Secret garden
Bartram's Garden, a colonial treasure,
has once again been rescued.
"On a late spring
day in 1988,
Martha Leigh Wolf
decided to go for a
walk in Historic
Bartram's Garden.
It was her
second day as
executive director of the site in Southwest
Philadelphia where Quaker farmer John Bartram
earned a place in history as the most honored
botanist of colonial America.
"I had been at the Brandywine Conservancy for
11 years, in a very safe job and a beautiful
environment," says the trim and elegant Wolf. But it
was time for a change. "I loved history, I loved
native plants, I loved everything about the Bartrams.
My job had been in preservation, and this was my
opportunity to act out what I had been telling
everybody else to do in historic preservation."
So here she was in the June sunshine, surveying
her new domain, an island of green surrounded by
old factories and public housing. Strolling from the
historic house down the long sweep through the
lower garden to the Schuylkill, she was feeling a
little dismayed.
"It looked like an overgrown park with uncut
grass and trees," she recalls. The grass, she learned
later, had been left long so that the foliage of
naturalized spring bulbs could ripen, but it had
become tangled with wind-blown trash. And where
were the flowers? Bartram had planted intensively,
sticking things in wherever he thought they might
grow. The lower terrace looked more like a stand
of aging trees than a botanical garden filled with all
kinds of plants to be studied.
As she stood there, thinking there must be
something she wasn't grasping, she was approached
by a young man on a bicycle. He was clearly
disgusted, and had to share his agitation with
someone.
"I waited years and years to come to John
Bartram's garden," he told her, "and I can't tell you
how disappointed I am."
The cyclist wasn't the first to feel that way. He
may have been one of the last.
"For a long time people had come and been
disappointed because there wasn't much to see,"
says archaeologist Joel T. Fry, curator of historic
collections at the site through which 18th-century
Europe became acquainted with hundreds of New
World plants. "It was just a pleasant, park-like
environment."
And not always so pleasant.
The historically and scientifically important site
was part of a city park system that sometimes
seemed to be struggling just to keep up with grass
mowing and tree trimming. Its budget had been cut
year after year, and there were scant resources for
historic preservation. At times the wilderness was
kept at bay only by dedicated volunteers.
But this week, when scholars and scientists and
ordinary citizens converge on Historic Bartram's
Garden for "Bartram 300," a five-day celebration of
John Bartram's 300th birthday, they will find not
only Bartram's restored house and outbuildings
bringing the past to life but the garden, too.
Bartram's pond is once more lush with American
lotus and fragrant water lily. A section devoted to
native plants provides a living catalog of hundreds
of plants the botanist grew. An abandoned factory
site on the northern edge of the garden has been
transformed into a wildflower meadow, and to the
south the Schuylkill washes in and out of a
re-created tidal wetlands, just as it did when
Bartram first arrived here.
For in the last two decades there has been yet
another rescue of Bartram's garden, with credit
going to a succession of quiet heroes - and
ironically with a tip of the hat to those who earlier
did little, and thus allowed it to be preserved.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the
restoration of Historic Bartram's Garden is that it
survived to be restored at all.
John Bartram bought the 102-acre farm on the
Schuylkill at a sheriff's sale in 1728. The farmhouse
was soon too small for Bartram, who fathered 11
children, nine of whom lived to maturity. Using
Wissahickon schist, he built on several rooms with
his own hands.
In 1731 he established his botanical garden in a
long swath from his house to the river, and for the
rest of his life he cultivated and studied the strange
plants he and his son William collected in the wild
all over the East Coast. Thanks largely to Peter
Collinson, a wealthy Quaker merchant and amateur
botanist in England with whom Bartram exchanged
seeds and plants, he became well known in Europe
and in 1765 was named Royal Botanist in America
by King George III.
The garden was well known in colonial America,
too - though not for its neatness. One visitor in
1754 wrote that Bartram's garden "is a perfect
portraiture of himself, here you meet with a row of
rare plants almost covered over with weeds, here
with a beautiful shrub, even luxuriant amongst
briars, and in another corner an elegant and lofty
tree lost in common thicket."
After Bartram's death in 1777, the property
passed to his son John and then to his
granddaughter Ann Carr. It was on the market in
1850, and seemed likely to fall victim to the
industrial sprawl that was snaking out along the
lower Schuylkill.
Enter Andrew M. Eastwick.
"He was a railroad engineer who did the Russian
railroad from Leningrad to Moscow and made a
fortune," says his great-great-granddaughter Kitty
Muckle of Villanova, a John Bartram Association
board member and longtime supporter. "When he
came back from Russia, the Bartram house was up
for sale . . . so he bought it. When he was a very
young boy, he didn't have much money, so he
would go down to the river, and he fell in love with
the garden. He wanted to keep it as a pleasure
garden, and have no harm come to any of the
plants."
