the meantime, there were his private clients, the first of whom was Mrs. William S. Paley, at her Long Island residence, Kiluna Farm. The design received its greatest accolade in a 1980 article titled “Water in a Woodland Setting” that appeared in the British magazine Country Life, written by Lanning Roper, an American who made his career in England as a garden designer and journalist. He described the large oval pool in a natural setting of trees and shrubs and the grass steps that rose gently through a wooded area under a canopy of dogwood trees. Barbara Paley's daughter, Amanda Burden, remembers walking from the house and looking over a mound and down the incline of steps to the surprise view of the still pond that reflected a rare assortment of pale orange azaleas. On the far side was a woodland walk lined with fritillaria. Regrettably, under its recent ownership the garden has reverted to a jungle of trees with little evidence remaining of its romantic setting.
Thomas and Iris Vail, who live in Hunting Valley, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland, first contacted Russell Page through William Paley, who was a former chairman of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Thomas Vail himself was the publisher and editor of a prestigious newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. After a first meeting with the Vails in London, Page began to work at their home, an old stable block called “L'Ecurie” that had been moved to the top of a hill from lower in the valley where they had originally lived in it. As was Page's custom, he stayed with the Vails while he designed the garden at various stages, and in his working habits—taking long walks in the morning and then rapidly drawing in the late afternoon (always with some time out for tea)—can be found the secret to his extraordinary productivity. His focus and concentration on the land and garden at hand would yield the creative idea within a day rather than later in an office somewhere. Sometimes the moment of inspiration and decision would come when he was actually working with the bulldozer driver shaping the land, as he did in flattening the Vails' front courtyard. This efficiency made it possible for him to move quickly and unfettered between commissions, always retaining his clarity of thought for the next place.
The Vail garden, composed of eight garden areas surrounding the house, incorporates images Page had retained from various European garden traditions, and yet reduced in scale, they blended perfectly with the typically American wilderness landscape viewed in the distance. In creating a gravel courtyard, he treated the stable block as if it were a small rustic chateau, say in Normandy. One day, after driving up and down the access road with Iris Vail, he conceived the idea for an entrance allée of a double grove of clipped and pleached linden trees underplanted with myrtle. Viewing them lined up on a grid, they are as satisfying in appearance as the long rows of clipped lindens at the Palais Royal in Paris, and yet they retain a domestic flavor.
The regularity of these trees is reflected in the swimming pool garden behind the house by twin rows of clipped hawthorns and by tall hemlock hedges that enclose garden rooms with long beds of roses or lilacs planted with peonies. Reflecting their mutual interest in Spanish gardens, outside the library window he designed a rill garden with fountains at either end bubbling away to his specifications, which were always explicit on this matter. Among his drawings for this garden is a sketch of a water jet shaped in wood on a lathe to be used as the form for the final jet in beaten copper. Thanks to a rigid maintenance program, except for occasional storm damage, these gardens have matured over the years without losing any of Page's precision or inspiration. Within the last year, the Vails planted the last segment of his original plan—hemlock hedges in U-shaped patterns enclosing single dogwood trees. Thomas Vail recalls the time they planted seventy thousand white pine seedlings on open land beyond the house according to Page's directive to “make the land work for you.”
Paris was the inspiration for Russell Page's best known urban garden in America, the small enclosed terrace on East 70th Street behind the Frick Collection, the choice museum of old master paintings located in the Fifth Avenue mansion in New York City that once belonged to Henry Clay Frick. Nothing is more tantalizing or inducive to fantasy than a beautifully trimmed garden with a refreshing fountain in an enclosure that no one may enter. Passersby pause and press their faces against the iron gates to enjoy this quiet respite from the noisy streets. Because Page understood that people cannot judge distances over water, the rectangular lily pond that stretches across the central lawn creates the illusion of great depth in this shallow space. With its low green hedges, balls of box, and asymmetrically planted trees, the garden is not unlike one he designed on the rue de Varenne in Paris and evokes the same sense of catching a glimpse of a private French garden. New Yorkers consider it as one of the masterpieces of the Frick Collection.
“He regarded this garden as his calling card,” says Everett Fahy, the former director of the Frick Collection who oversaw the garden's installation in 1976 and 1977. The opportunity for the garden presented itself when the Frick purchased and dismantled the last of three town houses adjoining the museum. Although there was talk of a temporary garden and future expansion, the garden has in fact become a permanent visual amenity. Reassembling architectural fragments that had been removed from the mansion's interior during an earlier renovation, the architects were inspired by the Grand Trianon at Versailles to design a garden pavilion facade of arched niches and Ionic pilasters to surround the garden.
During the planning stage of the Frick Garden, Page was introduced to Powers Taylor of Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne, New York, who had already been involved in other plantings at the Frick. From this meeting came one of the most important partnerships of Page's career in America. The men would spend hours roaming the acres of gardens at Rosedale, where Page learned about the hardy plants and trees of the region. For his part, Taylor enjoyed the challenge of working within the rigid architectural framework composed by Page. At the Frick, trees—like the Sophora japonica and the Koelreuteria paniculata—were placed and rotated into position for the best view from the street. A Metasequoia commands the northeast corner, linking the lower garden with an upper planter of pear trees that were intended to conceal the Frick's library building next door. And in the niches, dark green trellises support wisteria and clematis vines.
Although the border plantings change seasonally to introduce new colors and textures, what makes the scene alluring even in winter snow are the strong forms that Page cherished in his gardens. During recent warmer winters, the beds are carpeted with blue pansies that make a strong contrast with deep evergreens like the Cryptomeria japonica ‘Lobbii' that grow in the foreground. No doubt Page also saw his enclosed design as an antidote to the rustic openness of Central Park across the street.
He used similar motifs in designing a sculpture garden in 1978 for the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio—only here the inspiration was Italian. Taking into account the museum's building in the Italian Renaissance style, he wrote in his comments, “I have therefore thought it best that the whole effect of the gardens…should reflect the garden developments which such a building might have acquired over the last three or four hundred years.” And in suggesting an eighteenth-century landscape treatment along the main facade, he cited Veronese and Giorgione as two Renaissance painters who used “romantic landscape elements in relation to classical buildings.”
In 1984, Page was finally given the opportunity of designing a monumental civic landscape when he was engaged by the Friends of the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., to select the site and design the installation for twenty-two Corinthian columns that had originally supported the east central portico of the United States Capitol building, where the presidential inaugurations take place. Although the architect B. Henry Latrobe incorporated these columns in his 1806 plan for the Capitol, their design was derived from Sir William Chambers's 1759 Treatise on Civil Architecture. Chambers himself had borrowed the motifs from a sixteenth-century Italian book illustrating the combined capitals of columns from the Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Pantheon. Carved from local sandstone, the Capitol's columns were dismantled in 1958 and replaced with marble.
In a sense, the project was like creating a ruin as grand as the Roman Forum, since the columns' formation in a rectangle with the hint of a portico suggests the remains of a grandiose building. He selected a vast knoll with a prospect overlooking the surrounding meadows, and a rill from
