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WORK TITLE: Heroes of Horticulture
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.brushhillgardens.com
CITY:
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2012006981
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2012006981
HEADING: Robinson, Barbara Paul
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040 __ |a DLC |b eng |c DLC
100 1_ |a Robinson, Barbara Paul
670 __ |a Rosemary Verey, c2012: |b ECIP t.p. (Barbara Paul Robinson)
670 __ |a Wikipedia, Jan. 31, 2012 |b (Barbara Paul Robinson; a New York City lawyer with the firm Debevoise & Plimpton who specializes in Trusts and Estates law, and a former president of the New York City Bar Association;
670 __ |a Brush Hill gardens WWW site, Jan. 31, 2012 |b (Barbara Paul Robinson; a partner in the large international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton; [her] biography of Rosemary Verey is about to come out)
953 __ |a xh07
PERSONAL
Married Charles Robinson.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Lawyer, gardener, and writer. Debevoise & Plimpton, lawyer; sits on the Boards of Directors of Wave Hill public garden and Stonecrop garden; The Garden Conservancy, director emeritus and a past vice president.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to periodicals, including New York Times, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, and Hortus.
SIDELIGHTS
Barbara Paul Robinson is a lawyer with a passion for gardening and writing. Specializing in trusts and estate law, she was the first female partner at the international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. A garden enthusiast, Robinson and her husband, Charlie, created a lush garden at Brush Hill in northwestern Connecticut. She has also written biographies of famous gardeners, lectured at horticultural groups, sits on the Boards of Directors of Wave Hill public garden and Stonecrop garden, and is director emeritus and a past vice president of The Garden Conservancy.
Rosemary Verey
In 1991 during a sabbatical in England, Robinson worked for Rosemary Verey, the last of the great English gardeners who created the famous gardens at Barnsley House. Robinson’s 2012 biography, Rosemary Verey: The Life & Lessons of a Legendary Gardener, chronicles Verey’s introduction to gardening later in life, her use of the English style of gardening, her gardening advice to the rich and famous like Prince Charles, and her popularity during the 1980s and 1990s. As a volunteer, Robinson found the legendary gardener to be a brusk taskmaster but excellent mentor of the English garden style.
In an article by Tovah Martin in Cultivating Wisdom, Robinson described how she worked on hands and knees in the dirt and lived in a shack. “It was a profound experience,” she explained. “I learned to take risks, and lawyers don’t do that. The impact wasn’t only on my garden, it affected my outlook on life as well.”
Heroes of Horticulture
In 2018, Robinson published Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape, a collection of biographies, personal histories, and accomplishments of eighteen people who contributed to American landscapes and gardens. Highlighting people like Frank Cabot of the Garden Conservancy, plantsmen Dan Hinkley and Pierre Bennerup, John Fairey of Peckerwood Garden, and George Schoellkopf of the Hollister House garden, Robinson explores the gardeners’ creations, aesthetics, restoration of public parks, revitalization of botanic gardens, and search for new plants to introduce to gardens. She explains their visionary designs, passion, and contributions to American horticulture.
Observing that most of the profiles are of white men from privileged backgrounds, Anne Heidemann commented in Booklist that all of Robinson’s subjects were able to achieve their accomplishments “at least in part because of their relationships with fellow gardeners, [and] artists.” In a review in Hortus, A Gardening Journal, contributor Judith A. Tankard remarked: “Robinson’s delightful book is sure to whet anyone’s appetite for the diversity of American gardens, garden-makers, and plantspeople who deserve to be better known.” Mary Ann Newcomer said in American Gardener: “This book will help preserve the contributions these incredible people have made to our horticultural heritage.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Anne Heidemann, review of Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape, p. 38.
Cultivating Wisdom, September 2002, Tovah Martin, review of Rosemary Verey: The Life & Lessons of a Legendary Gardener.
ONLINE
American Gardener, https://www.brushhillgardens.com/ (September 1, 2018 ) Mary Ann Newcomer, review of Heroes of Horticulture.
Hortus, A Gardening Journal, https://www.brushhillgardens.com/ (November 2, 2018), Judith B. Tankard, review of Heroes of Horticulture.
