The principal meaning of the gardens at Maymont, as understood by classically educated people like James Dooley, was that mankind was placed in the world to manage and organize otherwise chaotic natural forces like water and vegetative growth in order to promote the civic good. Gardens, both decorative and practical, were like books that reinforced the lessons of order that were inherent in all cultures and periods, even as they provided the leisure for contemplation of this comprehensible vision of the natural world.
Aerial photo of Maymont, 1920, Maymont Foundation. The Italian Garden can be seen to the upper left.
Introduction
Maymont, Richmond's great public garden, was built as the landscaped suburban estate of James H. Dooley (1841-1922), a lawyer, philanthropist, and financier, and his wife, Sallie May Dooley (c1845-1925), a social and cultural leader. The 100-acre farm on the edge of Richmond was purchased in 1886 by the Dooleys when Sallie fell in love with the spectacular views of the James River to be had from the central ridge and with the large oaks that studded the grounds. James F. Dooley had studied Roman literature as part of a classical education at Georgetown College, from which he graduated first in his class. Sarah (Sallie) Dooley loved gardening, flowers, and travel.
The Dooleys' travels opened them to a wide variety of garden settings, including the gentle and informal English landscapes, the elaborate terraces and fountains of French and Italian gardens, and the gardens of Japan. The classical past inspired temples and, very likely, the garden's central waterfall, while a love for the Renaissance and Baroque villas on the outskirts of Rome led them to build an American version of an Italian garden that, with its cliff-top terraces and bubbling fountains, would astound friends and visitors.
No matter that there was no water supply at the top of the hill; with gasoline pumps, anything was possible. They worked from 1907 to 1911 with Richmond architects Noland and Baskervill to base their Italian Cascade on the similar feature at the Villa Torlonia outside Rome, but they added a massive naturalistic waterfall like that at the Villa Gregoriana at Tivoli. At the bottom of the hill, with the waterfall as a backdrop linking it to the Italian Garden, they soon after added one of the nation’s finest and oldest extant Japanese-style gardens. For that purpose, James and Sallie Dooley are thought to have employed Y. Muto, a Japanese landscape designer, to arrange the rocks and water courses in 1911-12.
The Dooleys began with modest Victorian landscape features. As their wealth increased, they expanded the scope of their gardening efforts and embraced the growing movement known as the American Renaissance, which took its inspiration from continental European sources. As Dale Wheary has observed, “as country places proliferated across the country, so too did the number of fashionable garden styles- Italian, French, “Colonial”, Japanese, and other thematic styles. Eclectic landscapes included several different types of gardens, much like outdoor ‘rooms,’ connected by naturalistic areas, such as park-like, English-style lawns.” [1]
The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Industrial
On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs, that we should compare it with the sublime; and in this comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent. . .
Edmund Burke, 1756
Starting in the seventeenth century, British philosophers explored the relationship between “Beauty”- a controlled experience of light and movement- and “the Sublime”- an experience of awe associated with a boundless and even threatening natural world. As Richmond expanded in the late eighteenth century, wealthy landowners, merchants, and industrialists built villas on the hills around the city. Starting with Belvedere, William Byrd III’s 1758 house west of the city, the elite built their houses on the low bluffs overlooking the broken and dramatic landscape at the fall line. The view of the roaring river, passing over the many layers of granite falls for a distance of six miles, was an object of contemplation and awe, suggesting the limitless power of nature. The setting of the city was highly praised by visitors who enjoyed the dramatic views of the river and the sound of the thunder of the falls. Its noisy, rockstrewn landscape provided an appropriately American setting for Jefferson’s Capitol temple set high on Shockoe Hill.
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| Quarry at Maymont: an industrial feature that was adapted as part of the finished landscape. |
The altered landscape visible at Maymont at the end of the nineteenth century proved to be an ideal setting for picturesque garden effects. When James and Sallie Dooley reused the former farm overlooking the river and the abandoned quarry operation to create the gardens at Maymont, they were following in the footsteps of generations of wealthy Richmonders. As they and their employees sculpted a garden, everyone involved in the project, from house servants, coachmen, and gardeners to the Dooley’s peers in the city, were touched by the ambitious scale of its idea. In a way, the estate as it exists today recapitulates the entire natural, social, and economic history of the region, from wilderness to a farm and from a private ornamental estate to an extraordinarily valuable public asset. Today, everyone is able to participate in the grand vision of the Dooleys and the other philanthropists who have enlarged it.