Eastwick died in 1879, and the property became
neglected and in danger once again.
"The destruction of the house built by the hands of
John Bartram . . . and the obliteration of the famous
Bartram's Garden would be a mishap to be much
regretted," opined the Philadelphia Press in 1884.
This time it was Eastwick's former gardener who
stepped in. Thomas Meehan, by then a city
councilman, launched a campaign to acquire the
house and botanical garden, and the site became
part of the city's public park system in 1891. Two
years later, Bartram descendants formed the John
Bartram Association to help care for the property.
The battle for Bartram's wasn't over, however -
witness this 1922 headline in the Philadelphia Public
Ledger: "Famous House, Once Show Place, Now
Shuttered and Bolted." The up-and-down pattern
would persist for a half-century.
Long before Martha Wolf's jarring stroll amid the
uncut grass, things were beginning to change at
Bartram's Garden.
It started in a small way, when association
stalwarts Peg Anderson and Mig Evans and garden
club volunteers sought to resurrect the Common
Flower Garden - an ornamental planting that
adjoins the house - in time for the Bicentennial. That
brought professional archaeological research to the
site for the first time, to determine a simple question:
Was there once a central path? (Apparently, though
when is not known.)
Then the Bartram Association - which administers
and supports the site under the jurisdiction of the
Fairmount Park Commission - decided in the late
'70s to hire a paid director.
"That was the big step," says Ernesta Ballard,
who was on the association's board at the time and
is again. "There had never been anybody running it
before except board members, and they were really
kind of running it in an old-fashioned way, as a nice,
low-key operation."
In 1981, the same year the city completed a
major renovation of Bartram's house to turn it into a
modern museum, D. Roger Mower Jr. became the
first full-time administrator.
There was still little operating money. "Every
penny meant something to us," says Mower, who
now runs Mill Grove, a wildlife sanctuary in
Audubon, Montgomery County. Along with
developing educational programs for children and
increasing membership, he remembers personally
hauling hundreds of boxed lunches to sell on tours,
persuading friends to donate a copier here, a
computer there. "I bought desks and chairs and
office supplies from bankrupt businesses."
It wasn't until 1986 - 93 years after its founding -
that the association launched its first capital
campaign, a $1.3 million fund-raising effort that
bankrolled the first projects.
Along the way, Mower helped engineer the
acquisition of the abandoned cement factory site
next door, a former part of the Bartram tract that
the botanist had used for farming, not research.
With much help from the park commission, the
Philadelphia Water Department and garden club
volunteers, the derelict "brownfield" would
eventually bloom again, as a 15-acre wildflower
meadow.
By the time it did, in 1989, Wolf was director,
and was embarked on a frenzied effort to attract
more grant money and raise the site's profile. If the
'80s were mostly about raising money, she says, the
'90s have been a decade of raising and spending it.
Outbuildings were refurbished, principally for the
all-important education programs. Energetic board
president Toni Brinton began a second campaign,
this time to raise $2.15 million for endowment and
capital projects.
The association's "big step" was paying off.
The big earthmovers rumbled across the grassy
ball field on the west bank of the Schuylkill early in
the summer of 1997.
Trees had already been toppled. Piles of old tires
had been cleared. Day after day, the teeth of the
massive shovels bit into the turf, stripping away the
layers of the 20th century, scooping out an irregular
1.3-acre bowl several feet deep.
By the end of July, all that held back the tide was
a stone and concrete retaining wall that in the early
1900s had essentially eliminated tidal wetlands on
the lower Schuylkill.
Now one was about to be restored on the
southern edge of Bartram's botanical garden.
On July 30, workers broke through the wall and
replaced the section with rocks that would act as a
filter. As the tide rose that night, water seeped
through the rocks and slithered into the onetime
field for the first time in nearly a century. Half an
hour before midnight it reached its peak, four feet
up the sides of the graded slopes.
When it ebbed, it left behind a permanent pool in
the deepest corner and a pattern of tidal inundation
that would soon support more than 17,000 native
wetland plants - many planted by hand in the mud
at low tide - and attract ducks, sandpipers and
great blue heron.
Before a year had passed, mallards were raising
ducklings where abandoned cars once rusted
among the weeds.
In a sense, restoration of the wetlands undid
Bartram's work, for he too had diked and drained
the area and tried to turn it into farmland.
But Wolf was jubilant. "It's one of the most
interesting things we've done," she says.
