Just as gardens disintegrate over time if given insufficient attention, so do the reputations of the men and women who design them. Especially past masters whose creations may not have been unquestionably transcendent or overwhelmingly influential. Not every landscape lion can be a Gertrude Jekyll or an André Le Nôtre, but knowledge about lesser-known mortals on the horticultural daisy chain is worth cultivating, because for every superstar there is a solid practitioner with a career that helps fill in history’s gaps, such as Frederic dePeyster Townsend. Born a New England blueblood, educated at Harvard University and married, for a time, to an heiress, Townsend was responsible for many a garden — public, as well as private, plus housing developments, town plans, playgrounds and a golf course — in the United States, Canada and Mexico. One of the survivors is Brookwood, the country place in Cooperstown, New York, where he lived from the late 1890s until the early 1920s, with his first wife and six children.
Established on the southern end of Lake Otsego in 1786 by the father of novelist James Fenimore Cooper — the latter romantically dubbed the eight-mile-long body of water ‘Glimmerglass’ — Cooperstown is famous as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Yet it also has a lesser-known history as the cradle of admired private gardens. The Coopers, the Clarks (Singer sewing machines) and other moneyed villagers commissioned personal paradises in the 1910s and 1920s from period notables, most significantly Ellen Biddle Shipman. A divorcée feminist who took up the profession to support herself and her children, she would become known as the dean of American women landscape architects. Shipman created two notable gardens for the Cooperstown Coopers, one at an estate called Fynmere c1911 – it is considered to be her earliest commission – and another, about six years later, at a smaller neighbouring house called Heathcote. A third, long under restoration, might be one of hers too, though no one is entirely certain. Handsome gardens are still tended in these parts, but few of Shipman’s or her contemporaries’ Cooperstown creations still flourish, having fallen victims to fickle fashion, eye-watering maintenance costs and, in several cases, the demolition of the main house (Fynmere being one) and subsequent abandonment of its floriferous setting to become wilderness again.
Frederic dePeyster Townsend’s Brookwood remains relatively intact, a small but potent evocation of the golden age of American country-house gardens. It is open to the public and administered by the Otsego Land Trust. Not too long ago, its rambling Victorian house was demolished, considered too dilapidated to preserve. (Townsend’s wife, Katharine, inherited it from her rich paternal grandfather in 1897, two years after they married.) Thus, the landscape designer’s flowering lakeside terraces, surveyed by a 1919 Arts and Crafts garden house made of stone-trimmed stucco — it looks straight out of a fairy tale — might mistakenly appear to be unanchored from their original context.
Townsend, a former college-football player, devised his gardens at Brookwood as a place apart, a destination rather than as an integration, placing it some distance away from the house. To reach it, one had to stroll down the main drive, traverse a bridge that spanned Brookwood Creek, and cross the carriage court to a blue-green-painted wooden door set within a stone wall. The door would – and still does – open to a long path, flanked on the right by a slope thickly planted with a mixed border and on the left by a rectangular greensward as level as a croquet lawn. (It was used as a victory garden during World War I.) At the end of the path, stone steps descend to the so-called lower terrace, a square space with an ornamental pool at its centre (a stone sculpture of Pan, the god of music, is set into the coping) and a terrace with a lyre-motif iron fence that offers a glimpse of Cooperstown in the distance.
Townsend devised the picturesque garden house with Walter PR Pember, an architect he knew from Buffalo and with whom he had collaborated on private houses in Brooklyn, New York, and Tenafly, New Jersey. The Townsends used the charming building, conceived in 1917 and completed in 1919, as a family retreat, entertaining space and library, filling the bookshelves with collected works (still in situ) of edifying if half-remembered authors. The couple also wrote the names of their children (one would marry a grandson of US president James Garfield) in the wet cement around the tile hearth. ‘It was in this garden house every Saturday morning in summer that we farmer’s children went for a singing class…’, a visitor recalled later in life. ‘After the sing, a swim in the lake for us all, and then a nice cool glass of lemonade or milk, and we are off home to lunch.’
Frederic Townsend bolted from this apparently idyllic life in 1920, for an unknown but likely reason: marital discord. Why else would Katharine have gone to live, apparently alone, in Munich for almost a year? Or take off on a months’-long cruise, seemingly unaccompanied? Four years later, she divorced him, the same year he married a Buffalo-area woman and relocated to Massachusetts. Katharine stayed on at Brookwood, and would marry for a second time too. Yet in 1944, her fortune depleted by too-free spending, she sold the majority of the property, largely furnished, though retained lifetime use of the garden house and its surroundings. The purchasers were Cooperstown automobile dealer J. Harry Cook and his bachelor son, Robert Wiles Cook, an antique dealer. The latter, who died in 1999, turned out to be a most attentive châtelain. He added Chinese furniture and tasselled lanterns to the garden house, which remain, and hosted memorable parties. He eventually deeded Brookwood to a foundation that would merge with the Otsego Land Trust.