The Dooley’s Vision
According to Major Dooley, his wife “fell in love with the place” and “begged” him to buy it. She brought to the project a passion for gardening and considerable knowledge about horticulture. He was involved in the creation of the gardens and probably brought to bear his classical education in the planning of some of the architectural forms and literary references to be found in the garden’s design, but Sallie May Dooley is given credit by her husband for much of the energy that went into its realization.[2] Much of the garden derives from its spectacular location overlooking the falls, now concealed by vegetation. Vision, in the sense of gazing out at the natural world, is built into the design of Maymont. The gazebos placed around the garden were stations from which the Dooleys could admire views over the landscape, both wild and cultivated.
Sallie May Dooley experimented with landscape effects and planting patterns in the grounds around the mansion in the 1890s. She and her husband planted an outdoor museum of rare trees among the large oaks that had first attracted her attention. Mrs. Dooley “would daily walk the grounds with Mr. Taliaferro, the estate manager, to supervise the planning, planting, and care of Maymont’s landscape and gardens” [3] Major Dooley, however, is given credit for the idea of the Italian Garden in an article written in 1908.[4]
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| Maymont today. The Italian Garden and Grotto are shown at the lower right. |
The Dooley's intentions at Maymont are difficult to track, due to lack of documentation, but the larger Maymont landscape seems to inhabit two distinct modes of design. The first is the Victorian, during which the Dooley’s began their adventure in country living. The picturesque Ornamental Lawn near the Victorian mansion at Maymont and the surrounding English Park-style landscape and Arboretum reflected the gardening styles popularized in mid-nineteenth-century American publications. The second mode is known as the American Renaissance, which prompted the Dooley’s emulation of the great gardens of Renaissance and Baroque Italy. Publications in the 1890s and early 1900s, as well as the success of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, encouraged a return to classical forms and planning principles. Likewise, the Japanese Garden, which is neatly dovetailed with the Italian Garden, grew from examples at late nineteenth-century world’s fairs. It also showed the Dooley’s interest in expanding their horizons beyond the simplicity of the American gardening tradition.
American Renaissance
“The great country house as it is now understood is a new type of dwelling, a sumptuous house, built at large expense, often palatial in its dimensions, furnished in the richest manner and placed on an estate, perhaps large enough to admit of independent farming operations, and in most cases with a garden which is an integral part of the architectural scheme.”
Barr Ferree, American Estates and Gardens,1904 [5]
The stylistic focus of the Dooleys shifted in the new century along with the tastes of writers like Edith Wharton, who encouraged the adoption of consistent programs of garden design and interior decoration based on classical European prototypes. This movement that spanned across the arts is know as the American Renaissance and it affected painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as garden design. The Dooleys redecorated their parlors at the Dooley Mansion in eighteenth-century French style and, in 1912, after Grand Tour-style trips to Europe, built and furnished Swanannoa, a palatial summer home in the mountains west of Richmond modeled after Rome’s Villa Medici. The gardens and house at Swannanoa are closely integrated, as was advocated by proponents of the American Renaissance and the allied American Country House movement. In contrast with Swanannoa, the marked disconnect between Maymont’s very Victorian mansion and the Italian- and Japanese-inspired gardens completed nearly twenty years later points out the change in the Dooleys’ perspective.
As their project at Maymont progressed, the childless couple seem to have decided to expand their private suburban estate, transforming it into a treasure house intended for the cultural education and recreation of Richmonders long after they were gone. They wished for it to serve as a presentation of the fine arts, found alike in the elaborate gardens and the mansion, which they equipped with curios, paintings, tapestry, sculpture, and musical instruments representing the best of the nation's European inheritance. It would appear that as their wealth increased, their program became more ambitious. James and Sallie May Dooley began their relationship with the fashionable architectural firm of Nolan and Baskervill in 1904, when they commissioned a up-to-date new Carriage House.
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| Aerial view today. Maymont Mansion is located to the upper left, the cascade at the center below the Italian Garden, and Japanese Garden at the lower center. |
There does not appear to have been a fully realized master plan for the landscape. In fact there are few documents that record the intentions of the designers and virtually no accounts of the garden's effect on viewers in the early accounts that have surfaced. Any connections between iconography, the owners' intentions, and perceived meanings is speculative. At the largest scale, a visitor's progress through the gardens, after leaving the house, moved from very formal to picturesque. It began in the rectilinear parterres and tightly organized cascades of the Italian Garden, progressed by means of the Grotto to the studied naturalism of the Japanese Landscape, and ended in a (no longer accessible) rock garden, called the Rocky Overlook, on a granite outcrop at the far east end of the property.
