This article published in Pacific Horticulture 68 (4) October 2007 5 - 11

At different times David has bred plants for several large companies. Right now he is with Ecke Ranch, the firm which took over Oglevee about six months ago. Oglevee, based in Pennsylvania, solved the problem of pelargonium breeding en masse, among other things. The plants are always very susceptible to infections and keeping them germ-free was a huge accomplishment.

We all know Ecke Ranch without realizing it. They are the leaders in the poinsettia field, having bred the myriad colors and textures we now see every Christmas. When we stroll through the flower market in December we are overwhelmed by the choice in poinsettias, a plant which until the last few years came in uncompromising pillar-box red. Did any of us ever think about what was going on and how it happened?

Ecke probably did 90% of the work and sells about 90% of the plants. Paul Ecke saw that combining the strengths of their poinsettia (late autumn/winter) market with Oglevee’s spring and summer markets would create a blockbuster firm. The plant world has rapidly been undergoing this sort of consolidation just as airlines have merged and food producers have become enormous (eg Dart and Kraft). It just hasn’t hit the papers in the same way since economists do not focus on these non-essential “products”.

All North American plant producers are threatened by the same forces which have affected the manufacture of clothing, shoes and so forth. People in other countries are paid much less. With flowers, the climate is also a big factor. There used to be acres of greenhouses in the Bay area for roses. All of them have gone because it is just too expensive to heat the greenhouses. Why do you think that our commercial roses all hail from Ecuador or Costa Rica now?

Well now, you are saying to yourself, she has finally lost it. She starts with a book about sweet peas and is now ranting about globalization in the world of horticulture. There is a connection and we shall explore it. This small paper-bound book is dog-eared from long use. David Lemon received it from one of his mentors. Many fewer people grow sweet peas now than formerly.

There was a time when they were one of the most popular flowers around. Breeders knew that whatever they created would be snapped up eagerly in the market. A key discovery occurred in 1902 when the head gardener at the Spencer estate, Princess Diana’s family, found a totally different sweet pea among his rows of beautiful flowers. This flower was ruffled with huge petals and in an exquisite shade of pink. It was a sport, occurring spontaneously in nature. Mr Cole named it ‘Countess Spencer’. Thereafter two races of sweet peas co-existed, but the Spencer type was in the ascendant.

The result was that C. C. Morse in San Francisco could publish a list of 200 pages of sweet pea varieties as an appendix to his Field Notes on Sweet Peas for growers about fifteen years later. At a rough estimate the book lists about 1500 varieties. The author notes that some of them were already obsolete, no longer in production even at the time the book appeared. Breeding was equally rapid on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is this extraordinary range of choice, of diversity and variation, which gets lost when the industry is driven only by commercial goals. If a flower does not meet the market projections it is scrapped. Sweet peas are only one example.

I have to declare a conflict of interest. I have a granddaughter named Mabel Taylor. One of the lost sweet pea cultivars was the ‘Mabel Taylor’, bred by a Mr Sharpe.

This article published in Scope - American Academy of Ophthalmology November 2002

Mrs Foote’s Rose Book is small with a red cover. It was almost hidden on the shelf. The word usually chosen to describe something like this is “unassuming”. It serves notice that in spite of being small and humble in appearance the object packs an unexpected punch. We are not disappointed.

Think about when it was published. Her book came out just three years after the end of World War II. From 1941 to 1945 she must have been absorbed in war duties and not worrying about her roses. There was never enough paper during the war to bring out something so frivolous as a book about roses. She writes principally about the period before the war, a time of other serious difficulties but one with more leisure and space for a person in her position.

Mrs Foote was the widow of a Massachusetts minister and created more than one rose garden during her life. With each one she hoped to achieve perfection, using new and what she termed “radical “ methods to accomplish her aims. Perfection is a very difficult goal and we need to understand what she meant by it.

Her name first appears in a list of commendations from Albert Benson’s official history of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. In 1910, Mrs Foote’s rose garden in Marblehead contained 900 varieties of roses, principally hybrid teas, hybrid perpetuals, Noisettes and Bourbons.

Many of these are extremely demanding to grow, unlike the tough, disease-resistant varieties of today. There were very few grafted roses. Everything was “own-root”. She arrived at her system through trial and error though she notes that she and her husband read every book about roses they could find.

