Martin House volunteers tend modern garden from yesteryear
We don’t know if Frank Lloyd Wright invented the word “floricycle,” but letters between the architect and his wealthy clients, Isabelle and Darwin Martin, show all three liked the idea of flowers blooming from early spring to late fall.
But how to do it? That question and Wright’s delays in sending a detailed landscape design vexed Martin in the early 1900s.
“As the shrubs were drying up we planted them Saturday and enclose this photograph showing how they were planted,” the Larkin soap executive wrote in 1905. “If the photograph is meager, remember that the planting plan was meager, too.”
Martin had no way of knowing that Wright’s plant expert, Walter Burley Griffin, had quit because he wanted to be paid in something other than Japanese prints.
With Griffin’s help, Wright came up with a plant list filled with oldfashioned garden stalwarts — hollyhock, phlox, columbine, lupine and my personal favorite, delphinium.
All of them grow today in the floricycle and other beds around the landmark Darwin Martin House (martinhouse.org) and adjacent Barton House built for Martin’s sister.
But it wasn’t easy. Martin lost his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash and his landmark house and 1.5 acres were in ruins when restoration began in the 1990s. The gardens were the last piece, begun in 2016.
Landscape architect Mark Bayer was charged with re-creating this collaborative landscape.
“This garden is as much the Martins’ as it is Frank Lloyd Wright’s. They loved plants and gardening,” said the owner of Bayer Landscape Architecture in Honeoye Falls, N.Y.
Since it was a rehabilitation rather than restoration, Bayer had more leeway in choosing perennials, shrubs and trees. Improved cultivars are available for most of the plants that grew a century ago.
The ‘Pagans Purple’ delphiniums by the verandah were spectacular when I visited in early July. But they have been fading lately so Susan Perlow and other garden volunteers recently cut them back.
“We get a beautiful second bloom in September,” said the recent retiree from Williamsville, N.Y.
Rosanne Stolzenburg, of East Amherst, said she and the other 20 regular garden volunteers learn constantly and sometimes use those lessons in their home gardens. Her favorite flower overall is delphinium, but it changes every week.
“This week the phlox look amazing. They’re purple, pink and white,” she said.
Perlow said she feels “privileged” to work upon a national landmark property that is part of the Great Wright Road Trip along with Western Pennsylvania’s Fallingwater, Kentuck Knob and Polymath Park.
Stolzenburg, who averages 12-15 hours a week in these gardens, agreed.
“To see how the landscape complements the beautiful Martin House, it’s awesome,” she said.