A Bit of Background
The gardens have evolved over 40 years, beginning in 1971 when the Robinsons first acquired their 1750’s clapboard farmhouse, in the hills of Litchfield County in northwestern Connecticut. As they began to restore the derelict farmhouse, Barbara began to “tidy up” the surrounding landscape. With her demanding legal practice as a partner in the large international law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, Barbara’s early plan for a “low maintenance” area around the house ultimately succumbed to her growing passion for plants. Originally a banker, Charlie turned to painting and established Brush Hill Studios. Theirs is very much a gardening partnership: Charlie sculpts the land, designs and builds all the garden structures and opens new “canvases” for Barbara to paint her plants upon.
During a once in a lifetime sabbatical, Barbara was fortunate enough to go to England in 1991 to work for the late, great Rosemary Verey in her famous gardens at Barnsley House. Her biography of Rosemary Verey was published by David R. Godine in 2012.
She also spent some of her sabbatical working for Penelope Hobhouse at Tintinhull, a National Trust Garden in Somerset. Her time in England was a transforming experience and added greatly to Barbara’s gardening skills.
She has lectured and spoken to many horticultural groups about her garden and its history and welcomes many visitors each year. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Wave Hill, the superb public garden in Riverdale, New York, Stonecrop, the brilliant garden established by Frank and Anne Cabot in Cold Spring, New York, and is director emeritus and a past Vice President of The Garden Conservancy.
Dinner with Four of the Horticultural Heroes Featured in my New Book
August 10, 2017
My new book is coming out — Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape. The manuscript is now at the publisher — David R. Godine — and should be out by year end or early in 2018. How amazing to have dinner with four out of the 18 Heroes profiled in my book — or 22% of my book — in one night. Pierre Bennerup and his lovely wife Cheryl invited us all to dinner —- Dan Hinkley, Darrell Probst, Darrell’s delightful wife, Joanne Holtje, George Schoellkopf, my husband Charlie and me. What a special time we all had.
I love this picture of Dan Hinkley pulling Pierre Bennerup’s ear — much to Darrell’s amusement. These three – Dan, Pierre and Darrell — have been on countless plant finding trips. often in each other’s company so they can clown around.
George, creator of Hollister House Garden, has been a long time friend of Pierre’s. George is my neighbor just two miles down the same road in Connecticut and we are both long time beneficiaries of marvelous plants from Pierre’s Sunny Border Nurseries. I had not met Darrell’s wife, Joanne before. She is a talented artist so she and Charlie had a lot to talk about. Cheryl Bennerup, a knowledgeable plants person herself , is a superb cook using fresh produce from her garden. Many laughs among good friends with delicious food and fine wine. What could be better?!
Print Marked Items
Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who
Transformed the Landscape
Anne Heidemann
Booklist.
114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p38.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape. By Barbara Paul Robinson. Apr. 2018.
270p. illus. Godine, $40 (9781567926149). 635.0973.
Gardeners often look to notable horticultural spaces for inspiration and ideas. A gardener herself who
frequently speaks on the topic of gardens, Robinson (Rosemary Verey: The Life and Lessons of a Legendary
Gardener, 2012) profiles 18 people who developed gardens and public spaces, worked in nurseries and
greenhouses, and identified specific plants for particular uses. Her goal is to celebrate a certain aspect of
each persons work, and profiles are grouped according to those aspects. Profiles begin with a bit of
individuals' personal histories before expanding on their horticultural accomplishments. A common thread is
that all of Robinson's "heroes" were able to realize their visions at least in part because of their relationships
with fellow gardeners, artists, plant enthusiasts, and other important figures in their lives. Although their
horticultural pursuits take a variety of forms, most of the featured individuals came from privileged
backgrounds, almost all of them are men, and all of them are white. Full-color photographs depict the
profiled individuals, their colleagues, and their projects. --Anne Heidemann
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Heidemann, Anne. "Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape." Booklist, 1 Apr.