Mrs Foote also joined the English National Rose Society and her first garden contained roses imported from Scotland. These were the first tender roses to be grown successfully outdoors in new England.

She did not start out totally ignorant but recognized the effects that the enormous variation in climate and soil had on her plants. The MHS Garden Committee singled her out with a few other luminaries for special commendation. They had visited 18 gardens that year.

Many of the great advances in rose breeding had not yet occurred when she began her work. J. Horace McFarland had just started his pioneering efforts to organize rose growing and rose growers into a solid group. Evidently Dr McFarland and Mrs Foote locked horns at one point. He accused her of being as “sententious as the Ten Commandments”, fighting words for a minister’s wife.

Mrs Foote’s prescriptions included digging the trenches as least 3 feet deep and establishing good drainage, using a good deal of cow manure, restricting the beds to a width of 5 feet, avoiding “cheap-own root” plants, watering very thoroughly, pruning very carefully rather than decimating the plants and protecting the tender ones against winter chill. Many of these ideas are now standard practice. Her insistence that enough leaves remain on a rosebush was based on good science. All the nutrition comes from the leaves. If you remove those recklessly, the plant has less energy to make flowers.

Mrs Foote claimed that one reason her hybrid tea roses grew very tall was that she planted them close together, between 12 and 16 inches apart. They tended to give each other a little support and their tops shaded the soil beneath them.

It is hard for us to believe that commercial rose growing did not really start in the United States until about 1914. Before that the public could only buy Prairie Queen, Baltimore Belle and a few hybrid perpetuals.

Nothing has been said about anything so crass as money but the MHS history tells us Mrs Foote created rose gardens for other people, with one assistant, Miss Emma Schumaker. For instance, she planted 400 bushes for the Spaulding family. In 1927, the society awarded her a gold medal for her lifelong achievements. Through the years she received other medals.

Mrs Foote kept on making improvements and being a thorn in the side of some of the “experts”. Our hats are off to her.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT THESE NOTES COULD NOT HAVE BEEN COMPLETED WITHOUT THE SPLENDID ASSISTANCE OF MS ROSALIND HUNNEWELL, A VOLUNTEER AT THE MHS LIBRARY.

Copyright © Judith M. Taylor December 2007

Judith Taylor’s Library Notes
February 2008

Not surprisingly we focus our gardening gaze on the Bay area in particular and the Pacific states in general yet there is an enormous amount we can learn from this book written by a woman who spent her entire life living and gardening in North Carolina. Elizabeth Lawrence (1904-1985) published four books during her lifetime. Four more appeared posthumously. This one is the very last, a selection from the more than 700 columns she wrote for the Charlotte Observer until 1972.

The English garden writers such as Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville West are generally supposed to be the last word in horticultural writing but there are some who say that Elizabeth Lawrence more than matches them in skill and style. I tend to agree. I have been looking at other English garden writers of the mid 20th century and feel that Vita Sackville West “sucked up all the oxygen” very unjustly. Quite a few of her contemporaries were every bit as good. It was just that she radiated an enormous amount of glamour by dint of being an aristocrat and having a very unusual marriage.

By contrast, Elizabeth Lawrence’s life seemed very uneventful. She was a single woman who stayed at home and took care of her mother. Considering her background in the genteel middle class it was perhaps a little unexpected that she enrolled at the precursor of the North Carolina State College in the late 1920s and took a degree in landscape architecture. It turns out she was the first woman at that college to do this but she made no fuss about being a pioneer.

Her life can be followed through her letters. Miss Lawrence was devoted to many friends, some from her childhood and others she met through gardens and horticulture. She stayed in touch with them by frequent letters. Two of her newer friends were quite famous: Eudora Welty and Kathryn White from The New Yorker. (re: Mrs White, see the Gazette for December 2007).

Miss Lawrence grew up in Raleigh and learned to garden from her mother. In 1948 they moved to Charlotte and built a house on a vacant lot. In that new garden Miss Lawrence used all her professional skills. Her first book, A Southern Garden, appeared in 1942. It sold very many copies as did her subsequent ones.