Lack of easily accessible documentation makes Townsend’s professional legacy difficult to trace or how the garden he designed for his family might reflect his taste. Still, he was highly thought of, being described in his heyday as ‘an expert in landscape work and… one of the ablest men in the United States in that department’. As a young married man, he lived in Buffalo, setting up Townsend & Fleming, a landscape architecture firm, around 1904, in partnership with Bryant Fleming. The pair would open satellite offices in Cleveland, Ohio (Townsend’s hometown), and Louisville, Kentucky, before splitting up in 1915. Exhibition catalogues and newspaper articles from the early 1900s identify a multitude of the duo’s projects, from several parks (Buffalo) to shipping tycoon Howard M. Hanna’s estate (Bratenahl, Ohio) to Lincliff, the mansion of a hardware magnate (Louisville), to the Chevy Chase Club (Chevy Chase, Maryland). In between are tantalising mentions of tea houses, ornamental lakes, pool gardens, improvements to the grounds of Denison University (Granville, Ohio) and laying out Club de golf Grand-Mère (Shawinigan, Quebec, Canada). The last-named can still be visited, but most of Townsend & Fleming’s work there seems to have been erased. Many questions remain to be answered about the firm and its projects. For instance, I’d like to know why American-born soap magnate Juan F. Brittingham contracted the firm to design the patio of his house in Durango, Mexico. I’d also like to study the partners’ work at Chester Place (now a public library) in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, an urban estate where the gardens were peppered with marble busts and Greek architectural fragments from the collection of Gilded Age architect Stanford White.
Brookwood’s layout, created in 1915, shortly after the Townsends began using it as a permanent residence rather than merely as a summer place, remains unchanged from the original ink-on-linen plan that is held in the archives of the Otsego Land Trust. Townsend’s plantings, real and intended, remain something of a mystery, however. The plan gives no hint beyond structure, and no list of plants seems to exist. The few period photographs available suggest a spare concept, simple and Italian in effect, with boxwood geometries in the manner of gardens that Townsend and his wife might well have seen on their travels.
Today, thanks to an avid volunteer force, Brookwood’s beds foam with flowers and foliage, reflecting the look of the gardens as they were in the 1940s, when Katharine Townsend was still a regular if prickly presence. (She reportedly sold the property to the car dealer because, since they were of different social classes, she would never have to cross paths with him or his wife.) Spikes of yellow mullein and great wands of white-flowering black cohosh punctuate beds crowded with orange daylilies, magenta bee balm, lilac phlox, pink and white cleome, rose-coloured astilbe, and blushing spirea. Ferns feather seemingly every corner, above which pale irises raise their ruffled heads. A planting list prepared in 2020 triumphantly notes that two varieties of verbena had proved to be ‘invincible to critters’, though it ends on a disappointing note: ‘There was no evidence of germination from outdoor seed sowing of cornflower, larkspur and poppy seeds.’
In the manner of the Italian gardens that Frederic Townsend likely knew well and which had become popularised through the writings of Edith Wharton, large ceramic pots — including a Chinese pair, encircled by dragons, once owned by a local survivor of the Titanic shipwreck — host even more brilliant flowers, notably allium’s cerulean spheres. The pot plants extend and enhance the growing season, while providing notes of serene classicism. The overall effect is kaleidoscopic and slightly overgrown, a bit architectural and a bit wild, a secret garden mood that is amplified by tall trees, stone walls and distance from the primary road.
As pleasing as Brookwood is to the eye — and as favoured as it has been with brides and grooms seeking plein air nuptials — it is about to get even better. A recent grant of $14,780 from the Preservation League of New York State and the New York State Council on the Arts will allow the Otsego Land Trust to thoroughly identify and propose solutions for long-standing issues. The lower garden’s lily pond, for example, has been dispiritingly if understandably filled with gravel, because its operating system no longer draws water from the lake. A full restoration of the garden house and its motley furnishings is greatly desired, so it can be used for special events, as it was in 1916. That year, the Townsends hosted an outdoor benefit performance of The Princess Who Could Not Dance, a ‘fairy fable’ that had been adapted by Katharine Townsend, an amateur playwright, from a contemporary Ruth Plumly Thompson story. The cast included, the New York Times reported, ‘many well known members of the Summer colony about Cooperstown’, as well as numerous children. Perhaps that script can be found somewhere in the garden house and the pageant be re-enacted, allowing visitors to time-travel to the days when the Brookwood’s garden was new, Katharine and Frederic Townsend were still seemingly happy, and rural children marched down the drive for singing lessons and a dip in the lake.
For more information, visit otsegolandtrust.org/brookwood-gardens
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