Catherine Cooper speaks with Erin Fogarty about starting a career in preservation horticulture and her current project at Massachusetts Horticultural Society.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Erin Fogarty: Erin Fogarty, the Conservation and Historic Gardens Horticulturist at the Gardens at Elm Bank in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. Could you talk about how you decided to combine horticulture and conservation?

Erin Fogarty: So, I want to preface it by saying that I grew up in an area with a lot of public gardens. My childhood home was more or less 15 minutes from Winterthur, Longwood, Hagley, the cream of the crop of historic gardens. So I had a lot of exposure to historic public gardens and horticulture from a really, really young age. I've always liked being outside. I've always liked history, especially in regard to architecture. And when I was looking at grads, I was given the opportunity by Dr. Jules Brook, a professor who later became my advisor that I really loved working with, who said, "Hey, I have this historic garden called Gibraltar in Wilmington, Delaware that we'd like to do some historic preservation planning on.

Little did she know that this is a garden I went to when I was nine years old. And ever since then I've wanted to make it beautiful again. I think that landscapes are really, really fascinating. They're constantly changing. So unlike a period room or a historic building, to a lesser extent, you could spend all the time in the world maintaining a historic landscape or you could leave it completely alone, put a fence around it, never touch it, and you're still impacting what it looks like 10, 15, 20 years in the future, which is terrifying, but it's also such a cool opportunity.

Catherine Cooper: So what does preservation horticulture entail?

Erin Fogarty: Really it depends on who you ask. It's in some ways a really old field. We have conservation of historic landscapes going back to the Ladies Mount Vernon Association in the 1860s, but as a data backed and records backed kind of systemic discipline, it's really new. For me it kind of has a similar vibe to translating literature. So you take every single thing you know about a garden or a piece of art or whatever, but also social context in which it was created. A lot of the landscapes that I've worked on were developed in a time before the estate and capital gains tax, which does really, really impact what people were doing and how they were doing it. And use all of that in combination with knowledge of what it's like right now. So how many people are there to take care of it? Is it open to the public? What's its environmental vibe? And use all of that to restore it in a way that honors that original vision, while also making sense for both its current environmental situation and also to the people who will be using it and interacting with it.

So, something that I always end up having to do is adjusting plantings for changing shade conditions. So they plant trees, they want them to be little, the trees were left alone, now they're 60 feet tall. That changes what you can do there. That has happened to me before. Transitioning from it just being a garden in someone's backyard to a garden that is now visited by the public, tens of thousands of people per year; knowing if the owner had access to a greenhouse that would impact what plants they could put in, things like that. Basically finding out what made it special when it was created, and finding a way to convey that specialness. And on the day today, it's a lot of just being covered in dirt.

Catherine Cooper: Congratulations on your new position with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Could you tell us about your current project for them?

Erin Fogarty: Yeah, so Massachusetts Horticultural Society is a public garden in an old Estate in Wellesley. So about half an hour outside of Boston, give or take. And the garden was designed in 1916 by Percy Gallagher. He worked for Olmsted Brothers Firm and it was designed for Alice Cheney Baltzell, whose father had a major role in the founding of both American Express and Wells Fargo. So what we’re talking about is like unlimited money. [Olmsted Brothers] designed a bunch of gardens, but one of the gardens they designed was a kind of Asian inspired water garden. So it’s an Asian Japanese garden made by a white guy who’d never really been to Japan, if that makes sense. But it’s a time period where everyone was really, really interested in that style of design. Elm Bank was not really gardened for about 70 years from 1938 to 1996, in which time that this Asian garden was not managed and all these plants which were brought over and kind of introduced to American gardens from Japan, many of them did so well in the area that they’re now invasive plants.

So right now, my job is to rehabilitate this water garden in a way that, again, honors the original design while making sense for us right now. It’s a super cool design. It’s basically a kidney shaped pond with a bridge in the center modeled after the Shinkyo Bridge in Nikko, Japan. If you’ve seen that Japanese red bridge, that’s what it looks like surrounded by really dense, overflowing beds of mostly woody perennials that continue in a curated woodland for about a little bit over an acre. And I’m holding off because the main things that define the project are its challenges, which I know you’re going to ask about in a second.

Catherine Cooper: Feel free to go right into the challenges.

Erin Fogarty: Okay. So there are three major challenges. The least challenging thing is that we don’t really have any pictures of the site. The woman who commissioned it, Alice, was really, really private, like so private that the only photos we have of the garden were those that were taken by force when the garden won a Massachusetts Horticultural Society award. So, an award for garden design in the 1930s. As part of winning the award, the garden had to be written about [and photographed] in a landscape magazine. So we have those, but those are mostly detail shots. So there’s nothing really showing the whole garden. And I have plant lists, I have blueline drawings, but it’s really difficult from the shots we have to tell what in that design was and was not implemented. But that’s not a huge deal. I have the designs, I know what they meant to put there.

The second most challenging thing is our site. So,the garden is located within a protected wetland area associated with the Charles River. And because of that, any decision we make will have the potential to impact someone’s garden 10-15 miles downriver. We are working with a local Conservation Commission, and, we file permits and they give us permits to tell us what we can and can’t do with the site. So right now what I am allowed to do is I can use any mechanical means, any physical means of removal I want. I can’t use any chemicals, I can’t use any stump treatments, which again considers that we’re so close to the water. And the river does have a really, really big impact on the people of who live here in eastern Massachusetts; it’s great, but being that close to the river does lend its challenges.

And we also have a really, really significant population of invasive species. So the site after Alice Cheney died in 1938, there was a minors seminary, so like a seminary but for children who used the site until 1971 and they practiced what’s known as mow and blow maintenance. So they would mow the grass, they would blow out the leaves, leave everything else alone. Then it was a tech school for a couple of decades until Massachusetts Horticultural Society took it over in 1996. And again, when the tech school was there, they didn't really do much in terms of maintenance of this area, especially because it's kind of out of the way of the main drag of the estate. So we have a ton of invasive species that were allowed to grow functionally unchecked for 60 or 70 years. What that means is that there's a lot of cutting, there's a lot of sawing.

There is a lot to do to just peel back the layers and find out what the physical boundaries and any physical features of the site would be. So there's stuff growing over that flagstone path that I mentioned earlier, which allegedly the flagstones were taken from the restoration of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the early 19 teens. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, but there's some big species everywhere. Our main issues are. Glossy buckthorn (Rhamnus frangula) and Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) round-leafed bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), things like that. All but the bittersweet were introduced to the site intentionally as part of the original design. Which is cool. I mean, it's an interesting story to tell about how horticulture has changed, but trying to dig out the site from the growth has been a lot.

Catherine Cooper: What are your goals for the completion of the project?

Erin Fogarty: We are aiming for a really slow, really conscious rehabilitation. The traditional way things like this have been practiced are you pay an architectural firm six figures, they come in, they do a big plan for the site, and then you drop another six or seven figures in an all-in-one restoration where you take everything out and then you put new stuff back in. But the view we're taking is kind of gardening the garden back to life. So what that means is that we are just gardening it and making slow but meaningful steps towards turning it back into something, which allows us to use the area for education. So for training people in landscape remediation, landscape history, environmental stewardships, and it also allows us to find cool stuff that would've been lost if we were to rip everything out all in one go.

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