martinhouseclr

182 DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE // CULTURAL LANDSCAPE REPORT Floricycle – now often questioned for its enormous density of seemingly unmanageable perennial and shrub plantings – bringing to question its viability as a landscape feature. Conversely, who of the day would have expected Wright’s ‘unusual’ architecture to be viable? Griffin’s experimentation with cultivated nature was well beyond an appreciation for the native landscape of the American mid-west. Griffin’s first commission after his departure from Wright was a 1906 plan for the Northern Illinois State Normal School in DeKalb, Illinois. Similar to the Martin House landscape, the plan and plantings for the school were a well-conceived combination of the formal and natural style, said to have no perceptible “abrupt or startling transition” between the two. 54 This was a distinctive characteristic of Griffin’s landscape design work. At a time when supporters for either formal or more natural style were in much disagreement, it was Griffin who developed a style characterized by the pleasant union of the seemingly disparate approaches. Rather, his “resolution of the two was an expression of his concept of nature itself.” 55 Another dominant principle of Griffin’s landscape design style was his strong interest in seasonal accents throughout the year – including winter. This is forcefully expressed in the Martin House 54 Christopher Vernon, “’Expressing natural conditions with maximum possibility’: the American landscape art of Walter Burley Griffin,” 29. Vernon credits this description to a 1915 article in The American Botanist, by F.K. Balthis. 55 Ibid., 31. Floricycle, as well as the more subtle use of fall or winter-interest plants throughout the other Martin garden spaces (sumac, red and yellow twig dogwoods). His work at the Normal School and his residential commissions displayed this preference for seeking out seasonality, a principle most directly embraced in a later (1909) residential design for Mrs J. W. Bolte, Hubbard’s Woods, Illinois, wherein Griffin specifically designed individual garden spaces for each season. 56 Though not believed to have been implemented as sketched, Griffin’s earlier landscape plans for Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Willits House’ (1902) contained many shared characteristics with the Martin House landscape, including a broad and exhaustive plant palette of naturally and ornamentally-inspired natives and exotics, a 180-dregree mixed perennial and shrub hemi- cycle surrounding the porch and verandah, and a series of outdoor rooms – relating to architectural features and axis, defined and organized by naturalistic shrub massings at the periphery. 57 The plans held within the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives at Columbia’s Avery Library are sketch-level only, a furious mass of pencil and plant names, but the arrangements and plant selections reveal his desire to combine the natural and the geometrically formal in a way that complimented and reinforced the house. 56 Ibid., 33. 57Aguar, Wrightscapes: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Landscape Designs, 67. Aguar’s own research comes to the conclusion that the Willits House plantings were never implemented. Figs. 178, top “Conservation,” photograph published in the ‘Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening,’ 1915. Figs. 179, bottom Tree lawn plantings, “before and after,” published in the ‘Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening,’ 1915.