November 19, 2024 Ι Landscape Architecture Magazine
On August 10, 2020, a derecho ripped across the Midwest with winds up to 140 miles an hour, causing $11 billion in damages, the most expensive thunderstorm in the United States to date. In the path of the wall of wind and thunderstorms was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which lost 65 percent of its tree canopy. Brucemore, a late Victorian country estate with a landscape designed in the early 20th century by ASLA cofounder O. C. Simonds, lost two-thirds of its tree canopy—300 mature trees. The $3 million repair bill put Brucemore in increasingly common company: a historic landscape devastated by climate change–accelerated natural disasters.
Prior to the storm, Brucemore’s tree canopy, and many other elements of Simonds’s design, had been in steady decline. In 2020, only 15 percent of the original canopy was intact, after successive waves of Dutch elm disease and emerald ash borer infestations culled the trees. This dramatic decline led to monocultured plantings of evergreens across the 26-acre site, which had little to do with the Simonds plan, the history of Brucemore, or its location in eastern Iowa.
Brett Seelman, ASLA, a native of eastern Iowa and the founder of Seelman Landscape Architecture (SLA) in Cedar Rapids, says that by the 1980s, nothing remained of the original Simonds design beyond the formal garden. “What the derecho did was sweep out all of these evergreens. I don’t think you could ever put in a report that, ‘If you want to take this property back to [its historic era], you need to remove 400 trees.’ But this storm allowed for that opportunity in an unprecedented way.” Seelman and his firm are rehabilitating Bruce-more’s landscape and attempting to answer the hard questions raised by the derecho’s destruction.
Post-storm, Brucemore was “almost tabula rasa,” says David Janssen, Brucemore’s chief executive officer. It took a crew of three groundskeepers with chain saws six hours to clear the way so that staff could leave to check in on their own homes. There was no power for 11 days, and Janssen sent his staff to Wisconsin to look for chain saws. “It was all adrenalin-fueled reaction,” he says. “You’re basically just triaging. Everything that the grounds crew had been taking care of had just been wiped out. We talked a lot about mourning and loss.”
The estate is an icon of Iowa: It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. In 1981, the property was donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation by owner Margaret Hall. Hall’s parents, George and Irene Douglas, hired Simonds in 1907 to design their estate. Since the donation, more than one million visitors have come, often using the gated but publicly accessible landscape like a park, exploring its trails and gardens. Simonds was a proponent of Prairie-style landscapes, emphasizing natural topography, long views, horizontal vistas, outdoor rooms, and curvilinear paths in ways that celebrated native plantings in an American design vernacular. Productive agricultural elements were incorporated into Simonds’s design, separated by hedgerows, and visitors made their way through a dense woodland before the more intricate choreography of formal gardens was revealed.
In particular, Simonds adored a loping, curved line for a drive or walkway. “Hardly any work is more interesting than staking a beautiful line,” he wrote in his 1920 book Landscape-Gardening.Much of this book was focused on extolling the naturalistic picturesque of the American countryside. “The fear that some persons have of bringing natural beauty, that is, the beauty of untrimmed trees and bushes, of natural slopes, ravines, streams, and lakes, near a house, would seem to be groundless, since there can be no more objection to having a window-frame [enclose] a beautiful picture which the objects named would make, than there is to having a similar picture hung on the wall of a room,” he wrote.
At Brucemore, as in the Country Place Era style of landscape that it typifies, tightly mannered and formal garden rooms near the mansion centerpiece loosen into informal outdoor open and linear spaces, including productive landscapes like an orchard and alfalfa field. “There’s this combination of the Italian villa, living the good life [going] back to the Romans, but it’s also a blatant display of wealth,” says Heidi Hohmann, ASLA, an associate professor of landscape architecture at Iowa State University, who is part of SLA’s Brucemore team (Seelman is a former student of hers).
Two elements of the rehabilitation have already begun, both of which refine Simonds’s planting palette to balance the tension between climate change preparedness and historical fidelity. In the first phase, woodland restoration, from fall 2022 through the spring of 2023, SLA planted 450 native trees and shrubs in the two-acre woodland at the south end of the site. Enveloping the entrance to the estate, the woodland sets the tone for the rest of the landscape, and Simonds’s book includes a section on woodlands, firmly placing it in the arena of landscape design. Simonds called woodlands “a restful retreat which might with propriety be called ‘an American Garden.’” The effort earned SLA a 2024 ASLA Central States Honor Award for Historic Preservation and a 2024 Iowa ASLA Honor Award.