The garden was expanded over a period of four years, but the sequence of construction shows unexpected relationships between sections of the garden. For instance, architectural drawings show that the water supply system was designed from the beginning to serve the Upper Terrace and Cascade as completed in 1908-1909, perhaps, but not necessarily, before the concept of the Japanese Garden was conceived.[6]
The full design for the upper terrace was presented to Major Dooley in early 1908 in a rendered sketch plan and elevation showing elaborate planting beds, Italian cypresses, and other decorative accessories.”[7] The Dooleys expanded the Italian Garden over the next three years with two terraces below and in front of the original one, all completed by 1911.
The Via Florum
A minute's walk will transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones of the Roman pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence a little farther stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful seclusion. A seclusion, but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and populace, stranger and native, all who breathe Roman air, find free admission, and come hither to taste the languid enjoyment of the day-dream that they call life.
The garden enclosure is entered through a rough stone gateway, above which is inscribed Via Florum (the Way of Flowers). The term, which reminds us of James Dooley's education in classical literature in the Latin language, appears to be a play by him on the name of the principal road through the Roman Forum, the Via Sacra, or Sacred Way. This miniature triumphal arch provides access to a long rose-covered colonnade or pergola that runs along the upper terrace of the garden.
The Via Florum is similar to the cool, sheltered, longitudinal avenues typical of Renaissance gardens. The three levels of the terrace are reached by wide granite stairs. The parterres on the upper level are Italian in inspiration but originally made use of plants appropriate to the place and season of use. Since the Dooleys escaped the heated summer season at Swanannoa, the gardens at Maymont focused on spring flowers.
The direct inspiration for the Cascade and the Fountain Pool located above it was Carlo Maderno’s 1623 garden at the Villa Torlonia in Frascati, near the site of Cicero’s villa at Tusculum. This was an important and accessible destination in the Dooley’s era, but we don't have evidence that they visited it. Their experience may have derived entirely from books. An article in the local paper makes clear the careful study of sources that went into the garden's design: “drawings, photographs and measurements of the best specimens of this character of artistic work abroad have been used by the landscape gardeners in charge of the work. . . ”[9]
As at Frascati, the cascade at Maymont is fed by an oval-shaped ornamental reservoir and ends abruptly in a spectacular feature which dramatizes the power and beauty of water. There, the water flows into an arcaded “theatre” in which water is the main actor, centered on a nymphaeum or grotto. At Maymont, the picturesque waterfall, fed by the cascade, serves a similar role to that of the Baroque water theatre, but with an origin in a later, more picturesque, period of garden design. As we will see below, it is related to a famous nineteenth-century garden at Tivoli with a complex history, built around the falls of the Aniene River. The grotto found at the Villa Torlonia was not forgotten, however, but its counterpart was displaced to the east, where Maymont’s Grotto is built into the base of the bluff near the Old Pump House.
Temples and Springs
One of the few clues we have about James Dooley's vision for the garden is his name for the tiny peripteral Italian gazebo at the eastern end of the Italian Garden, which he had purchased at Venice. He called it "our beautiful temple," and may have seen it as a miniature allusion to the tempiettos placed at the ends of vistas in Baroque gardens. Another classical allusion can be found in the large circular, temple-form "summer house" at the end of the Via Florum pergola- another structure ultimately based in Roman models. Dooley may have intended for these temples to refer to more elaborate temple-form structures in European gardens that carried symbolic and mythological meanings.
EndnotesA minute's walk will transport the visitor from the small, uneasy, lava stones of the Roman pavement into broad, gravelled carriage-drives, whence a little farther stroll brings him to the soft turf of a beautiful seclusion. A seclusion, but seldom a solitude; for priest, noble, and populace, stranger and native, all who breathe Roman air, find free admission, and come hither to taste the languid enjoyment of the day-dream that they call life.
The gardens of the Villa Borghese, described by Hawthorne, in The Marble Faun
The Italian Garden is separated from the mansion both visually and physically and is reached by means of a path made of roughly finished stones. The route to and through garden (the Via Florum) can be seen to actually begin as the guest exits the Mansion through the porte cochere, where a copy of Canova's statue of Three Graces is placed as an object of contemplation above a small reflecting pool. Sculpture in the nineteenth century, was often selected as a part of a “decorative program” in which the subjects of work of art corresponded to the theme or use of the building or landscape. This marble sculpture, a copy of a nineteenth-century original by Canova, begins the progress of the gardens with a reference to the goddesses of beauty, amusement, and festivity appropriate to gardens.
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| Entrance to the Via Florum and the Italian Garden from the west |
The Via Florum is similar to the cool, sheltered, longitudinal avenues typical of Renaissance gardens. The three levels of the terrace are reached by wide granite stairs. The parterres on the upper level are Italian in inspiration but originally made use of plants appropriate to the place and season of use. Since the Dooleys escaped the heated summer season at Swanannoa, the gardens at Maymont focused on spring flowers.