She expressed a constant tension between the strictures of landscape design and the pull of individual plants which attracted her powerfully. Her books may have sprung from this creative tension. When her mother needed a lot of care during the last seven years of her life, Miss Lawrence could not find time for the long periods of quiet thought needed to produce new books so she turned to writing for the newspapers. The first column appeared in 1957.

Critics have all said she combined great technical knowledge with a flair for the English language. The key was a continuous wonder at the beauty of plants and her extreme joy in working with them. This compensated for whatever may have been lacking in her life.

Elizabeth Lawrence wrote her columns as the seasons changed but the editors have arranged the pieces in useful groupings such as “Perennials and Annuals”, “Trees, Shrubs and Vines”. There is one section headed “Seasonal Flowers”.

While she maintained a very attractive voice she was never saccharine. She could be sharp and even tart if necessary in a good cause. This is what she had to say about a certain variety of honey suckle: ” Nearly every garden in the South has a large ungainly Christmas honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima, that is dull at its best, shabby at its worst and never the least bit beautiful even when in full bloom.” Gardener be warned. This plant could not be compared with the witch hazels which flowered at the same time. It is the clearly personal tone which makes her columns worth reading, much as one might talk to a colleague. One can agree or disagree but the chat is never dull.

Copyright © Judith M. Taylor December 2007

Richard Gorer, 1913 – 1994, was born into a distinguished Jewish family. He was the youngest of three sons.

Figure: Richard Gorer in his greenhouse From the jacket of Hardy Foliage Plants, published by Collingridge 1962. Photographer unknown.

His mother Rachel, known affectionately as “Rée”, was an artist and sculptor. She was a close friend of Edith Sitwell, the eldest of the three Sitwell siblings, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell, who created so much of a stir in English artistic circles between the wars. Rachel met Edith Sitwell soon after the latter started to live in London by herself with her former governess as chaperone. Rachel was a student at the Slade School of Art.

Figure: Rachel Gorer, Richar Gorer’s mother Portrait by Pavel Tchelichew, 1927 Reproduced by permission The Tate Gallery, London

Moving into her own flat was a defiant gesture for Edith Sitwell in 1913, when “nice” girls always lived at home. It was an exceedingly modest apartment in an unfashionable part of town and she subsisted on an exiguous income, only being able to serve tea and buns at her literary parties, but she was independent of her overbearing father and self-absorbed mother. The money was her very own, and could not be taken away from her.

Even after Rachel Cohen married Edgar Gorer at the Hampstead Synagogue in 1905, and went to live in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, the friendship endured. Biographies of Edith Sitwell indicate that she entertained Mrs Gorer and much later she and Richard’s elder brother Geoffrey would go to pubs together.

Edith invited the Gorers to her literary teas. She introduced them all to the most important person in her mature life, Pawel Tchelichew, the painter. He painted the iconic portrait of the poet, but he also painted a portrait of Mrs Edgar Gorer and one of her sons, Richard. After their mother died, the Gorer sons donated Tchelichew’s portrait of Mrs Gorer to the Tate Gallery. Gorer’s niece, the daughter of his brother Peter, inherited the portrait of her uncle.

In general the Sitwells, like other people in their class, were not fond of Jews and preferred not to spend very much time with them. The Gorers must have had exactly the right tone to overcome this universal dislike. As far as is known they were not practicing Jews and were not active in the Jewish community, yet there was never any question about their identity. There is no evidence that Rachel helped Edith with money.

Quite recently I came across a woman whose father had worked for Richard Gorer in the 1930s and who was Richard’s god daughter. Her father Patrick was an Irishman and her mother was of Italian descent. Almost the first words of her note stated that it was odd for a Catholic child to have had a Jewish godfather. Religion and race were central.

Richard’s father, Edgar Ezekiel Gorer, ran a successful antique business. Its success was in large part due to his exquisite knowledge of Chinese porcelain. He frequently travelled to New York to visit his agent in New York at 500 Fifth Avenue, Dreicer and Co. In London his business was at 170 New Bond Street.

The business had been started by Gorer’s father Solomon in the 1880s but Edgar took it to new heights. Edgar Gorer wrote a monograph on Oriental porcelain which is still relevant.

He had the misfortune to be returning to London from New York on the “Lusitania” when it was sunk in 1915. Survivors’ reports describe his gallant behaviour in the face of certain death. He was only 43 years old.

