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The nineteenth century has justly been called the Golden Age of Horticulture. The period saw vast plant explorations, the growth of horticultural societies, and the publication of many books on gardening. The great horticultural richness of the Victorian era is especially apparent in the unique and beautiful gardens they created. In England this style of landscaping was called the Gardenesque; in American it was better known simply as "landscape gardening."

Gardenesque concepts were largely brought to America in 1841 by the father of American landscape architecture, Andrew Jackson Downing, through his book, The Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. The actual term, "Gardenesque," however, was coined by John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843), one of England's most celebrated gardeners. It was Loudon who continued the trend, started by the famous landscape designer, Humphrey Repton (1752-1818), of combining the natural English landscape garden with formal or "artificial" effects near the house. But perhaps one of the most distinctive features of the Gardenesque landscape was the great attention given to individual plant specimens throughout the garden.

Although vestiges of the Gardenesque can be seen around Victorian mansions throughout America, one of the most outstanding examples of this style exists at a relatively obscure estate named Rockwood. Located just outside Wilmington, Delaware, Rockwood is significant because it survives nearly intact as originally built in the 1850s. The mansion, gatehouse, carriage house, gardener's cottage, and gardens all remain as an example of a complete Victorian country estate.

Today the mansion at Rockwood, together with six acres of gardens and buildings, are preserved s a museum. Unlike many historic estates, the gardens at Rockwood have retained much of their original integrity. Magnificent specimens of unusual and exotic trees, open expanses of lawn, a conservatory, pleasure garden, and remnants of a kichen garden and orchard all reflect the horticultural wealth and beauty of the Gardenesque landscape.

Rockwood Patterned after English Gardenesque Concepts

The unusual completeness and unity of design found at Rockwood was inspired directly by English examples. Rockwood was built by Joseph Shipley, a native of Delaware who spent most of his life in Liverpool, England, as a merchant banker. While in England, Shipley not only amassed a sizable fortune, but also a country house with extensive gardens. As a member of the rising merchant class, he also had easy access to many country estates. According to one account, Shipley loved Wyncote, his English country estate, so much that when he returned to Delaware in 1850, he desired to recreate it.¹

Facts seem to support this story since Wyncote's architect, George Williams of Liverpool, also designed Rockwood's mansion. The general design of the gardens was also patterned after that of Wyncote, but like Downing, Shipley applied Gardenesque principles and ideals to a distinctly different American climate and geography.

Shipley's success in adapting the Gardenesque style to Delaware is evident from an article which appeared in an 1861 issue of The Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser, edited by the famous Germantown nurserman, Thomas Meehan:

The magnificent place constructed and occupied by Joseph Shipley, Esq., appropriately called Rockwood...is the most splendid specimen of the English park-like style of landscape work that we have ever seen...The lawn contains some of the rarest ornamental trees that can be grown in this climate, and exhibits specimens of rare size and beauty. The forest work, the lawn, the beltings and groupings of trees and shrubs, and indeed the entire landscape, all appear replete with natural and artificial effects in landscape gardening, on a large scale, unique, beautiful and grand in the extreme...We feel quite sure there is nothing of the kind equal to it, in its peculiar style in Pennsylvania.²

The excellence of Rockwood begins even before visitors pass throught the pair of granite gateposts which mark the estate's entrance. For those traveling north from Wilmington, it appears that the public road was built to end at Rockwood's gate. On approaching, however, it is apparent that the road actually makes a turn to the right just past the gate, but the heightened effect of the entrance has already been achieved. Inside the gate stands a stone gatehouse, whoe peaked gables and wooden eaves hint of the more elaborate mansion beyond.

A long, gently curving drive leading to the mansion was carefully planned to allow extensive views of the surrounding countryside. Sweeping vistas of farmland and wooded hills once opened up beyond the native oak and hickory forest through which the drive passes. Along the way, conifers were naturalized within the forest to add variety. Today, although the well planned vistas no longer exist due to encroachment by the surrounding forest, the natural scenery of the estate is still manifest. As the drive nears the mansion, it skirts a wooded ridge of rocky cliffs. In perfect harmony with Gardenesque theory, the cliffs make the curve in the road seen natural.

Continuing beyond the cliffs, as the drive nears the mansion it borders the edge of a park-like lawn dominated by venerable specimens of native and exotic trees. A ginkgo, atlas cedar, sugar maples, and Delaware's tallest sour gum tree all remain from the original plantings. Catawbiense rhododendrons, also planted by Shipley, have developed into immense clumps which provide a spectacular display of lavender blossoms in late spring. To achieve a natural effect, trees and shrubs on the lawn were planted singularly and in irregular clumps. Care was always taken, however, to allow enough space for each specimen to develop its full form and beauty.