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| Postcard showing the Via Florum pergola and the large circular temple in the Italian Garden with its original tile roof. |
The Italian Garden has its roots in the ancient world. The Roman writer Cicero enjoyed a luxurious villa in Tusculum, southeast of Rome. Pliny the Elder had two villas, one in the Tuscan hills and the other by the sea. His descriptions, along with the ruins at Tivoli, were sources for later garden designers wishing to emulate the settings of classical villas. As we have seen, James Dooley, had been exposed at Georgetown College to classical and Renaissance literature and was intellectually equipped to imagine such a classically inspired garden [8].
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| Detail from Maxfield Parrish, The Cascade, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, from Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and their Gardens, 1904. |
“It was in the guidance of rushing water that the Roman garden-architects of the seventeenth century showed their poetic feeling and endless versatility.”
Edith Wharton, 1904
The direct inspiration for the Cascade and the Fountain Pool located above it was Carlo Maderno’s 1623 garden at the Villa Torlonia in Frascati, near the site of Cicero’s villa at Tusculum. This was an important and accessible destination in the Dooley’s era, but we don't have evidence that they visited it. Their experience may have derived entirely from books. An article in the local paper makes clear the careful study of sources that went into the garden's design: “drawings, photographs and measurements of the best specimens of this character of artistic work abroad have been used by the landscape gardeners in charge of the work. . . ”[9]
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| Detail, Plan of the Villa Torlonia. Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe, Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 1925. Note the large pool at the top and the cascade just below. At the Villa Torlonia, the grotto takes the form of a "water theater" at the bottom. |
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| Maymont Cascade today |
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| Upper Cascade at the Villa Torlonia at Frascati in 1903, Charles Latham, The Gardens of Italy, 1905 |
As at Frascati, the cascade at Maymont is fed by an oval-shaped ornamental reservoir and ends abruptly in a spectacular feature which dramatizes the power and beauty of water. There, the water flows into an arcaded “theatre” in which water is the main actor, centered on a nymphaeum or grotto. At Maymont, the picturesque waterfall, fed by the cascade, serves a similar role to that of the Baroque water theatre, but with an origin in a later, more picturesque, period of garden design. As we will see below, it is related to a famous nineteenth-century garden at Tivoli with a complex history, built around the falls of the Aniene River. The grotto found at the Villa Torlonia was not forgotten, however, but its counterpart was displaced to the east, where Maymont’s Grotto is built into the base of the bluff near the Old Pump House.
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| John Singer Sargeant, The Fountain, Villa Torlonia, Frascati, Italy, 1907. |
Images and descriptions of the popular garden at Frascati were published by the early 1890s. Edith Wharton said of the Torlonia cascade in 1904, that it “is the most beautiful example of fountain-architecture in Frascati. . . The upper terrace is enclosed by ilexes and in its center is one of the most beautiful fountains in Italy-- a large basin surrounded by a richly sculptured balustrade”[10] According to Henry Baskervill’s niece, the Dooleys sent him to Italy to acquire garden ornaments and find inspiration, so it entirely possible that he visited Frascati and was impressed by the Villa Torlonia.
The Meaning of the Garden
Whatever its source, the Italian Garden, as built, seems to embody a kind of multivalent narrative structure with a classical underpinning. Meaning is suggested by the name Via Florum as inscribed over the entry archway. The name that could refer either to the rose-covered pergola beyond or to the entire garden as a pathway to an understanding of nature. Garden meaning is here also inherent in the kinds of forms and structures chosen by the Dooleys. Classical architecture, flower beds, fountains, waterfalls, stairs, and grottoes carry an intrinsic meaning.[11]
Whatever its source, the Italian Garden, as built, seems to embody a kind of multivalent narrative structure with a classical underpinning. Meaning is suggested by the name Via Florum as inscribed over the entry archway. The name that could refer either to the rose-covered pergola beyond or to the entire garden as a pathway to an understanding of nature. Garden meaning is here also inherent in the kinds of forms and structures chosen by the Dooleys. Classical architecture, flower beds, fountains, waterfalls, stairs, and grottoes carry an intrinsic meaning.[11]
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| Domed summer house at the east end of the pergola |
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| Major Dooley's "Temple" |
Temples and Springs
We had quite a loss by the storm also. Our beautiful temple, that I got in Venice, was blown down and badly broken. I expect it will cost me some hundreds of dollars to restore it.
