Gorgeous, Highly Invasive Garden Thug Captivates Baristaville With Its Beauty

Ohmigod! I saw this yesterday. My beloved and I bought some plants and I came THIS CLOSE to buying a little wisteria starter plant until I learned that the seeds and parts of the plant can be toxic. Since we're getting a dog, I nixed that idea. We ended up with sunflowers and some sort of creeper which name escapes me at the moment. What a gorgeous place!

I suspect Baristanet chose the word "thug" in a feeble attempt at humor.

I know very little about gardening, but I know that wisteria really is a "thug". It will grow with wild abandon and choke the life out of any other plant that gets in its way.

Bambo has the same furtive tendencies. I have never seen a more beautiful wisteria in my life than the one at Van Vleck. Charles Van Vleck designed this house for his father who was more interested in the garden so the house is more like a regal outdoors object with very plain interiors. Van Vleck designed the Gates Mansion interiors that were produced by Tiffany & Co. Besides designing some the notable places in our area, he designed Saks Fifth Avenue in NYC, as well as Bloomingdales and several luxury apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue between 61st and 70th. On this Fifth Avenue tract, Charles Van Vleck designed some spectacular apartments for the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers were no strangers to the local social scene in Montclair's Belle Epoque, Fredrick Gates was the Rockefeller's financial advisor and the head of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Charles Van Vleck was the Rockefeller's architect. If I am not mistaken, the Van Vleck's owned limestone quarries (the Van Vleck house is made of limestone) and this material was quite frequently used on luxury buildings in NYC.

Thanks for the clarification, VNC.
I'll take a garden full of wisteria type thugs over a garden full of human type thugs, any day, no problem.

frank, i love learning about the history of our beautiful local buildings. thank you!

Thank you Fran, SC Sheola and our other Baristanet photographers for documenting our beauty for future generations.

I have known people who planted Wisteria at the base of a tree that was already dying anyway (and starting to look like junk) so that the Wisteria would climb it and basically make a new tree out of it.

Hi - I managed to photograph the wisteria as the light was fading yesterday... It's still not in full bloom but if we have some more warm days it should be there soon... Sally Sheola

SCS, I think 11 repeat posts is some kind of record. Maybe cut back on the coffee! :)

SCS,

In some blogs, you can delete/edit your own posts, but not on Baristanet. Once it's posted, it's there forever or until a Barista administrator deletes or 'edits' it.

:-)

there you go, ten of the eleven repeats have been deleted. and sally, your photos are beautiful. i hope everyone takes the time to check out your flickr page.

We planted 3 'trumpet vines' on our back fence a few years ago. It is beautiful, but aggressive too. It will sprout up all over the place and attach itself to anything that it can. It has beautiful crimson/orange blossoms and a deep green foliage.

Once, coming home from the shore on the GSP, I noticed, in Irvington, entire trees that had been engulfed by this vine and I looked over at my wife and said "oh, oh!", but we've never had any problems with it. It just takes a little extra attention.

i think you are right. vigilance can keep it from taking over. also, there are spots where it is beneficial to have galloping growth take over. i'm thinking specifically of the dunes at fire island, where wind and erosion are a constant danger. my mother once pointed out that the more plants like sea grape and reeds grew there, the more the dunes could be "anchored."

Ack Mom and I went to the plant sale on Saturday. My wysteria, while almost completely covering the right-hand side of my garage, has yet to flower. I got the purple tip sheet while I was there and hopefully next year I will get the blooms.

I am letting my thug kill a rose of sharon right now.

I love going to the Van Vleck estate, can I live there? Please! Its like you're in another world - a good world, a world without Montclair.

Frank, wasn't the Frederick Gates house designed by an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose last name was Washington? There are so many elements here that depict Wright's early style when he left Adler & Sullivan. His first independent commission was to build the William H. Winslow house(1893),in River Forest Ill. One look at this house compares so closely to the elements found in the Gates house. The features include the broad hip roof with an expansive over-hang and the ubiquitous urns set on blocks, at the entrance way. Mellow tapestry brick was used for the facade and some terra cotta adornments. The windows seem to be identical too, alluding to Wright again!

Here is part of an article that I did for the Montclair Times. Now I am running to Trenton for the anouncement of Preservation NJ's 10 Most Endangered Sites....Some sites in Baristaville have been nominated.