The natural beauty of the lawn is heightened by rock outcroppings which break up the smooth green expanse. While preparations were being made to start building the mansion, Shipley gave explicit instructions not to remove any rocks "near the site of the proposed house until the plans of the garden, lawn and shrubbery are fixed."³ No doubt to Shipley, these rocks embodied a particular type of beauty, then described as the "Picturesque." According to Downing, the "Picturesque" included any object with irregular, rough, or broken surfaces. This contrasted with the "Beautiful" in nature which was embodied in smooth, rounded, gentle forms, such as curving walks and round-topped trees.⁴

Along the entrance drive, near the edge of the lawn, Shipley planted a weeping beech (Fagus sylvatica 'Pendula'). During the Victorian age trees of weeping habit were much admired not only for their elegance but also for their ability to generate deep and often melancholy thoughts. Today the beech towers over the drive, and it is only after one passes through a suspended tunnel of its pendant branches that a view of the stone mansion is possible.

Rural Gothic Style Mansion

High peaked gables topped with iron finials, and intricately carved wooden ornamentation over the entrances and eaves distinguish the stone mansion at Rockwood as an excellent example of rural Gothic architecture. This style was first developed in England, and later popularized in America by Downing. Typical of many country houses, the mansion at Rockwood was built as a long, narrow rectangle, with the longer sides having two different facades. Visitors arrived at the mansion's entrance facade whice faces north. The opposite side, known as the garden facade, faces the pleasure garden to the south.

In a Gardenesque landscape, house and garden are carefully integrated to provide vistas of the garden from inside the house. Upon stepping into Rockwood's lofty entrance hall, one's attention is immediately drawn directly across the mansion's narrow width and through a pair of full-length glass doors to the garden on the south side. Similar views of the garden are possible from the dining room and drawing room, which also have glass doors facing south.

All the glass doors on the mansion's garden facade open onto a raised grassy terrace. In Shipley's day, the terrace was planted with round flower beds and embellished at its center with an ornamental iron garden urn. During the English landscape period, the terrace with its formal or "artificial" plantings was considered unnatural and was eliminated from the garden.⁵ Later, however, Repton reintroduced the use of the terrace near the mansion to provide a smooth transition from the regular lines of the house to the naturalistic garden beyond.⁶

The elevated position of the terrace provides a prospect of the entire pleasure garden which includes a large central lawn surrounded by a judicious planting of trees. A place for quiet strolls, the pleasure garden once contained a series of gently curving gravel pathways affording commanding vistas of the countryside. In 1857, a visit to Rockwood inspired an article in a local Wilmington newspaper which described this scene:

...a few years ago, rocks and trees covered the site of the elegant and spacious mansion, and what is now a beautiful lawn ornamented with flowers, and here and there a stalwart oak, or lordly chestnut shooting their branches high up toward the sky,...The Delaware [river] is plainly visible, and yet the charming spot is so shut in by hills and woods as to be scarcely seen from any of the public highways...⁷

Through the years, the once open fields surrounding Rockwood were overtaken by forest. There is little indication that a view of the river ever existed, except perhaps for a ha-ha, or stone retaining wall, which still surrounds the entire pleasure garden. Ha-has were built throughout the gardens to separate the raised lawns from the open fields beyond. Adopted from the English landscape garden, a ha-ha protected a garden from livestock, while allowing an uninterrupted vista of the surrounding countryside.

It was especially important to keep browsing animals out of a pleasure garden because it was planted with rare ornamental trees and shrubs. Throughout the nineteenth century plants were collected much like objects of fine art, and in Shipley's day Rockwood's pleasure garden was truly a horticulturist's paradise. Nursery receipts from such famous New York firms as Parsons and Co. and Ellwanger and Barry, and Philadelphia's Robert Buist, show that Shipley purchased over twelve hundred plants for his gardens.⁸

Some were old favorites, such as weeping laburnum (Laburnum anagyroides) and ENglish hawthorn (Crataegus laevigata), which no doubt reminded Shipley of his garden at Wyncote. Others, like the smoke tree (Cotinus coggygria) and the fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus), were native American species grown as choice ornamentals. The vast majority of the pleasure garden plants, though, were rare, newly discovered flowering species from the Orient, such as spirea, deutzia, magnolia, forsythia, and weigela.

During the Victorian era, the passion for collecting plants was so great that areas of a garden were often set aside solely for growing rare or unusual plants. Photographs suggest that a pinetum containing choice conifers once existed next to the pleasure garden at Rockwood. At least twenty-seven different species of pine, spruce, fir, juniper, and other conifers were purchased for the gardens. some, such as the weeping cypress (Chamaecyparis funebris) and deodar cedar (Cedrus deodara), are marginally hardy exotic specimens which perhaps only a true connoisseur would have attempted to grow.

