Chanticleer Garden
History
The estate was built in 1912 as a summer cottage for Christine Penrose and Adolph G. Rosengarten Sr., the latter of whom was the head of Rosengarten & Sons, a Philadelphia pharmaceutical manufacturer that his family had founded in 1822 to produce quinine. The company merged with Merck & Co in 1927.
Upon inheriting the estate in 1946, their son, Adolph G. Rosengarten Jr. established a foundation to ensure that Chanticleer would be developed as a public garden.
"Chanticleer" means rooster in French. The entrance gate is crested with a carved-stone rooster; other references to roosters can be found throughout the estate. Rosengarten Jr. hired Christopher Woods, a native of Britain, to develop the garden. After Rosengarten Jr.'s death in 1990, Woods became the founding Executive Director and began a radical revision of the garden. He tore down Mr. Rosengarten's stone house to create what is now known as "The Ruin".
Today, Chanticleer consists of a collection of open lawns and large trees. Different sections of the botanical gardens include:
- Chanticleer House, the Main House, connecting to the entrance and Teacup Garden, which includes an open-air porch, providing a popular spot for visitors to sit and relax
- Asian Woods, planting for which began in 1995, after being cleared the previous year, and now hosting a variety of species native to Korea, Japan, and China, but in the style of an American woodland garden
- Pond Garden, a large man-made circular pond constructed in the early 1970s, acting as a mirror for the trees that surround it
- Teacup Garden, a small garden serving as the entrance courtyard to the property
- Minder Woods, a heavily vegetated area with towering red oaks and dark green pines, firs, false cypresses, and hemlocks, accessible via meandering stone paths
- Tennis Court Garden, the estate's old tennis court, transformed into a garden
- "The Ruin" Garden, the Minder House, built in 1925 and razed in 1999 to offer a series of spaces, pools, and fountains
- Gravel Garden, small garden spaces, connected by a series of steps, and home to a variety of species of plants that are rare to the area and climate
- Cutting Garden, a traditional cottage garden with a series of arches, fashioned from rebar and driftwood, for clematis and annual vines
- Vegetable garden, where rustic benches help frame a simple traditional American vegetable garden
- Bell's Run, with adjacent woods giving way to undulating lawns, a stream, and a functional 1940s waterwheel
- Bell's Woodland, a naturalistic garden devoted to plants indigenous to the eastern U.S.
- Bulb Meadow, on a hillside, highlighted by Spanish bluebells and fragile daffodils
The grounds
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Asian Woods
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Ruin and Gravel Garden
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Plants on the Croquet Lawn in front of the main house
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Garden Path
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Landscape
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Wall of ruin
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Portion of ruin
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Chanticleer House
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Bell's Run
See also
References
- ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. March 13, 2009.
- ^ Jacki Lyden, Chanticleer: A Botanical Distraction From Daily Life, National Public Radio, June 17, 2012.
- ^ Higgins, Adrian; Cardillo, Rob (2011). Chanticleer: A Pleasure Garden. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 192 pages.
- ^ Carl E. Doebley, 1984, NRHP Nomination Form for Chanticleer Enter "public" for ID and "public" for password to access the site.
- ^ Michael A. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy; published by The Haworth Press, Binghamton, New York 2004
- ^ Chanticleer Garden: a history Archived September 16, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Chanticleer, a review by The Longwood Graduate Program, Public Horticulture, University of Delaware, 2007 Archived May 19, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Chanticleer Garden". www.chanticleergarden.org. Retrieved October 1, 2017.