Had he lived he would have brought an extraordinary lawsuit for half million dollars against the most prominent antique dealers in the world at the time, the Duveens. They had insinuated he defrauded a client over a piece of antique porcelain when in fact they had wanted to snare that customer themselves. He strenuously denied this accusation. It impugned his reputation and went right to the heart of his business but he died before he could do anything about it.

All three Gorer sons became expert in their fields. The eldest, Geoffrey, was famous as an anthropologist. The middle son, Peter, was a physician who did important research into the immune system very early. The department of immunology at Kings College Hospital Medical School in London is named for him. Had he lived he would have been a candidate for the Nobel Prize. It was awarded a year later to his laboratory associate.

Peter Gorer had laid down the biological basis of organ transplantation. He died at the age of 54 of a rapidly progressive lung cancer after smoking very heavily all his life. Peter Gorer is the only son who married and had any children. Both the others lived into their 80s.

Richard grew up in a very stimulating environment but probably had no clear memory of his father. As a child he was a day-boy at Westminster School. The well-known English novelist and writer Angus Wilson was in the same class and has left some stories about Richard. Richard showed him how to finesse the compulsory sports periods by volunteering for fencing class. They often went for tea and cakes to a local café and amused themselves by inventing histories and personalities for the customers they saw there.

Richard was disputatious and contrary in manner, but extremely clever. In her biography of Angus Wilson, Margaret Drabble, another well known novelist, suggested that a principal character in his famous novel, The Middle Age of Mrs Elliott, is based on Richard Gorer.

Figure: Richard Gorer, far left in the 2nd row from the back. when he graduated from Kings College, Cambridge in 1934. Alan Turing is in the front row, 2nd from the right. Photograph reproduced by permission, Kings College, Cambridge. Photographer unknown.

Richard lived with his mother first in Hampstead, and later in Highgate. The houses had large gardens. Such a childhood can have a strong influence on later choices. In 1931 he went up to Kings’ College Cambridge, the same college as his brother Geoffrey. One of his classmates was Alan Turing, hero of Bletchley Park and pioneer of the self programming computer. It says something about the Gorer family that they could send their son to Cambridge during the depths of the Depression.

Kings College had a great tradition of famous graduates, going back to Sir Isaac Newton and John Milton. In the inter-war period of the twentieth century, undergraduates were affected by the poverty and distress in Great Britain and Europe. They witnessed the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and the Spanish Civil War. In order to make a statement it was not unusual for some of them to join the Communist Party or at least to become sympathetic observers.

The “Comintern” (Communist Party International) created its “sleeper” groups then, activating them many years later. A small group of exceptional students were in the Apostles, a more or less secret society of intellectuals which increased its membership entirely by invitation. One could not apply to join.

This slight digression about the college is important in understanding what life as an undergraduate in Cambridge was like in the early 1930s. It was almost impossible to avoid taking some sort of political stand but it appears that Richard Gorer stuck close to his work and stayed away from politics.

The college register indicates that Gorer went up to read both music and horticulture, which presumably would have included botany, as an undergraduate. Mixing science with the arts for the tripos was uncommon. Music was his principal course of study. The alumni records list him as a musician, nevertheless he seems to have absorbed botany and horticulture somehow.

The music department had a long and distinguished history. The chair was the earliest to be founded, dating from 1684. Among the previous incumbents were William Sterndale Bennett, a noted nineteenth century British composer who was eclipsed by the Continental geniuses, and Charle Villiers Stanford, another solid British composer.

The professor and chairman of the department when Gorer was up was a Fellow of Kings College, Edward Dent, 1876 – 1957. He was a well-known scholar and critic and ran the department from 1926 to 1941.

Dent was a close friend of E. M. Forster. He wrote several influential books such as a biography of Mozart and one of Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico’s father. Another of Dent’s friends, Sacheverell Sitwell, wrote the first modern biography of Domenico Scarlatti at the behest of Violet Woodhouse, the clavichordist. Mrs Woodhouse played Scarlatti at her intimate drawing room recitals long before he was popular or fashionable. The Sitwells were her ardent devotees and Richard Gorer went to hear her play occasionally.

