martinhouseclr

112 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT Decline The rest of the property remained more or less intact, although a long and slow decline was certainly fermenting. Despite financial difficulties, Martin retained his staff (assuming the gardener too, based on photographs), but the focus on connecting with and exploring the wonders of horticulture seemed to be much reduced. Although somewhat conjecture, a regimented and minimal maintenance effort seemed to take over. Indeed, even as shrubs and trees aged and grew expansively large, the lawn visible along Summit Avenue seemed to grow as well – indicating reduced perennial areas, a pulling back in the quantity and vastness of shrub massings, and an increase in the simple (and by this time) mechanical convention of lawn mowing. [Fig. 96] The threat of deferred maintenance in the garden, however, was not a sudden decline. The Floricycle, the property’s premier garden feature, was complete and spatially intact with both perennials and shrubs, and it seems to have been as rigidly uniform as one would expect from twenty-five year old plant material. Photographs from the period indicate the feature contained two or three interior rows of perennial plants (most visibly iris, just as in 1923), and, for the first time unmistakably visible in the historic documentation, a very strong repeating unit pattern in the shrubs. Aside from the quality of photographic equipment, a large part of the late-date visibility of this pattern in the Floricycle shrubs seems to be that, in this landscape period, the shrubs have visibly been trimmed into bulbous shapes as opposed to simply pruned. The hand held gasoline powered hedge trimmer would not have been available until after 1955, however, through perhaps dwindling resources and a desire to simply do more with less, it is evident that the shrubs were partially “sheared” and not pruned as they had been in the years prior. The observation remains true for all the naturalistic shrub massings at the property – which, in 25 years of interested and professional care had never before been trimmed in a way that made them seem unnatural. [Fig. 97] Walter Burley Griffin is known to have visited the United States circa 1932 and it is presumed, based on photographs of the Martin House grounds otherwise unexplainably existing in the archives of the National Library of Australia, that he visited Buffalo during this trip. 247 [Fig. 98] The photographs include a view of the front yard and entry, the verandah and northern portion of the Floricycle, and the Summit Lawn and Barton House as viewed from the main house’s verandah. It is believed that, as Griffin kept in contact with Martin outside of Wright’s employ and, indeed, was hired to design additional landscape alterations in 1910, Griffin would have 247 Unspecified author, “American Architecture: Impressions of Mr. W. B. Griffin,” Sydney Morning Herald, 26 September, 1932, 8. Griffin had not been to the United States in more than 20 years at the time, and, as the article notes, he was researching waste incinerators in New York City. Fig. 95 1935 Sanborn map showing house on former Martin garden plot, highlighted. Martin ownership in blue. Fig. 96 Barton House as seen across the Summit lawn, c 1935.