And it didn't cost Bartram's Garden or the
Fairmount Park Commission a penny.
"Four or five years ago, I began to get interested
in environmental fines on the Schuylkill," Wolf says.
"I wondered why we never got any compensation,
although we were in an area that was affected by
it."
Right across the river from Bartram's is a Sunoco
oil refinery. When it was cited for a clean water
violation, the association joined a group of civic
organizations seeking to benefit from the settlement
between Sunoco and the Environmental Protection
Agency.
The wetlands project was chosen because it
benefited the river and the community and could be
used in Bartram's educational programs with
Philadelphia schoolchildren. Construction cost
$384,000 - all paid out of the Sunoco settlement.
As a bonus, excavated soil was used to rebuild an
adjoining softball field.
The restoration won this year's environmental
award from the Consulting Engineers Council of
Pennsylvania. And Sunoco and Bartram's became
good friends: The company is underwriting next
weekend's Living History Festival, the "Bartram
300" finale.
When a 1758 drawing of John Bartram's house
and garden was discovered in 1955, tucked away
in the library of the Earl of Derby in England, it
seemed that it would facilitate the re-creation of the
botanical garden. For one thing, "A Draught of John
Bartram's House and Garden" showed that the grid
configuration of the garden survives intact from the
18th century.
But it was more difficult than first thought. The
Bartram family lived on the property for a long time,
changing it a great deal over the years. Then there
are the overlays of all the eras that followed.
"We haven't really decided what period the
garden should be," says archaeologist Fry. But
1728 to 1823, when William Bartram died, is the
general interpretation period. "It's a long continuum
- it will always be an interpretation."
Archaeological research provides some of the
missing details. It also serves up some surprises.
Long before the Bartrams, prehistoric people left
traces, which led to designation as a state
archaeological site.
Excavations have been in progress at the Bartram
site for nearly a quarter century, providing the
underpinning for the ongoing restorations of the
buildings and the garden. Much of it has been done
by Fry.
It's not just artifacts he looks for, but also soil
stains - root and plant traces - that may preserve
the best evidence of the historic garden, including
where things were planted.
Which is one reason that the restored
18th-century water garden has, incongruously, a
rubber liner. Two summers of exploratory
excavations in the botanical garden helped sketch
an outline of the pond's come-and-go history. At
some point in the 19th century, the pond essentially
disappeared, perhaps drying up and accumulating
organic matter. Around 1910, it was reconstructed,
only to be filled in the 1930s, according to analysis
of the rubble. This time around, the pond was
rebuilt with a rubber liner to preserve what remains
below of the original for any full-scale
archaeological work in the future.
The redone pond - now barely a year old - is
more than two feet above the level of the one
Bartram built, probably with his own hands. But a
visitor would never notice - it's the plants growing in
and around the pond that grab attention. Here in the
boggy edge is the yellow pitcher plant Bartram
called "a glorious odd flower," there the fragrant
water lily he sent to England. And, of course, the
American lotus, the "colocasia" that Bartram
mentions dozens of times in his letters.
Bartram imported the lotus, Nelumbo lutea, from
creeks in southern New Jersey, and it became
naturalized on sections of the Schuylkill. It could be
invasive: He wrote one acquaintance that it had
taken over the pond. He sent roots of the lotus to
the Royal Gardens at Kew in England, "along with
two of our Bull frogs for the King."
There may not have been any bullfrogs in the
restored pond, but there were fish. Briefly.
Temptation apparently proved too great, and furtive
fishermen caught every one.
With nearly half a dozen garden projects
completed in the past few years, it's unlikely the
disgruntled young man on the bicycle would be
disappointed if he visited Bartram's today. But that
isn't what motivates Wolf.
"The mission of the Bartram Association," she
says, "is education, and I believe it's more important
than visitation."
So the latest restoration involves the beautiful
stone barn built in 1775, which is being adapted as
an educational center so that twice as many children
can attend classes that combine history, science and
nature.
As the work progressed, Wolf checked it
regularly, marveling at the workmen's loving
attention to detail, thrilled even by the
wheelchair-accessible restrooms that are part of the
project.
"I'm having the time of my life," she says, and
clearly she means it.
Strolling through the garden one recent spring
day, she pauses at the edge of the wetlands and
looks south at the hulking outline of an old gypsum
factory - silent now, with a million-dollar "for sale"
sign attached.
But Wolf doesn't see the building. She sees 10
acres of potential.
Imagine.
"It could be additional wetlands, a visitor center,
parking, you could tie a boat up there. . . ."
Historic Bartram's Garden
54th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard,
215-729-5281
Living History Festival, next Saturday and Sunday
(May 22 and 23) |
