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Walking through Taliesin’s Garden Court with Amy Schertz, gardener at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, changes the way you see it. She draws my attention to color first. Then pattern. Then texture. A stem rising from stone. The soft disorder of prairie plants melding with the varied geometries of Wright’s architecture. The garden carries its history in layers.
Amy Schertz
Recreating a historical garden is not so simple. Today, she works from a landscape preservation plan that contains archival photographs and documentation, including a horticultural list drafted by Jens Jensen—who worked with Wright on Taliesin’s landscape architecture. It captures what we know of what was grown on the property during Wright’s lifetime. Some plants are easy to trace: the apples remain the same. So do the orchard grapes. Others are harder to account for. Due to recorded strikes, some plants likely sat on delivery beds for long periods—we do not know which survived or dried out before they ever reached the ground. The gaps are filled with native plants. That brings its own difficulties.
Like the Fellows who tended these beds before her, Amy is largely self-taught. Gardening, she says, is often a matter of watching, trying, failing, and trying again. She points to a bed surrounding the UNESCO signs, one of her first projects after taking the gardening role about five years ago. Native prairie plants and playful grasses fill the space. They are beautiful, but they have opinions. They do not always want a formal bed. They do not want to be pampered. Too much water, Amy has learned, can make some of them grow too vigorously. Then they flop. A plant that once stood upright spills outward, changing the shape of the whole bed. Such was the case for a particular goldenrod, which has since been moved elsewhere on the estate, and replaced with a sturdier variety. The garden is full of such negotiations.
Peony bed
The lilacs offer another example: “How do you know there’s something wrong with the lilacs?” I ask. “Because it’s blooming,” Amy quips. “And it’s September,” she smiles. The bed will be remade next year, with hopes of blooms returning to an early spring schedule.
Nearby are also replanted peonies, which had suffered from disease a few years ago. One mature variety remains from the original bed, kept for its flowers, which fade toward a soft yellow. Beyond the peonies are hollyhocks (among Wright’s favorite flowers and namesake of one of his most famous houses). Amy shares photos of their towering red and pink forms from June:
Sedum mosaics
Adjacent to the hollyhocks, a sedum planter flourishes in tougher conditions: sun and rocky soil. Colors gather in mosaic-like patches across the stone. The planting draws the eye toward the architecture behind it, and then releases it, ever conversing.
To the right of the sedum stands a recently reshaped juniper. Tim Gruner, retired curator from Anderson Japanese Gardens, spent two days this past winter shaping it and its neighbor into their new bonsai silhouettes.
View from the Tea Circle
From the Tea Circle, the garden opens. This was where Wright and the Fellowship gathered each afternoon at four. Amy has planted two varieties of begonias here, encircling purple salvia. The planting has thrived this season. From this perspective, we can see something of what Amy is imagining for the rest of the garden: not a frozen picture of the past, but a living composition.
In the distance, a dusting of red begonias leads toward emerging mums. The planting pulls the eye along the path and toward the entrance to the architecture, where red-framed windows offer another direction.
Purple salvia echoes the coloring of the giant ironweed, one of the courtyard’s great statements, anchored near the Garden Room. Its scale gives the corner a kind of gravity.
Pruning the giant ironweed
Beyond it, wisteria climbs. The trellis, however, will not remain. Future preservation work on Wright’s bedroom wing will bring heavy equipment through, requiring the area to be disassembled because it is not part of the garden’s original footprint.
At Taliesin, that question of what is “original” extends throughout the landscape. It means understanding the garden as it existed in 1959, the year of Wright’s death. Plant selections must align with photographic evidence or archival records from Wright’s lifetime. The garden is not simply being restored, but interpreted.
Every bed contains a question: What was here? What survived? What belongs? What should be moved? What should be allowed to grow wild?
Amy walks among those questions with a gardener’s patience.
She looks closely.
Then she tries something.
Then she waits.