James F. Dooley, 1913
One of the few clues we have about James Dooley's vision for the garden is his name for the tiny peripteral Italian gazebo at the eastern end of the Italian Garden, which he had purchased at Venice. He called it "our beautiful temple," and may have seen it as a miniature allusion to the tempiettos placed at the ends of vistas in Baroque gardens. Another classical allusion can be found in the large circular, temple-form "summer house" at the end of the Via Florum pergola- another structure ultimately based in Roman models. Dooley may have intended for these temples to refer to more elaborate temple-form structures in European gardens that carried symbolic and mythological meanings.
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| Edward Lear, The Waterfall and Temple at Tivoli. |
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| J.M.W. Turner, Tivoli, 1826-27 [Tate Gallery]. The painting shows the Temple of the Sibyl or Vesta perched high above the waterfall at Tivoli. |
The Waterfall
The 45-foot Waterfall, the Dooley’s most spectacular garden feature, lies between the Italian Garden terrace and the Japanese Garden. The water supply plans documented in 1908 confirm that the waterfall, readily suggested by the bare rock and jagged cliff left behind by the former quarry, was part of the garden concept from as early as 1907, and that it was seen by the Dooleys not only a backdrop for the as-yet unrealized Japanese Garden, but as a key linking element in the overall design garden design. At first the cascade appears to have been relatively small. The volume of the waterfall was increased after 1911, very likely so that it could be more effective when seen from the new Japanese Garden below. The upper part of the falls beside the cascade was at the same time “improved” by the creation of a series of ledges, possibly to enhance its appearance from the cascade stairs.
Extensive use of water and shade emphasize the garden at Maymont as a cool retreat from the heat and activity of the city. As was the case at the Villa Gregoriana at Tivoli, the path extending from the lower terminus of the Cascade originally led down by a series of zigzags, not to the Japanese Garden, but towards the Grotto added in 1911-12, which is the actual termination (or beginning) of the Italian Garden.
The grotto at the base of the bluff, with its dripping tufa ceiling artificially fed by pipes and its embedded stalactites, restored in 2007, provides not only an allusion to the idea of coolness found in subterranean retreats like the grottos at Tivoli and Villa Torlonia, but to the power of the earth (reinforced by the pair of flanking lion sculptures) and to messages obtained from the underworld. “In contrast to formal gardens and bright uplands, artificial grottos were intended as places within the country house landscape to contemplate the irregular, hidden or grotesque aspects of the natural world."[18] While some grottos were lined with shells and featured figures of river gods, stalactites and stalagmites were brought from Virginia caverns to realistically line Maymont’s Grotto.
The progress of mythical heros such as Aeneas from earth to the underworld and back was re-enacted in the Baroque gardens of Europe by movement between highly finished pieces of architecture and the rough forms of rustic stone formations such as grottos. The Aeneid was a key textbook of the classical education enjoyed by Major Dooley. It is possible, but by no means certain, that James Dooley may have been thinking, not only of grottoes in Italian gardens, but of the Sibyl’s Grotto in Cumae, near which Virgil’s Aeneas descended into Hades to receive predictions of the future greatness of Rome. On the other hand, the Grotto at Maymont may simply serve to underline the value of water within and without the garden as a source of life and meaning.
Japanese Garden
The Japanese Garden at Maymont, reached by descending the Italian cascade fountain, was one of the most spectacular of a number of similar private gardens built in the period before the First World War. Immediately following the creation of the Italian Garden, the Japanese Garden was created, based in a former quarry at the base of the naturalistic 45-foot waterfall made possible by the Dooley’s waterworks. It was built in 1911-12, probably by Japanese landscape gardener Y. Muto. He came to the U.S. in response to the increasing elite interest in Japanese arts in America. This followed the opening of Japan to commerce and displays of Japanese decorative arts and gardening traditions at international fairs like the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. The new garden brought out the natural beauty in what was, as a quarry on the edge of a canal basin, a former industrial site. Like other Japanese-style gardens in America, the Maymont example is as much a product of the interests of its patrons as it is a representation of the spiritual and aesthetic themes of Japanese gardening traditions.
Maymont became a public park in 1926, Since that time it has evolved into an extensive, interconnected landscape filled with opportunities for enjoyment and learning that can be understood by a close reading of its landscape and materials. Information about the estate, such as the embedded classical references or the concealed hydraulics that bring the gardens to life, can spark additional interest in the estate and gardens.
The past few days I have been at Tivoli, and have seen one of the first spectacles of nature. The waterfalls there with the ruins, and the whole complexity of landscapes, are of a class of subjects, acquaintance with which is an enrichment of our whole nature to its utmost reach.
