability.
Already, you may notice that thousands of square footage of plant beds have been established, a woody layer of shrubs and trees have been planted, and below the ground over 2,000 bulbs are ready to emerge in the spring of 2024!
