Customer Reviews

The Winterthur Garden: Henry Francis du Pont's Romance with the Land

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The gardens at Winterthur are undoubtedly beautiful, but were grandly assisted by being built upon a magnificent stretch of undulating territory and executed by 300 gardeners during its development. DuPont's role is certainly worth lauding, but not in the embarrassingly fawning, reverential way this book is written. Even his daughter presents a more realistic portrait of the man, his garden, and his collecting obsessions in her own recent book.

He was such a shy and inarticulate man, that the quotes throughout the book are almost embarrassing. He sounds like Chauncy Gardner in "Being There." The author and her Winterthur sponsors would have served their subject better had they not expressed their admiration in such florid, effusive prose. A great garden speaks for itself.

Read, instead, Hal Bruce's, "Winterthur in Bloom" for a rich, lyrical tour of the natural garden without the irritating hype and turgid writing.

As a director of Winterthur Garden near Wilmington, Delaware, the author is hardly about to criticize her employers or their deceased benefactor, Henry Francis Dupont, but she sometimes gets carried away with her praise for Harry while failing to provide much information on the Bidermanns, who started the estate, or on how gunpowder money, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, funded Dupont's hobby which basically involved non-formal color woodland landscaping concentrating on rhododendrons. The book includes attractive color photos of the woods around the estate but provides only a small b/w map of the present estate and gardens, hardly suitable for use when touring the gardens. Not recommended for gardeners on tight budgets, but of interest to those who are fascinated with the Duponts.