Written by: Thomas Christopher, Growing Greener Podcast
Over the course of my career as a gardener, using my craft to restore the local ecosystem has become a personal passion. Still, I know that in the big picture this is sometimes a process of one step forward and two steps back, as areas around my plantings fall prey to the developer’s bulldozer. Clearly, restoration must be partnered with conservation. And if a restoration program is to have a serious impact, it must win support from as broad a constituency as possible. It’s got to have something that attracts fans who will support it politically and financially. This may sound like a difficult synthesis to achieve, a brilliant example of this kind of synergy can be found in the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Courtesy of the Brandywine Conservancy
Founded in 1967, three years before the first Earth Day, this organization dates back to the early years of the environmental movement, to a time when native plants were virtually unknown in cultivated landscapes and when the sight of an insect in the garden brought a reflexive reach for the sprayer.
There was a unique core constituency in Chadds Ford, however, that was already committed to a more enlightened kind of stewardship. The village is set astride the Brandywine River in an area long famous for its scenic beauty. When railroads linked Chadds Ford to Philadelphia and Wilmington in 1859, the Brandywine Valley became a favorite summer retreat for well-to-do city dwellers. In 1900, a leading artist and illustrator of the day, Howard Pyle, began offering summer courses for aspiring artists in Chadds Ford; among the students he attracted was a young N.C. Wyeth who decided to settle there permanently with his young wife in 1908. Wyeth’s children and grandchildren, most famously his son Andrew and grandson Jamie, continued the family devotion to the fine arts. A celebration of the local landscape is a thread that runs through all their work, and the Brandywine Valley became famous as a result.
Change started with the suburbanization of the region in the 1950’s. The pressure came to a head in the 1960’s with a proposal for a major industrial development in the valley. This threatened not only the visual character of the land but also the water quality in the Brandywine River watershed, a major source of drinking water for the city of Wilmington, Delaware. Confronted with this turning point, a young associate of Andrew Wyeth, painter George “Frolic” Weymouth, organized the community to purchase and preserve the targeted land. This was the beginning of the Brandywine Conservancy.
Courtesy of the Brandywine Conservancy
This marriage of the arts and the environmental concern continued as the Conservancy began to facilitate the granting of conservation easements to local landowners in 1969. In 1971, the Conservancy established a museum in a historic mill, which provided a way to preserve the artistic heritage of the Brandywine Valley while also making Chadds Ford a tourist destination. Then in 1974, the Conservancy made explicit the connection between the land, the residents, and their culture by hiring a pioneering local horticulturist, F. M. Mooberry, to create a 15-acre garden principally of native plants on the museum campus. Mooberry combined native plants with locally naturalized plants to achieve two goals: creating settings that recalled native plant habitats; and satisfying visitors’ desire for full season bloom.
When Mooberry undertook this assignment, sources of native plants in the Mid-Atlantic region were few, so she adopted a do-it-yourself approach, collecting seeds locally with Conservancy volunteers to start plants from scratch. In this way, Mooberry filled her beds with local ecotypes, long before the gardening world had awakened to their ecological importance.
The volunteers’ seed collecting became a tradition that continues to this day. Last winter, I spoke to Mark Gormel, the Conservancy’s current Horticultural Coordinator, who every year joins the Conservancy’s volunteers in harvesting, cleaning, and storing the seeds of 100 native plant species. These are made available to research laboratories, highway beautification and habitat restoration projects, public and private gardens, universities, and commercial nurseries, as well as to the public through the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art website. The collected seeds are also grown for use in the Museum’s gardens.
I referred earlier to synergy, and that is what I experienced during my visit. The museum was my first stop, which displayed paintings by varioust artists, all with their own distinct interpretations of the local landscape. I found that not only did the visions depicted by the artists enrich my appreciation of the plants that filled the landscapes, they awakened me to the powerful role that the native flora can play in shaping cultural traditions. I have witnessed a number of efforts to use the arts to promote environmental consciousness; however,the paintings and drawings hanging on the walls of the Brandywine Museum wereby far the most pleasurable and effective.
After immersing myself in the paintings, I went out to explore the gardens and experience the plantings with new eyes. I’ve been a student of North American flora since my days at the New York Botanical Garden half a century ago, but still I was struck with the flair and imagination with which they had been displayed in the Brandywine gardens. There are four miles, too, of walking paths stretching back from the river and museum that take the visitor through the wild prototypes – woodland, meadow, and wetland – that had inspired the conservancy’s gardeners from Mooberry onward. Later, I logged onto a webinar hosted by the horticultural staff that shared the expertise it has developed over the years about seed saving. This is the kind of education that both inspires and supports positive action.
The true test of this approach to conservation and restoration, though, lies in the success the Conservancy and Museum has had in preserving land and habitats. Currently, it holds 510 conservation easements that protect some 70,200 acres of land, including five and a half miles of riverbank. That total would be an extraordinary achievement for any private conservancy, but is even more remarkable considering Chadds Ford is located just 25 miles outside of metropolitan Philadelphia.
The Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art had an unusual asset in the region’s rich artistic heritage, but what the organization has accomplished by leveraging local cultural resources to unite residents and inspire them to value and protect their environment could serve as a useful model for other communities. If nothing else, the success of the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum spotlights how combining different constituencies and approaches into a single campaign can lead to an impact far greater than the sum of the parts. That – and an illustration of the powerful role that gardening should play – surely is a useful lesson for those seeking to enhance the ecosystem in which they live.
Courtesy of the Brandywine Conservancy
Thomas Christopher, a graduate of the New York Botanical Garden School of Professional Horticulture, has written more than a dozen gardening books, including “Garden Revolution: How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change” (which he co-authored with Larry Weaner). He shares his passion for environmentally positive gardening in the weekly podcast “Growing Greener” which he produces in partnership with the Berkshire Botanical Garden.