Though Reynolda never appeared on a Society meeting schedule, many members have walked about house, grounds, and gardens during an Old Salem Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes conference. Reynolda, moreover, was a conference co-sponsor from its 1979 beginnings and thus helped to prepare the ground for the 1982 founding of the Southern Garden History Society. Time spent at Reynolda (now a fine arts museum) is always memorable, if only just to linger a few moments in the forecourt of the house admiring the Dutch Colonial work of architect Charles Barton Keen or to become absorbed in the trees and groves/shade and light feel of its surroundings. The Reynolda House visitor will have to search a bit, however, for the large formal gardens, though in fact only a short path leads from one area to the next.
As the name implies, at the core of the story is the Reynolds family, and most especially Katharine Smith Reynolds, wife of tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds. Under her guidance, their great wealth underpinned the early twentieth-century construction of a one-thousand-acre plus estate that featured not only a house and gardens but also a village, working farm, lake, and a golf course. Initially relying on the landscape engineering firm of Miller and Buckenham for site layout, Katharine Reynolds turned to Philadelphia landscape architect Thomas Warren Sears, a frequent collaborator with Charles Keen, for detailed landscape and garden design. It is to Sears, whose work spanned many years, that we owe the Olmsted-like feel of the house setting, along with the four-acre formal garden complex southwest of the house and adjacent to Reynolda village. Instead of arriving from the main house, however, most visitors today enter via a Sears-designed conservatory-greenhouse complex, before walking a series of rectilinear paths that separate parterres and individual themed areas, including two distinct rose gardens, along with a cutting and vegetable garden. Especially evocative of the designer’s touch are pergolas, teahouses, and shelters that offer visual and physical terminal points for garden paths. Their design displays a Japanese influence widespread in the early 1900s, as did the use of Cryptomeria japonica and weeping cherry, which along with London plane trees, were the dominant arboreal elements of the garden.
For more details, visit: https://reynolda.org/gardens/formal-gardens/
Recommended reading: Catherine Howett*, A World of her Own Making: Katharine Smith Reynolds and Landscape of Reynolda.
*Catherine Howett was an early SGHS president and is professor emerita at the University of Georgia School of Environmental Design.