Faulkner Farm: an Italian garden in Massachusetts

Abstract

Brookline, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston, was a pace-setting town in American garden design during the second half of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was the climate: the intellectual climate. Many lively and intelligent people in all fields of endeavour lived in Brookline. Andrew Jackson Downing, in his popular, oft-reprinted Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1841), cited two Brookline estates—Thomas Lee's and Colonel T. H. Perkins'—as exemplars of his ideal combination of the ‘Beautiful’ and the ‘Picturesque’. By the 1880s, John Lowell Gardner and his wife, Isabella Stewart Gardner, the flamboyant art collector, had adorned their elaborate Brookline garden ‘Green Hill’ with Italian artifacts. Frederick Law Olmsted, already famous as a landscape designer, established his home and office in Brookline in 1883. At the same time, Charles Sprague Sargent, director of Harvard's new Arnold Arboretum, was expanding and developing his family estate ‘Holm Lea’ into 150 acres of idealized natural landscape. And then, in the last three years of the century, the Honorable and Mrs Charles F. Sprague began transforming their Brookline estate ‘Faulkner Farm’ into something entirely new in America. Their garden, in situation and in plan, was patterned directly after the Renaissance villa gardens of Italy.