Recreating Jens Jensen garden: It’s still a work in progress

This is the second part of a series. Click Here for the first part.

By Connie Zeigler

When Rob and Jennifer Sloan purchased their 1920s home at 4936 North Meridian St., they had some idea of the

Connie Zeigler is a resident of Fountain Square who holds a master’s degree in history. She is an architectural historian who operates a green preservation consulting business. C Resources, Inc. offers a variety of writing services as well as historic research, national register nominations and preservation planning.

amount of time and energy it might take to rehabilitate the house. What the Sloans didn’t know was that they were also about to embark on an odyssey to restore a nationally significant landscape buried beneath the overgrown trees, honeysuckle and euonymus that passed for their yard.

When Rob Sloan discovered that his home’s original landscape was designed by Jens Jensen, he set upon the task of learning as much as possible about the nationally known landscape architect.

The internet is an expansive resource for Jensen information. Born in Denmark in 1860, Jensen came to the United States in 1884 and before long began a rapidly advancing career in the Chicago Park System.  There Jensen developed a signature style that included the use of native plants in landscaping. By 1905 he was the superintendent of the Chicago West Park System, guiding the design of that city’s publicly owned landscapes.

Jensen helped shift the notion of landscape design in these years. His work with native plants and natural-looking landscapes fit well with the subdued adornments of the Arts & Crafts movement, which was having an impact on the built environment in this period.  At the same time that Frank Lloyd Wright was designing in the Prairie Style, Jensen became known for his prairie landscape design.

When Jensen left his parks position in the 1920s, he opened his own landscape design firm and began to translate his work to residential properties. His clients were the movers and shakers of the day, including the Henry Ford estate and, in Indianapolis – along with the Dr. Goethe Link property now owned by the Sloans – he also designed the James Allison estate, which is now incorporated into Marian College, and a few other residential projects.

Rob Sloan found a lot of information about Jensen on the internet, including his home’s original landscape plans (as discussed in part one of this report in the August issue of Urban Times). Sloan also contacted a landscape scholar, University of Michigan’s Robert Grese, whose biography of Jensen, “Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens,” is required reading in most landscape architecture courses. Grese actually came to Indianapolis to see the Sloan’s property, and was able to point out that, not only was an original “pool” surrounded by rough limestone rocks still intact, but that some of the smaller trees on the site were probably seedlings from the Jensen installation.

Because they live in the North Meridian Street Historic District, a state-designated historic district governed by its own governor-appointed historic preservation commission, the Sloans had to first seek approval to basically scrape their yard of the majority of its existing plants in order to create a nearly blank palate on which they would replant Jensen’s landscape plan.

Although the removal of even one mature tree has to be approved by the commission, the nine-member group unanimously supported the Sloan’s plans, giving the green light for the restoration and re-creation to begin.

Once the over- and undergrowth was removed by a bulldozer, with neurosurgeon Rob Sloan acting as his own contractor for the heavy work, an unearthed manhole cover revealed the wonders of an original, below-ground pump room. This 10×16-foot underground room still had working valves and wheels to control the water level in the limestone-surrounded pool.

The Jensen “pool,” which is still under renovation, is surrounded by new plantings outside the North Meridian Street home.

As soon as the yard was cleared, the planting began.  For this the Sloans needed help, not only with the physical work, but also with selecting and locating the old plant varieties that Jensen used and with making judicious decisions about when it might be absolutely necessary to choose a similar but hardier or less invasive variety of the same species. They found their plant guru in Trena Trusty. Trena, who has a horticulture degree from Purdue, wasn’t really working on landscaping but was known to Rob’s parents as a plant scholar. And she had one unique qualifying experience.

She had been working as a volunteer horticulturist on another former Goethe Link property, the Link Observatory in Brooklyn, Indiana.   Having already had the kismet experience of discovering a long-lost landscape, the Sloans were not going to ignore the fatefulness of Trena’s connection with the original owner of their home. Trena became their plants person.

Trena color-coded Jensen’s elaborate plan to see how he repeated plants and placed them in relation to their neighbors. She and Rob found that as they installed the metal edging where the plans showed the borders of beds, it slid into place like a knife cutting through butter. They were finding on the ground the 87 year-old layout that they were looking at on their copies of the plans.

They also found that it wasn’t as difficult as they had feared it would be to locate the proper old-time versions of the plants called for in Jensen’s plans.   In places were Jensen’s parks and landscapes are still in existence, such as Chicago, there are nurseries that still stock his selections.

They began installing the massive quantities of plant materials called for.  As much as possible they stuck to the original plans, though for instance, where the plans called for 40 trees, the Sloans installed 10-15 large trees and 20-30 seedlings to reduce their expenses somewhat.  And where Jensen’s plans called for a native species of crab apple tree, Trena instead ordered a modern cultivar that is less susceptible to disease but looks very similar. And, in a nod to their modern Meridian Street neighbors, rather than planting the native violets that reseed and spread so invasively, Trena chose woodland phlox, a plant that Jensen used elsewhere and which isn’t such a pushy neighbor as the violet.

Still a work in process that Rob will be tweaking for years to come, the Sloans’ yard is now a beauty spot. Even Jennifer Sloan, who sometimes wondered why they had undertaken this monumental landscaping task with a price tag considerably higher than the cost of many homes in Indianapolis, is a Jensen convert, well-pleased with the appearance of woods-loving jack-in-the-pulpit springing up on her city lot.

For Rob, the coming together of this landscape has been a labor of love and of discovery, which he likens to finding a room full of art locked up in a dark basement.

The Sloans willingness and capacity to recreate this landscape is also a gift to the city in which they live, and even to the nation. Now, along with a new football stadium and a winning Super Bowl bid, Indianapolis can claim a parcel of native beauty designed 87 years ago by the father of the prairie style landscape, Jens Jensen.

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