2018, p. 38. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956812/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c1eec787. Accessed 19 Oct. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956812
CULTIVATING WISDOM. By: Martin, Tovah, Victoria (Hearst Magazines, a division of Hearst Communications, Inc.), 10406883, Sep2002, Vol. 16, Issue 9
What makes a garden fourish? For the owners of these two bowers, it was seeking out a famously green-thumbed mentor. Sometimes good advice is the best fertilizer.
Visitors to Carol Goldberg's lush and billowing garden in upstate New York have a hard time believing it's only a few years old. Sweeping in a long corridor of full blossom and perfect harmony, with all the vines twining lickety-split where they should and all the heights layered densely and in graduating tiers, it looks mature, settled, venerable. Even more impressive is the fact that Carol had never wielded a spade before 1995. That was the year she snagged some roadside daylilies moments before the town crew mowed them down, and proudly installed them in front of an old stone wall. Then, with all the zeal (and naïveté) of the newly converted, she called up Page Dickey, an eminent gardener and garden writer who happens to live a stone's throw away, and invited her to come and view her glory.
Page wasn't impressed. Of course she was polite, but she tactfully suggested that Carol's property deserved something slightly more sophisticated than weeds. A perennial border would be just the thing. Page would advise-as much as feasible given her hectic lecturing and writing schedule. After a flurry of phone calls (how deep should Carol dig to prepare the soil? which perennials would survive in upper Westchester County?), a modest but respectable border along the stone wall was installed. Encouraged, Carol went into overdrive, touring gardens, studying magazines, visiting nurseries. In 1998, she tore down a barn to make way for a double border that evokes gasps. The fact that horses had once inhabited the site didn't hurt. Nor did the fact that Carol had the savvy to echo colors and repeat plants rather than throwing in every perennial in the catalog. Of course, she's long since removed many mistakes (“no one mentioned that gooseneck loosestrife is invasive beyond control”). But the garden at Artemis Farm has progressed far beyond beginner's luck.
Barbara Paul Robinson and her family had lived in this green and pleasant corner of Connecticut for thirty years, a great deal of digging and planting had gone on, and a rose garden and perennial border were already in place, when she woke up one morning in 1991 and decided that she needed to become, as she puts it, “a serious gardener.” That same day she sat down, wrote to the two most famous British gardeners she could think of-Penelope Hobhouse and the late Rosemary Verey—and asked if she could come work with them for a summer.
Barbara is a partner in a prominent international law firm, but she managed to swing a two-month leave of absence. Interviews ensued in which it turned out her most compelling credentials were a set of totally ruined fingernails. “Rosemary Verey had no intention of taking me on until she saw my hands,” Barbara recalls, “and then her only question was, would I he willing to be treated like staff? Well, that was just what I hoped to he treated like.” Not only did Barbara slave on hands and knees beside both of those legendary gardeners during the spring of 1991, she lived in the gardeners' quarters, where the plumbing was so rickety, “I couldn't even draw a hot bath in the evening to soothe my aching back.” But she met dozens of plants not common in this country and learned how to orchestrate an all-season display. After that summer, her roses were underplanted with an ocean of forget-me-nots and catmint, the borders were dappled with more color than ever and a hillside garden was installed, where an emboldened Barbara has experimented with even wilder hues. “It was a profound experience,” she recalls. “I learned to take risks, and lawyers don't do that. The impact wasn't only on my garden, it affected my outlook on life as well.”
82n1.jpgS (COLOR): Carol's first planting along the stone wall has been refined, left. The rose campion that seeded too prolifically has been controlled to allow penstemon, angelica, balloon flower, yarrow and salvia to coexist beside the original roadside daylily. Her latest obsession is the garden below, blooming where horse stalls once stood. A nineteenth-century French water pump wades in Salvia ‘Snow Hill,’ while a trellis made of old porch parts supports Rosa ‘Bonica’ and Lonicera ‘Gold Flame’ (above), a non-invasive but non-fragrant honeysuckle. Carol has uncommon luck—in her garden, even delphiniums, right, prosper in an area where most gardeners treat them as annuals.
