In , H. Designed as a "room garden," the area is walled by massive conifers from the Pinetum and an enclosing hedge. Fragrant trees and shrubs are arranged in concentric circles around the garden's focal point, an armillary sundial. But as a horticulturist, the situation outrages me. Indeed, what he created at Winterthur , the family estate outside of Wilmington, Delaware, remains nearly forty years after his death a quietly revolutionary masterpiece, still far ahead of contemporary American landscape design.
To overlook this is more than an injustice; it is for all who love gardens an opportunity wasted. Harry, as he was known to friends and employees, is of course hardly an unknown. A pioneer in the appreciation of Early American decorative arts, du Pont included in his collecting not only furniture, ceramics, and textiles, but often whole houses when he found a structure with architectural features, plasterwork or wooden paneling, perhaps, he felt were outstanding.
All of this, tens of thousands of objects, each one personally and carefully selected, he assembled in a designed-for-the-purpose, one-hundred-and-seventy-five period-room mansion he built on the Winterthur estate. He assembled selections of furnishings that were related not only in period and provenance but also aesthetically, playing one off against the other in roomscapes that ranged from subtly powerful to the brilliantly unexpected.
In the dining room, du Pont carefully coordinated flowers, candleholders, and dishes for his lavish dinner parties. His floral aesthetic was precise: multiple arrangements of one type of bloom or one color.
This is why Winterthur has been, ever since it opened to the public in , a place of pilgrimage not only for historians and curators but also for interior decorators. The fact is that H. He planted and maintained his own garden while a teenage boarder at prep school, and borrowed space in a nearby commercial greenhouse to grow sweet peas and other flowers for cutting.