Goethe,1787
The 45-foot Waterfall, the Dooley’s most spectacular garden feature, lies between the Italian Garden terrace and the Japanese Garden. The water supply plans documented in 1908 confirm that the waterfall, readily suggested by the bare rock and jagged cliff left behind by the former quarry, was part of the garden concept from as early as 1907, and that it was seen by the Dooleys not only a backdrop for the as-yet unrealized Japanese Garden, but as a key linking element in the overall design garden design. At first the cascade appears to have been relatively small. The volume of the waterfall was increased after 1911, very likely so that it could be more effective when seen from the new Japanese Garden below. The upper part of the falls beside the cascade was at the same time “improved” by the creation of a series of ledges, possibly to enhance its appearance from the cascade stairs.
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| Maymont Waterfall with the Italian Garden seen above and the edge of the Cascade to the right. |
The context of the Maymont Waterfall, with the circular "summer house" temple placed high above it, resemble the dramatic gorge at Tivoli, where the antique, circular Temple of Vesta is perched at the head of a famous gorge caused by the waterfall of a branch of the Tiber. The gorge in ancient times had been selected by powerful Romans as a site for a series of cool summer retreats. It was developed as a picturesque public park by Pope Gregory XVI in 1843. The park was known as the Villa Gregoriana. Until about 1915, this naturalistic landscape flanking the waterfalls at Tivoli was one of the principal destinations on the Grand Tour. Since the nearby Villa d'Este, with its famous terraces and fountains, was closed to the public during the early years of the 20th century, the principal experience of many visitors of the watery landscape of Tivoli was the Villa Gregoriana.
The popular Baedeker tourist guide for 1896 said of the Villa Gregoriana:
Hydraulics
Like the Cascade, the Fountain Pool at Maymont had its model in the reservoir at the top of the Villa Torlonia gardens. It is likely, based on a 1908 piping layout, that the waterfall was initially intended to be fed only by the outflow from the bottom of the cascade. It seems likely that the waterfall was enlarged in 1911-12 and given a new outlet under the upper terrace wall to improve its appearance from the Japanese Garden. At the same time, the architects added a new garden feature, “the Fountain Pool,” at the east end of the Carriage House. It served, not only as a beautiful oval basin served by a high central jet, but as a nine-foot-deep reservoir or tank to supply additional water to the waterfall.[17] The reservoir seems to have been needed to reduce the pressure from the water tower in order to make more volume available to the cascade and the expanded waterfall. The reservoir was later reduced in depth from nine feet to just a few feet.
Unlike the terrain surrounding Rome, the plateaus around Richmond were high and dry. Drinking water was drawn from springs in the hillsides (several were exploited as part of the landscape at Maymont) and from the elaborate canal system that skirted the falls of the James River and supplied the city’s many mills. As was the case in the gardens of the French king at Versailles, up-to-date machines, like the gasoline pump that remains in place within the Old Pump House near the Grotto, were needed at Maymont to move the increasing amounts of water from low-lying streams into reservoirs or tanks elevated above the gardens.
The popular Baedeker tourist guide for 1896 said of the Villa Gregoriana:
"Visitors. . . . reach a Terrace planted with olives, whence we obtain a charming view of the Temple of the Sybyl above us, and, below, of the new waterfall (about 330 ft. high). . . We now return to the path, which descends at first in zigzags and afterwards in steps, We descend to the lowest point to which it leads and finally mount a flight of stone steps, wet with spray, to the fantastically shaped Siren's Grotto."[12]Perhaps more than any other landscape south of the Alps, the Tivoli waterfall was identified by poets and artists with the concept of the Sublime [13] The wild scene, topped by the circular temple, was depicted countless times by painters including Lorraine, Poussin, Ingres, and Turner. At the bottom of the gorge, below the ruins of ancient Roman villas, were several cave-like grottos, identified with subterranean gods and river nymphs, which caught the imagination of visitors. The cliff in the former quarry at Maymont presented the Dooley's with an opportunity to recreate, on a smaller scale, a sense of the sublime like that at Tivoli.
Hydraulics
Consuls, emperors, and popes, the great men of every age, have found no better way of immortalizing their memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging, upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass or marble.
Hawthorne, The Marble Faun [14]
Water, both still and moving, has been an essential feature of garden design in the West since Roman times. The harnessing of the power of water for the improvement of mankind is symbolized in a garden by its channeling into jets and pools. As constructed between 1908 and 1911, the Maymont waterworks, including the picturesque Water Tower that supplied the fountains at Maymont, relied on established systems of hydraulic engineering familiar from the gardens of Italy and France.[15] The most famous Italian gardens, like those in the hills around Frascati, received their water from copious streams and aqueducts at higher elevations.