To the northwest of the mansion lie the utilitarian parts of the estate, including the kitchen garden, carriage house, and orchard. The kitchen garden is surrounded on three sides by a tall stone wall. The south end of the garden was originally enclosed by a low fence or hedge, so as not to block the strongest sun of the day. In addition to providing fresh vegetables for the mansion, the kithen garden contained fruit trees, and at one end a greenhouse "vinery" once stood. In the vinery Shipley's English gardener, Robert Salisbury, raised varieties of European grapes for which he was awarded a "special premium" at the 1855 autumn exhibit of the Delaware Horticultural Society.⁹

When laying out an estate, "convenience and utility" were prime considerations. Next to the kitchen garden Shipley built a large stone carriage house which included not only stables but a barn, quarters for servants, and a water tower. The stables were conveniently located near the kitchen garden to allow easy transfer of manure for compost. The placement of the carriage house to the north was also deliberate since the structure protected the mansion from prevailing winds and the attendant stable smells.¹⁰

In a Gardenesque landscape, the utilitarian areas of an estate are normally considered unsightly and carefully screened from view. So to the north of the kitchen garden, Shipley planted a pear orchard and surrounded it by a tall hedge to hide the regular rows of trees. In order not to detract from the mansion, the gardener's cottage, lying to the north of the orchard, was also hidden from view by a graceful weeping willow.

Elegant Conservatory Survives

During winter, while the outside gardens lay dormant, the mansion's conservatory became the focus of interest. Attached to the drawing room on the east end, the conservatory at Rockwood allowed the entire household to live in close harmony with nature. As early as 1816 in England, conservatories were attached to mansions but they did not become especially fashionable in America until after the Civil War.¹¹ Rockwood's conservatory, built in 1852, is one of the oldest and finest surviving conservatories of its kind in the country.

The conservatory was designed by the mansion's architect, George Williams, an early pupil of Decimus Burton who designed the great conservatories of Kew Gardens. Built of wood, glass and cast iron, the conservatory at Rockwood is a richly ornate, elegant structure. The floor plan is basically rectangular with a five-sided alcove enclosing a small pool at one end. Slender interior cast iron columns support the roof and lend not only a sense of grace and spaciousness to the conservatory, but also permit maximum exterior walls are surmounted by an elaborate balustrade of pierced cast iron panels and finials.

Heated by a system of hot water pipes set beneath the floor, the conservatory was kept warm all winter for growing an assortment of flowering plants. While the garden outside was dreary and colorless, indoors blue flowering achimenes, torenia and salvias, red amaryllis, and whilte flowering oxalis were all forced into bloom. An avid horticulture enthusiast, Shipley also grew rare flowering bulbs from southern Africa, as well as an exotic tropical fruit known as Custard Apple (Annona cherimola) in the conservatory.

Shipley enjoyed his beloved country estate for only sixteen years. When he died in 1867, the estate was inherited by his two surviving sisters. They owned Rockwood for the next twenty-five years, during which it remained virtually unchanged. When the last of these sisters died in 1892, the estate, with many of its furnishings, was purchased by the Bringhursts, who were relatives of Shipley. For the next seventy-five years, almost until Rockwood became a museum, the estate remained in the Bringhurst family.

During the Bringhurst years, the gardens experienced changes which not only reflected a preference for more formal garden design but also less concern for the estate's utilitarian aspects. The vinery was torn down and the kitchen garden was replanted with boxwood-lined pathways and a formal rose garden. In later years the orchard was allowed to decline. When many of the flowering shrubs died they were not replaced. For the most part, however, the garden's original character remained and the walks were carefully maintained. Old trees that died were often replaced by identical or similar species.

Altered but not drastically changed, Rockwood's landscape retains today much the same spirit that Shipley intended. Like a place untouched by time, the gardens are still a beautiful example of horticultural richness, harmony with nature, and integration of house and garden, which was the Gardenesque.

NOTES:

1. Liverpool Post and Mercury, 4 July 1931, cited by Gilbert T. Vincent, "Rockwood: A Romantic Villa in Brandywine Hundred," (Master's thesis, University of Delaware, 1972), p. 17.
2. Graptolite, "Trip to Wilmington, Del.," The Gardener's Monthly and Horticultural Advertiser, vol. 3, June 1961, p. 229.
3. Joseph Shipley to Edward Bringhurst, Sr., 21 September 1850, Hargraves Collection, Rockwood Museum Archives, Wilmington, Delaware.
4. Andrew Jackson Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, 6th ed., (New York: A.O. Moore and Co., 1859; rerint ed., New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1967), p. 58-59.
5. John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, the Genius of the Place; The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 31.
6. Wilmington Delaware Weekly Republican, 16 July 1857.
7. See note 6 above.
8. Horticultural Receipts, Box H, Rockwood Museum Archives, Wilmington, Delaware.
9. Wilmington Delaware State Journal, 21 September 1855, vol. 23, p. 2.
10. Vincent, p. 61.
11. John Hix, The Glass House, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), p. 95.

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