Natural science was in a ferment at Cambridge in the 1930s. Botany went a long way back, to John Ray in the 17th century, a clergyman-scholar who is considered to be the first truly modern botanist. By the 1930s, new discoveries in physics, chemistry, biochemistry, genetics and neuro-physiology emerged in rapid succession. Joseph and Dorothy Needham, Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, and E. D. Adrian (later Lord Adrian) created a lot of excitement and inspired generations of scholars.

G. E. Briggs was professor and chairman of botany at Cambridge in the 1930s. He was a noted plant physiologist and surrounded himself with other expert physiologists. Rigorous techniques of chemistry and physics were being used to explain natural phenomena, changing biology from a descriptive science to one based on fundamental facts. Only in this way could true progress be made in understanding how life worked.

Briggs had a powerful influence on his students. He was a “kingmaker”. John Stewart Turner, demonstrator in the department from 1934 to 1938, left to take the chair of botany in Melbourne, The Australian Rutherford Ness Robertson, (later knighted) was a graduate student at Cambridge and returned to Australia to take the chair at Sydney.

With such teachers Richard Gorer’s attitude to scholarship was set for life. The topic would matter less than the way in which he would approach it. His family also commented on his tenacious memory, a major asset.

After going down Richard Gorer was soon deep in London’s artistic circles. Michael Ayrton, a painter with a strongly marked personal style, introduced him to Humphrey Searle, the composer. They remained friends for the rest of their lives. Gorer was best man at both Searle’s weddings. When Searle took up a post at the B.B.C., Gorer also worked there for a time. He created new programmes and immersed himself in various composers, some very obscure from the 18th century and others much more modern.

His erudition was recognized. Eric Blom, the famous editor of Groves’ Dictionary of Music and Musicians, asked him to write several of the entries for the 5th edition. At the time contributors did not sign their articles but Gorer wrote about the Czech composer Fibich and possibly others. He also contributed to The Heritage of Music and The Great Musicians.

Richard and his brothers kept in touch with Edith Sitwell. She sent him a copy of one her new volumes of poems when it appeared in 1962, inscribed to “Darling Richard, with love, Edith”. This volume was found in his library at his death.

Figure: Edith Sitwell’s inscription to Richard Gorer in a new book of poems 1962 Reproduced by permission of Kings College, Cambridge

I kept expecting Gorer and his circle to be the basis of characters in Anthony Powell’s huge A Dance to the Music of Time but have not been able to identify them unequivocally. Friends of theirs such as Constant Lambert appear in starring roles. I have a feeling Powell and Gorer’s paths may have crossed, yet when I asked Michael Barber, author of an excellent biography of Powell, he had not come across Gorer’s name.

The Second World War began when Gorer was 26 years old. He did not fight in it, probably because of a minor medical disability. He made his contribution by market gardening in Kent. With his powerful intellectual background he may also have been tapped for other, more clandestine services, but this is entirely conjecture. His school friend Angus Wilson worked at Bletchley Park.

At some point Gorer moved away from music as a full time activity and went into horticulture. The reason for this transition is not known. It could have had something to do with his brother Geoffrey. In 1950 Geoffrey bought Sunte House, a small seventeenth century manor in Haywards Heath, Sussex and devoted himself to its garden.

Geoffrey was very interested in gardening and this could have been part of the motive for his brother. Geoffrey was an active member of the Royal Horticultural Society, attending its meetings very regularly. Quite frequently, he, Richard and their niece went to the shows together.

Some years later, Richard noticed a spontaneous hybrid of Abutilon in his brother’s garden. Christopher Brickell named it A.’Suntensis’ and it is still a popular shrub.

I have had the great privilege of corresponding with a close relative, but neither she nor her mother can tell me why Richard switched to horticulture. Other persons who knew him are also at a loss. I assume it is connected with his meeting one or more influential people who affected his thinking beside his brother Geoffrey.

One of these was John Hooper Harvey, an architect-historian who wrote prolifically about England’s architectural heritage and as a by-product, its landscape and garden history. Harvey was so thorough that his work led him to search the old nursery catalogues for evidence of what was available to the gardener in the period he covered. It also led him to be one of the founders of the Garden History Society.