THE GATES MANSION
FGG from The Montclair Times March 7th 2004

"...The Gates Mansion is one of the most exceptional and unusual designs in our community, fruit of the spirit of an age of illuminated vision of great thinkers. Frederick Taylor Gates, a young Baptist Minister was chosen by John D. Rockefeller as a guiding light for his philanthropic endeavors and then financial advisor in building one of the greatest world empires of it?s time ? Standard Oil. In 1891, after having laid out the University of Chicago as a philanthropic initiative for Rockefeller, Gates moved with his family to Montclair and set up office in New York. Originally, the Gates family resided near Harrison Avenue and the present Gates Avenue. A tall well-built man with florid and melodramatic flair, Gates was considered exceptionally intelligent and charismatic. He began with Rockefeller at $4000 yearly in 1891 and then achieved a $32,000. yearly salary from Rockefeller by 1902. At this time, Gates acquired the South Mountain property with it?s pre existing Second Empire Mansion and natural spring water rights from the Thompsons and Baldwins and thus commissioned visionary architect George Maher, a Frank Lloyd Wright colleague, to design his unusual house which embodied the dawn of the new world power of wealth and philanthropy. In 1887, George Maher wrote, ?? peculiarity or originality in design arises from local reasons; the exactions of an educated public are essential for any improvement in art. Thus it was in Athens in the time of Pericles and also in Florence in the fifteenth century.? At the dawn of the twentieth century, Montclair in the time of Gates was a community of enlightened thinkers, inventors and pioneers in many modern movements.

At this time, Montclair was the second richest community pro capita in the USA and keeping in theme, the vitrified beige brick mansion takes the form of an Italian Patrician Palace with a central Venetian trifora window to command the spectacular view of the growing metropolis ? symbol of the New World. The peculiarities of the design are the massive scale, the long horizontal windows and exaggerated roofline. From the outside we see a long sweeping lawn but from the inside, there is a long sweeping view of Manhattan, from Westchester to Staten Island. Montclair?s Joseph Van Vleck designed the glamorous interiors, crafted by Tiffany & Co. Van Vleck designed several of New York?s most exclusive residential buildings like 820 Fifth Avenue, a twelve story 1916 Italian Renaissance limestone Palazzo with an 18 room apartment on every floor. Nelson Rockefeller, a prot?g?e of Gates, commissioned Van Vleck to create his tri-plex penthouse at 907 Fifth Avenue modeled after his design for Charles Van Vleck?s duplex at 1107 Fifth. Joseph Van Vleck designed the home for his brother, William at 21 Van Vleck Street, Montclair in 1916. The sober Prairie School lines combined the richness of the Tiffany?s fittings and flame mahogany panels embellished with miles of hand carved oak leaf and acorn motif freeze work, the wide single ante flame mahogany pocket doors throughout the house as well as the extinct archeological excavation marble specimens, make the Gates House Interiors incomparable.

Andrew Carnegie much esteemed by Gates and Rockefeller bestowed our nation with a gift of 2800 libraries (locally on the corner of Church Street and Valley Road and another on Bellevue Avenue, designed by Francis Nelson), many similar to the design of the Gates House. Greatly influenced by Carnegie?s vision, upon his death in 1929, Gates attempted to leave his unique home to the Township of Montclair as a Public Library. The Mansion, with precious Tiffany & Co. interiors, although perfectly suitable for world class, erudite intellectual millionaire readers, the ever growing suburban township declined the gift and finally in 1941, the Gates estate sold the property to a succession of private owners until this difficult to understand mythological temple-like residence was acquired in 1953 by Charles Manuel Grace, the legendary African-American cult figure, Sweet Daddy Grace..."

Frank, I appreciate the in-depth history to answer my question. I had forgotten George's middle name was Washington, instead of his last. it was all that came to mind, at the time. The Prarie School lines truely define Wright's influence in Maher's exterior design.

What I find remarkable, Mojoe, is that George Washington Maher attempted to capture the excitement of the moment by creating a totally new type of house that would represent of the dawning of the new world. Rather than a pictoresque mountainside suburban estate, he wanted something totally new, like a temple on our mountain that would be a silent witness to the building of NYC's modern electrically illuminated skyscrapers....the dawning of a new era. Daybreak, an adjacent estate was also named as to capture the emotion of the sunrise above the Manhattan Skyline. Please excuse me for the long post above!

The post that you provided, Frank, was enlightening and not long enough. To transport back in time, to this period in Montclair's heyday, has been a long unfullied wish for me. If anyone can sense the spirit of the time, it is you! Thank you so much.

Its a pleasure Mojoe....You're so kind....Thank you.