In his Italian Gardens of 1894, American architect Charles Platt describes how the fountains worked: “one of the chief peculiarities of the villas at Frascati is the importance given to such reservoirs. Frequently the water has to be brought from a long distance, and before it is distributed through the fountains and watercourses it is concentrated in a large reservoir at the highest point of the villa, and of this a feature of unusual interest is made.”[16]
In his Italian Gardens of 1894, American architect Charles Platt describes how the fountains worked: “one of the chief peculiarities of the villas at Frascati is the importance given to such reservoirs. Frequently the water has to be brought from a long distance, and before it is distributed through the fountains and watercourses it is concentrated in a large reservoir at the highest point of the villa, and of this a feature of unusual interest is made.”[16]
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“Reservoir at the top of the Cascade, Villa Torlonia,”
Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe. Italian Gardens of the Renaissance, 1925
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Maymont's reservoir today, a recreation of the hilltop pool at the Villa Torlonia. |
Unlike the terrain surrounding Rome, the plateaus around Richmond were high and dry. Drinking water was drawn from springs in the hillsides (several were exploited as part of the landscape at Maymont) and from the elaborate canal system that skirted the falls of the James River and supplied the city’s many mills. As was the case in the gardens of the French king at Versailles, up-to-date machines, like the gasoline pump that remains in place within the Old Pump House near the Grotto, were needed at Maymont to move the increasing amounts of water from low-lying streams into reservoirs or tanks elevated above the gardens.
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| The Maymont Grotto today. |
The Grotto
And after having remained at the entry some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear and desire, fear of the threatening dark grotto, desire to see whether there were any marvelous things within it.
Leonardo da Vinci
The grotto at the base of the bluff, with its dripping tufa ceiling artificially fed by pipes and its embedded stalactites, restored in 2007, provides not only an allusion to the idea of coolness found in subterranean retreats like the grottos at Tivoli and Villa Torlonia, but to the power of the earth (reinforced by the pair of flanking lion sculptures) and to messages obtained from the underworld. “In contrast to formal gardens and bright uplands, artificial grottos were intended as places within the country house landscape to contemplate the irregular, hidden or grotesque aspects of the natural world."[18] While some grottos were lined with shells and featured figures of river gods, stalactites and stalagmites were brought from Virginia caverns to realistically line Maymont’s Grotto.
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| Arnold Houbraken- Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld |
The progress of mythical heros such as Aeneas from earth to the underworld and back was re-enacted in the Baroque gardens of Europe by movement between highly finished pieces of architecture and the rough forms of rustic stone formations such as grottos. The Aeneid was a key textbook of the classical education enjoyed by Major Dooley. It is possible, but by no means certain, that James Dooley may have been thinking, not only of grottoes in Italian gardens, but of the Sibyl’s Grotto in Cumae, near which Virgil’s Aeneas descended into Hades to receive predictions of the future greatness of Rome. On the other hand, the Grotto at Maymont may simply serve to underline the value of water within and without the garden as a source of life and meaning.
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| Japanese Garden today |
Fine natural cascades abound all over Japan, but, on the principle of following classical models, it is customary, in an elaborate garden, to represent a famous waterfall in the south of China known to the Japanese as Rozan.
Josiah Conder, 1893
Conclusions
James Dooley’s classical studies had prepared him to appreciate Italy and the new garden he and Sallie May Dooley planned was a dramatic departure from what preceded at Maymont. It was also dramatically different from anything Richmond had ever seen. The classical past inspired temples and the big waterfall, while a love for the Renaissance and Baroque villas on the outskirts of Rome led them to build an American version of an Italian garden that, with its cliff-top terraces and bubbling fountains, would astound friends and visitors.
Maymont became a public park in 1926, Since that time it has evolved into an extensive, interconnected landscape filled with opportunities for enjoyment and learning that can be understood by a close reading of its landscape and materials. Information about the estate, such as the embedded classical references or the concealed hydraulics that bring the gardens to life, can spark additional interest in the estate and gardens.
[1] Wheary, typescript, “The Italian Garden at Maymont,” 1999, 2009.
[2] “Ever since [1893], Mrs. Dooley has been devoting her time and energies and her studies to making this place beautiful. We do not cultivate it for profit; we tried to get it in grass, and make it as beautiful as possible, and to that end she put out six hundred rose bushes and thousands of other flowers, and purchased the most costly evergreens from all parts of the world, and all those beautiful cherry trees they have in Japan, at great cost, and set them out in this place. She has covered it with the work of her own hands and some twenty men we have there. . . .” from Dooley testimony 1906, files of Maymont Foundation.
[3] Wheary, 2000, 2009.
[4] Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 October 1908].
