Bulletin of Remarkable Trees Vol. 2 No. 11
The hedge garden and E. Lowell Kammerer's legacy
Change is inevitable.
Seasons alter and affect the landscape - rendering trees bare and appearing lifeless, only to be reborn anew in the Spring. Time changes all things. But the underlying architecture, the bones of a thing, like the branches and trunk of a tree, stand steady - scaffolding for what will be built and rebuilt upon it.
The Morton Arboretum will inevitably change and grow with time. As the land around it has evolved, so have the gardens within this green suburban gem. In reflecting the changing needs and interests of the community it serves, the Arboretum maintains its purpose. Building on what came before, it becomes ever more deeply embedded in Chicagoland consciousness.
I have a deep emotional attachment to the hedge garden at the Arboretum. My grandfather was instrumental in the design and implementation of the space, and he took countless photographs of the vista from the Administration Building terrace over the years. My parents were married near the hedge garden in the 1980s, when weddings were not big business but were allowed for family and those with ties to the Arboretum. Their small ceremony took place on the rough stone steps to the east of the hedges, the iconic four pillars standing tall in the background. As a kid, I loved visiting that spot - it felt magical to be able to walk through the grass and up the weathered stone steps where my parents had been married, at an age where it was still almost incomprehensible to me that they hadn’t always been entangled in that way. My husband proposed to me during the Illuminations light festival held at the Arboretum every winter, just above where the four pillars stand. Knowing the connection my family and I have to that particular garden, he chose that exact spot purposefully.
To say that I’ve had mixed feelings about the initial announcement of a “reimagining” of my treasured hedge garden in time for the Arboretum’s centennial next year would be an understatement. The renderings of the new Grand Garden looked beautiful, but I couldn’t help feeling that this space which has meant so much to my family and to me, was going to be erased.
I’ve always felt closest to my grandfather in that garden, amongst the trial hedges he wrote about so diligently. I feared that connection would be weakened by this upheaval, that redesigning the space would remove the traces of my grandfather’s legacy in the garden’s design.
As painful as it is to let go of something I’ve held so dear, I think my grandfather would appreciate the new design for the hedge garden space. From the hours I’ve spent reading his journals and notes and looking at what he chose to photograph during his travels, I’ve noticed that he appreciated formal gardens. He cared deeply for trees, shrubs, and of course, hedges and wrote extensively to help educate the public on what options worked best for our climate here in Chicagoland. He also appreciated more natural landscapes, like the “Kammerer Wild Garden,” which attracted local and international visitors. But it’s obvious he valued aesthetics and the beauty of a well-designed garden. He cared equally for natural landscapes and more formal flowers, aesthetics, design.
When he traveled to Europe in the 1920s, he used up pages and pages of his journal diagramming the gardens he saw. At every castle garden, botanic garden, even private garden he had the pleasure to visit, he took the time to draw plans of the formal, traditional designs.
In his description of the hedge garden for a pamphlet accompanying the scaled-down (and award-winning!) hedge display at the 1963 Chicago Flower and Garden Show, my grandfather wrote that the garden aimed to “demonstrate the hedge potentialities of various trees and shrubs, both deciduous and evergreen.” Most importantly, he continues, the garden hopes to “illustrate the architectural value of hedges.” The Grand Garden’s design seems to harken back to some of the original, grandiose hedge design that was part of the garden during my grandpa’s career at the Arboretum. I do hope the reimagined space retains some appreciation for this original goal of the trial hedge garden that once existed in its place.
Though the hedge garden that my grandfather and Clarence Godshalk (with input from Mrs. Cudahy) designed will cease to exist, the architecture remains. Architecture can be thought of as static - something is designed, built, and resides in a particular place as a physical, tangible entity. But interpreting architecture as scaffolding, the bones upon which something - anything, really - is constructed gives the term a slightly different meaning. It’s feasible to describe bone, muscle, and connective tissue as the architecture of a human body. Or core policy positions being the architecture and foundation upon which a political platform is built. Using this definition, I can see that my grandfather put a great deal of thought and planning into the architecture of his life, considering what he would leave behind. Not only the literal landscapes he designed or aspects of the Arboretum he helped construct, he had to have known those were impermanent, but also the immaterial mark he intended to make on the world.
This idea is a comfort to me, now that so much of what he built and planted is gone - Riverby and its gardens, and some of the landscapes he designed and constructed within the Arboretum (like the hedge garden), no longer exist physically in the way that he molded them. But his ideas and intentions are still very much present, undergirding the Arboretum as it exists today.
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Thank you for your candor. Change is hard especially for family memories, pleass know by sharing it helps the rest of us accept our own changes.