Drawing largely from planting lists derived from Landscape-Gardening and other writings, SLA emphasized preserving natives, planting hackberry, tulip trees, and several different species of oaks, many species that Simonds planted himself. Understory plantings include serviceberry, witch hazel, and fragrant sumac. The firm identified many invasive species, including some Simonds used himself, like honeysuckle and winged euonymus.
Because of the extensive storm damage, hard decisions had to be made on which trees to keep and which to remove. With help from Mark Vitosh, a district forester with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, as well as several other regional tree experts, the SLA team created a set of metrics to determine tree viability. For a community still reeling from the destruction of the derecho, this “took the emotion out of deciding if you were going to take down a tree or not, which was really important in the community after the storm,” Seelman says. For a publicly accessible landscape in an urban area, “it really comes down to risk,” says Vitosh, whose guidance encouraged SLA to remove trees that had lost 50 percent or more of their canopy or had suffered a serious wound. Another 100 trees came down to protect visitors and provide light and space to allow new trees to establish themselves. Previously, the three dominant deciduous trees on-site were green ash, oak, and sugar maple. SLA’s rehabilitation goal was to increase tree diversity so that no one tree comprised more than 10 percent of the canopy.
Certain trees were more susceptible to the derecho’s winds. “We lost specific species because of the density of their canopies,” Seelman says. Maples and bur oaks were most damaged, while, Seelman points out, “the honey locust and the pin oaks, which had much more open air in their canopy, survived better through the storms.” SLA planted 40 pin oaks in the woodland, and honey locusts are planned to replace green ash trees along an allée.
Seelman and his team also spread a shade-loving woodland seed mix made up of wildflowers and grasses in the understory, including milkweed, bellflower, and rye. “Post-derecho, the ground plane has been the toughest to manage,” Seelman says. With the shade canopy gone, the shade-loving plantings were at the mercy of weeds like garlic mustard and pokeweed. “This is a constant battle,” he says. While SLA couldn’t generate an instant umbrella of shade, it could clear the woodland site to completely reset its ecology. To do that, the firm brought in a herd of 85 helpful goats. “The goats really cleared the way for us to be able to plant those 450 native trees and shrubs,” he says.
The second phase of Brucemore’s ongoing rehabilitation took some archival research. After spending time in Brucemore’s archive, SLA determined that hedges had defined the different spaces within the gardens. But what these hedgerows were made of and where exactly they were located was unclear. Starting with a hedgerow separating the formal gardens from the alfalfa field called the Ridgeline Hedgerow, Seelman and his team reconstructed a hedgerow from historical aerial photos, reverse engineering the Simonds landscape from his documented preferences and a list of functional requirements for this planting. “We needed this hedge to do a lot,” Seelman says.
The Ridgeline Hedgerow had to separate differing landscape programs with a dense barrier, in addition to being deer-resistant and climate change–attuned. It also needed to be low-maintenance and provide visual interest in a heavily trafficked part of the estate while filling out the proportions of the garden, with a barrier that was eight to 12 feet tall. SLA arrived at mock orange for this hedgerow, which Simonds used at one of his most famous projects, Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery, and it was found elsewhere at Brucemore. Deer aren’t fond of it, and it does well in warmer, wetter climates. In September 2023, SLA planted more than 200 mock orange shrubs across 600 feet in a Simonds-inspired arched line.
While mock orange will reach maturity in three years, the restored woodland may take two decades to grow in. Unwinding the derecho’s devastation and the steady erosion of the tree canopy takes time, which keeps Seelman focused on the temporal complexities of the landscape architecture. “O. C. Simonds talks about this in his writing,” he says. “[Landscape architecture] is one of the most challenging of all the fine arts, because we’re imagining what something will be. When you plant a tree, we’re imagining it as being a mature tree that produces a canopy for a picnic. There’s really something beautiful in that.”
“Unlike architecture, you can’t just stop the clock,” Hohmann says. “The plants keep growing.” This dynamism forces landscape designers reconstructing historic landscapes to focus on “what the significant spatial, physical pieces of this are so that you don’t lose what makes the design the design,” she adds. This necessitates an emphasis on ambience and poetic truth over literal formal and material compositions. “You also have to acknowledge that what’s there is not always what’s meaningful to people, and that meanings change over time.”