[5] Barr Feree, American Estates and Gardens, 1904, quoted in Dale Wheary, “Maymont, Gilded Age Estate, An interpretive Overview.” 2000, revised 2013.
[6] Noland and Baskervill, “Plan Showing Part of ‘Maymont’, Country Seat of Major James H. Dooley,” March 1908.
[7] Noland and Baskervill, “Sketch for Garden at Maymont."
[8] A contemporary article, dated 12 October, 1908, gives him credit for the concept of the garden, and says he began the work while his wife was away for the summer as a surprise for her. This was, probably, at least an exaggeration, since the earliest drawings date from 1907 and Sallie May Dooley would likely have shared in so important a development, but it demonstrates Major Dooley’s full imaginative involvement [Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 October 1908, cited in Wheary, 2000].
[9] Richmond Times-Dispatch 12 October 1908.
[10] Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904.
[11] Certainly, the books and commentaries available at the time concentrate on garden form and ignore any deeper meaning, except in a few instances where the forms and materials themselves constitute the meaning, as in Edith Wharton’s observation quoted above.
[12] Italy: Handbook for Travelers. Second Part, Central Italy and Rome. Leipsic and London, Karl Baedeker, 12th edition (1896)
[13 Kristina Taylor, “Villa Gregoriana at Tivoli: an overlooked “Sublime” landscape.” The Garden History Society.
[http://archive.org/details/03675130.5346.emory.edu].
[14] The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni in 1860. The popular and influential work, part Gothic romance and part travel book, is set in the gardens and ruins of mid-nineteenth-century Rome. Its romantic plot traces the adventures of three American artists and a mysterious young Italian aristocrat. It confirmed a strong American interest in Italian art and culture.
[15] A March 1908 site plan shows that the original hydraulic system consisted of a five-inch pipe that ran south of the stone barn from the eastern edge of the property and ended at the head of the cascade, as yet unbuilt. At first glance, it looks like Major Dooley at first made use of the city water supply to power the rustic fountain and the hose bibs in the upper terrace, which was all that had been completed. It is also possible that the 5-inch pipe ran from the water tower along the service road to a point near the Hampton Street Gate and then returned to the garden along the south side of the Stone Barn. The new 50,000-gallon water tower next to the Coach House was designed in July 1908 and probably completed in 1909.
[16] Charles A. Platt. Italian Gardens, New York: Harper and Bros, 1896.
[17] Noland and Baskervill, Pool at Maymont, February 1911.
[7] Noland and Baskervill, “Sketch for Garden at Maymont."
[8] A contemporary article, dated 12 October, 1908, gives him credit for the concept of the garden, and says he began the work while his wife was away for the summer as a surprise for her. This was, probably, at least an exaggeration, since the earliest drawings date from 1907 and Sallie May Dooley would likely have shared in so important a development, but it demonstrates Major Dooley’s full imaginative involvement [Richmond Times-Dispatch, 12 October 1908, cited in Wheary, 2000].
[9] Richmond Times-Dispatch 12 October 1908.
[10] Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens, 1904.
[11] Certainly, the books and commentaries available at the time concentrate on garden form and ignore any deeper meaning, except in a few instances where the forms and materials themselves constitute the meaning, as in Edith Wharton’s observation quoted above.
[12] Italy: Handbook for Travelers. Second Part, Central Italy and Rome. Leipsic and London, Karl Baedeker, 12th edition (1896)
[13 Kristina Taylor, “Villa Gregoriana at Tivoli: an overlooked “Sublime” landscape.” The Garden History Society.
[http://archive.org/details/03675130.5346.emory.edu].
[14] The American author Nathaniel Hawthorne published The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni in 1860. The popular and influential work, part Gothic romance and part travel book, is set in the gardens and ruins of mid-nineteenth-century Rome. Its romantic plot traces the adventures of three American artists and a mysterious young Italian aristocrat. It confirmed a strong American interest in Italian art and culture.
[15] A March 1908 site plan shows that the original hydraulic system consisted of a five-inch pipe that ran south of the stone barn from the eastern edge of the property and ended at the head of the cascade, as yet unbuilt. At first glance, it looks like Major Dooley at first made use of the city water supply to power the rustic fountain and the hose bibs in the upper terrace, which was all that had been completed. It is also possible that the 5-inch pipe ran from the water tower along the service road to a point near the Hampton Street Gate and then returned to the garden along the south side of the Stone Barn. The new 50,000-gallon water tower next to the Coach House was designed in July 1908 and probably completed in 1909.
[16] Charles A. Platt. Italian Gardens, New York: Harper and Bros, 1896.
[17] Noland and Baskervill, Pool at Maymont, February 1911.
[18] Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto. Braziller, 1982.
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