
To those not from the Deep South, the word “bayou” can carry an element of mystery not found in “creek,” “stream,” “run,” or “river,” a feeling perhaps enhanced by listening to Hank Williams or Linda Ronstadt songs. Add “Buffalo” to “Bayou,” and the romance grows. The story goes that the original resident of the fourteen-acre National Register site went against family wishes in naming it for its unique Buffalo Bayou location, but she did so precisely because of the especially southern resonance of the word.
Often grouped among Country Place Era sites, Bayou Bend is now an arm of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A century ago it was a larger-than-average tract within the River Oaks subdivision, a thousand acres then being developed by the oil-rich brothers Michael and William Hogg, along with attorney Hugh Potter. Bayou Bend, in turn, would serve chiefly as the home of Michael and William’s sister, the universally termed “Miss Ima.” Credit subsequently goes to Ima Hogg, architect John Staub, and landscape architect Ruth London for the initial efforts in transforming the Hoggs’ sloping overgrown acreage into the home and gardens seen today. A true gardener, a knowledgeable plants-person, and the project’s driving force, Ima worked tirelessly with Staub and later with landscape architects Pat Fleming and Albert Sheppard in the process of Bayou Bend improvement.
A winding, wooded drive leads to the home’s strongly Palladian front, while the opposite side faces the bayou below, being centered on a “plantationesque” two-story Tuscan portico. The designers linked the dwelling to the stream area via the central and arguably best-known of the “rooms” comprising the Bayou Bend landscape, the Diana garden. Offering some design similarities to the portico garden at New Orleans’ Longue Vue, this large space features an upper terrace and a central lawn, culminating in a gleaming white statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. Backed by columnar yews and nestled in azaleas, she faces a rectangular pool overarched by opposing water jets.
Diana shares the overall mythological stage with two other marble deities, Clio, muse of history, and Euterpe, goddess of music. On the west, separated by hedges and adjacent to the Diana lawn, the highly formal Clio garden consists chiefly of an ellipse enclosing smaller demi-elliptical and circular hedged parterre gardens. Flanking the central lawn on the other side, the Euterpe garden dramatically reduces the formal tone of the Clio parterres, the muse’s statue being set amidst columnar yews, ferns, and a variety of azaleas. As elsewhere on the property, pines, oaks, magnolias, and sycamores offer verticality and shade.
The work of Ruth London, the serene East garden is the earliest of Bayou Bend’s garden rooms. Set apart by hedges and immediately next to the house, it features parallel rows of boxwood topiary knots divided by a large grass panel and terminates in a fountain simple in concept compared to the treatment of the three goddesses. Over the year, color and life across the gardens comes from numerous azalea varieties, camellias, gardenias, roses, and more, all planted in a green setting of trimmed evergreen shrubs, grass panels, and trees.
Beyond these gardens, a variety of other spots, including the surrounding woodlands, draw visitor raves. (See links below.) It was the core Diana garden area, however, along with the house and its fine decorative arts collection, that stamped a lasting impression on Society members during a March 26, 1999 Houston annual meeting dinner. Two earlier presentations on Ima Hogg and Bayou Bend garden preservation and interpretation had offered scholarly “basic training,” the combination of education, site visit, and collegiality capturing the very essence of the Southern Garden History Society.
For more details, visit: https://www.mfah.org/visit/bayou-bend-collection-and-gardens/bayou-bend-gardens
For a plan of the property, see: https://www.anandarooproy.com/projects/bayou-bend-gardens-9/
Highly recommended reading: Mac Griswold and Eleanor Weller, Golden Age of American Gardens, 240-242
An excellent Magnolia article on Bayou Bend’s history can be read at: https://southerngardenhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Magnolia_Fall_1998.pdf#page=8
For Cultural Landscape Foundation biographical sketches of project professionals, see:
https://www.tclf.org/pioneer/john-f-staub
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