Innisfree in October

In autumn, Innisfree Garden, so lush with blooms in spring and summer, begins to reveal its bones.  The stands of yellow flag have been cut down, the bed from which peonies once spilled out has been returned to bare ground.

The clematis are reduced to withering vines.  The lotus flowers are spent, their great pods dried out, their leaves curling to brown.

Our neighbor Leslie Land, a mistress of fine gardening in her own right, once observed about the Central Park Conservatory in New York City:

 . . . winter is indeed the test of great gardens.  You show us statuary in a muted gallery more flattering than flowers, and as for that allee... well, you can't beat structure and there it is, no matter how tired we all sometimes get of hearing about the importance of bones.

We won’t be able to see Innisfree Garden in winter, as it closes from mid-October until early May, but October offered a chance to see its peerless autumn display.

Innisfree’s first owners were Walter and Marion Beck.  Walter was an artist; Marion heiress to a mining fortune and owner of land in Dutchess County that included a forty acre glacial lake.

The Becks built a Queen-Anne-style mansion on the property and landscaped it, at least at first, in the style of a traditional English garden.  They named the garden Innisfree after the poem by W. B. Yeats.

That's not the end of the story, though.  Midway through the project (money clearly was no object), Walter Beck changed his mind and ripped the garden out.

For a year the Becks searched for an alternative approach, finally landing, again in England, on a book about the Wangchuan Villa, a grand garden in China that originally belonged to Tang dynasty poet and painter Wang Wei.

Over a period of twenty years, Beck created around the lake a “series of self-contained landscapes using natural elements” to which he gave the name “cup gardens.”

On examining the early painting career of Beck, there’s little to suggest his turn to this approach.  He painted in typical 19th century realist style, including several portraits of Civil War veterans.

One day, all that changed, when he "happened to spread some starch on a piece of wet blotting paper and followed this with a stroke of the brush charged with a tempera paint."

Of his discovery, he wrote,

To paint on wet starch is to eliminate friction and there is nothing to oppose the artist's flow of ideas or emotions... He does not think in dimensions or restrictions but is swayed by rhythms.

From that method, it was but a short step to the design of Innisfree.

Dormant within me lay all the imaginative world of thought, which came to light because of the starch-film medium.  Its spontaneity, its emphasis on stroke and the vision which it stimulated not only permitted me to paint as I have done, but also prepared me for the building of Innisfree garden. 

"As I write," he continued, "I look out of my window at the garden.

On a wall at the lake edge is a rock, which I call dragon rock; it is the key in a grouping of stones whose function is to hold in balance the lake and the nearby hills, whose function is to cope with the energies of the sky and the distant landscape.  I owe the development of the pictorial sense so essential in the placing of dragon rock to my work in the starch-film medium.

A slideshow of Innisfree Garden in mid-October:



For a Spotify Playlist, click on Innisfree in October.  A selection of words and music can also be found here:

Jonas Alaska channels Bob Dylan, live on God Morgen Norge, with his song October.

Enter a time warp with the Incredible String Band's October Song from 1966.

Amy Winehouse channels Sarah Vaughn in her own, rather different, October Song.

Rosemary Clooney and Nancy Wilson turn schmaltz into magic with their versions of Mercer/Manilow's When October Goes.

Read Poem in October by Dylan Thomas at Friko's Poetry and Pictures.

Last not least, here's Yeats, reading Lake Isle at Innisfree, including introductory remarks that should not be missed.

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To read more about Innisfree Garden, click here and here.

Credits:  The Beck quotations can be found here, citing as the original source Beck's 1942 book, Painting with Starch:  A Tempura Method.  The other quotations are from the sources linked in the post.  The sources for reproductions of the works of art can be found at these links: 

Handscroll detail, Wangchuan Villa, Wang Yuanqi

Map of the Peninsular Campaign, Walter Beck

Lyric Cadences, Series III, No. 18, Walter Beck

As is true for all photographs appearing on the blog that are not credited to others, the photographs of Innisfree Garden are mine.  The panoramic photograph below, however, was taken by J. Holford.  Click here and scroll down for another panoramic photograph of Innisfree (without the incongruous statuary).