Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia

10. Peony

49 & 10. Peony on saturday we often walk to the hardware store to buy paint or potting soil or nails.We pass the dark stone walls of Eastern State Penitentiary constructed from 1823 to 1836 on land that was part of the north border of Thomas Penn’s estate. Later there was a farm here that sold cold drinks and strawberries down the road from the waterworks. Closed since the early 1970s, the prison is a museum now with crumbling halls,the wires of the electric chair unraveling.The design was revolutionary for prisons. Each prisoner had his own room and his own exercise run.He was given his food through a slot in the door. The designers felt that peaceful contemplation of one’s sins would bring about redemption. Instead, all the inmates went crazy within a year. The prison sits at the top of the hill where Thomas Penn’s little stream flowed down into the grove of fir trees. A guidebook to Philadelphia architecture tells me that John Haviland , the architect of the Pagoda and Labyrinthine Garden,won the competition for the design of the prison. The instructions to the architects competing for the project were:“The exterior of a solitary prison should exhibit . . . great strength and convey to the mind a cheerless blank indicative of the misery that awaits the unhappy being who enters within its walls.” The interior was a variation on Sir Samuel Bentham’s 1787 radial plan of seven long cell blocks, the spokes of a central rotunda. The cell blocks were long dark passageways with individual cells. Some prisoners had gardens in the plot of land behind their cells. But unlike monks who might have cultivated their own patch of gar- 50 springettsbury den,they did not meet for prayers and meals.The men who lived here grew their cauliflowers and herbs and lettuces and carrots alone. For many years after it closed the prison was a wilderness.A forest of thirty years grew up in the central rotunda. People dumped tires and trash along the perimeter. “It’s quite beautiful in there now, like a cathedral,” the director of the museum told me. I was trying to get him to pick up the trash along the sidewalk in front of the iron portcullis,and he was assuring me that it was the city’s responsibility, not his. “It was in our lease when we bought the building,” he said. Onwarmdaysflocksof sparrowsbendthelonggrassesandfruiting bushes back to eat seeds and berries along the granite walls, planted now with a garden. Haviland purchased a piece of land near the waterworks and designed the Pagoda and Labyrinthine Garden in 1828.The pleasure garden that once surrounded the corner where our house sits now was bankrupt by 1829. His garden was in competition with three other public gardens closer to the city. But this garden was unusual in the combination of a labyrinth and a pagoda. The original design included a Chinese temple in each corner. I think perhaps the garden was full of peonies. They’re beautiful and long-lived. I know one artist who painted bushes with wide pink flowers along the perimeter. The pagoda overlooked the graveled walks and fountains of the waterworks where the landscape was still a patchwork of large estates and farms along the river. You could climb a winding stair over a hundred feet to the top and see the city to the west and country to the north. The roads were rutted and muddy in the spring. The entrance pavilion had a “tent-like open verandah” that one critic said“evoked a Chinese spirit.”The design of the garden,whimsical in contrast to Haviland’s other projects, was based on William peony 51 Chamber’s book on Chinese Buildings published in 1757.Chamber’s book included a design for the ten-story pagoda at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew built for King George III. The pagoda that stood not far from my house was inspired by a trip thatWilliam Chambers took to Guangzhou when he was a boy. I like living on the bones of a garden with a“Chinese spirit.”Philadelphia has always been a place where you could cultivate your soul any way you wanted, or that was the theory. John Bartram was disowned from the Darby Meeting because he would not state that he believed in the divinity of Jesus. He saw...