84n1.jpgS (COLOR): A series of borders right each with its own theme, runs out from the old farmhouse Barbara shares with her husband, Charlie. A former banker turned artist, he's responsible for the obelisk-shaped watering towers. An avid propagator—a habit picked up in England—Barbara is notoriously generous with her botanical wealth. In return, many of her plants have arrived from friends and neighbors, including the mystery iris above. One of the finest peonies on the place, left, came as an anonymous “freebie” in a mail-order box. From their bedroom window, the Robinsons have a bird's-eye view of the night garden, whose golden shrubs (below) gleam in the moonlight.
~~~~~~~~
Produced and written by Tovah Martin; Photographed by Richard Brown
In this book, Barbara Paul Robinson examines some of the brightest threads that make up the tapestry of modern-day American horticulture. She brings together the stories of the visionaries and creators of public parks, exceptional gardens, and institutions like the Garden Conservancy, as well as influential nursery owners, plant breeders and explorers who bring new plants to our nurseries and personal gardens.
“A perfect madness of plants,” is how Dank Hinkley, one of the heroes in the book, describes his life. He is often the ringleader of intrepid souls hanging from cliffs, sorting seeds in wet tents by lamplight. While the 17 other people profiled in this book might not take their passion to this extreme, each is no less devoted to their horticultural endeavors. And though none of them set out to do so, their hard work has yielded significant contributions to American horticulture.
The reader will meet Frank Cabot, for example, who created the Garden Conservancy at the urging of his wife, Anne. This national organization preserves outstanding private gardens for public enjoyment. The book also includes the stories of people behind a few of the Conservancy’s preserved gardens, such as Peckerwood Garden, created by John Fairey in Texas, and Hollister House, designed by George Schoellkopf in Connecticut.
While unraveling each person’s background, Robinson noticed that in addition to a passion for plants, several have art as a common denominator. For instance, Lynden B. Miller, who helped to restore the Conservatory in New York’s Central Park, recounts she was “a painter who gardened and became a gardener who painted.” And John Fairey moved from painting to gardening because plants offered a three-dimensional medium of artistic expression.
Tom Armstrong, a cohort of Cabot, understood great gardens as works of art, noting that “gardeners are artists, and great gardens, like paintings and sculpture, must be preserved. Our cultural heritage must include, forever, gardens.”
I couldn’t agree more, and would add that this book will help preserve the contributions these incredible people have made to our horticultural heritage.
-- Mary Ann Newcomer
Barbara Paul Robinson’s latest book, Heroes of Horticulture: Americans Who Transformed the Landscape (David R. Godine, $40), celebrates some of America’s most important public gardens seen through the eyes of their creators and custodians, many of whom may be unfamiliar to British garden lovers. The foundation of the book rests with leaders of the Garden Conservancy, America’s foremost preservation organisation which sponsors the nationwide Open Days Program. Chief among them heroes is the founder, Frank Cabot, whose gardens at Stonecrop in New York and Les Quatre Vents in La Malbaie, Quebec, are well-known. Cabot had a knack for assembling a team to transform his vision of the Conservancy in 1989 into a reality. The team consisted of the late Tom Armstrong, art collector and former museum director, and Antonia Adezio, who directed the organisation for many years. The core of the book, however, is devoted to the people who made public gardens more visible, such as Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, saviours of New York City’s Central Park (more later on that subject) and Lynden B. Miller, an artist-turned-gardener whose work can be seen at the Conservancy Garden at Central Park, the New York Botanic Garden, Bryant Park and her own garden in Connecticut. Other heroes who are profiled include Gregory Long [see Hortus 126], long-time director of the New York Botanical Garden; Betty Scholtz, former director of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden; Marco Polo Stufano, an art historian-turned-gardener who transformed Wave Hill in the Bronx; and Stephen Byrns, who singlehandedly resurrected the Untermyer Gardens in Yonkers, New York, famed for its Persian water garden and elaborate structures.
Robinson also presents some of America’s remarkable plantsmen, including Dan Hinkley, Pierre Bennerup and Tony Avent. The book concludes with two major garden creators whose work should be better known abroad: George Schoellkopf of Hollister House and John G. Fairey of Peckerwood. Robinson’s delightful book is sure to whet anyone’s appetite for the diversity of American gardens, garden-makers, and plantspeople who deserve to be better known.