Gorer and Harvey wrote several articles together, examining such topics as the diappearance of Lonicera x Americana, or the mysteries of Lord Anson’s pea in exquisite detail. These papers appeared very late in their lives, 1990 and 1991. Gorer died in 1994 and Harvey in 1997. These were not journeyman efforts but were written when both men were mature experts. The Somerset historian Michael McGarvie helped me with this connection between Gorer and Harvey.

Harvey had not been able to afford a university education but had been apprenticed first to his father, an inspector for the Ancient Monuments Board, and later to Sir Herbert Baker. He was devoted to the mediaeval period and considered all other architecture to be a very poor second in style. Few academics could match Harvey’s phenomenal output of scholarly works.

Such a man, with a powerful personality and huge drive, could well affect someone who was looking for a path to follow. Where or how they met is a puzzle as Harvey was not part of the inner circle of university men and lived way up north in York all his life. Gorer always lived in the South of England. Presumably Gorer had already taken the first step into the world of garden history and horticulture before he came across Harvey.

Another person with whom Gorer was friendly was Thomas Rochford III, owner of Rochford’s nurseries in Turnford in Hertfordshire. Rochford also had a strong personality. His family had been in the nursery business for two generations. His father had pioneered the development and distribution of indoor plants, or house-plants as they became known. He created several innovations which made them available all year round, and as a result changed the attitude of the public.

Garden space shrank as towns grew more congested and land more valuable yet people still wanted something green and fresh in their lives. What better than a plant which grew right in your living room? Rochford’s ideas took him way past the outmoded and almost comic aspidistras of popular renown.

At the nursery, house-plants were affectionately known as “Tom’s weeds”. In 1961, Gorer and Rochford put out a useful book on the care of these plants: The Rochford Book of House plants. Tom’s son Thomas Rochford IV, now a professor of computer science at a college in Cambridge, remembers Gorer as a figure from his early life. The children called him somewhat irreverently “Old Weedy” because of his proclivity for growing his treasures among weeds in odd patches of his garden.

They were in awe of his knowledge but found it hard to get him to talk about anything other than plants. His niece also commented on that aspect of his personality. They were not aware of his previous musical career. Some of his authority came from having seen the house-plants, which were tender and had to be coddled a bit, in their native habitat.

Dr Rochford recalls that Gorer had interesting modern paintings on his walls, in particular, two by the modernist Francis Bacon. These valuable possessions contrasted with the extremely messy house which Gorer inhabited. He also knew that Gorer was very interested in the great essayist Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, and very knowledgable about Gorhambury, Lord Verulam’s estate. His interest led him to write about the rockery at Gorhambury with John Harvey.

Rochford thought there could have been a nexus in Gorer’s mind about the two Francis Bacons, with possibly occult overtones. The modern painter was a distant, collateral descendant of Lord Verulam. He led what might be called a very “rackety “ life, but in spite of that lived to be 83. Gorer had avant garde artistic friends in London, both before and after he was at Cambridge, possibly influenced by his mother.

Bacon reached London in 1934, soon after Gorer came down. They were roughly contemporaries in age.

Richard Gorer wrote the following books:

• The Rochford Book of House-plants, co-author Thomas Rochford 1961
• Rochford’s Book of Flowering Pot-plants, co-author Thomas Rochford 1966
• Hardy Foliage Plants 1966
• Climbing Plants 1968
• Rochford’s House-plants for Everyone, co-author Thomas Rochford 1969
• The Development of Garden Flowers 1970
• Multi-Season Shrubs and Trees 1972
• Living Tradition in the Garden 1974
• The Flower Garden in England 1975
• Choosing Your Garden Plants 1975
• Trees and Shrubs: a complete guide 1976
• Quick Growing Shrubs 1976
• The Growth of Gardens 1978
• Growing Plants from Seeds 1978
• Illustrated Guide To Trees 1980
• Garden Flowers From Seed: an illustrated dictionary 1981
• The Collingridge Handbook of Hardy Foliage Plants 1983
• Fruit and Vegetables from Seeds: an illustrated dictionary 1984

(This list was compiled with the help of C.J.Wisdom at the Lindley Library, Royal Horticultural Society)

Gorer also edited Edith Holden’s hand-written diary about wild flowers in the countryside near her home. She illustrated it with water colour sketches of those flowers. This work, published as The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, became very successful. More people know of Richard Gorer because of this book than from any other source.

Regardless of whether any particular book was a work of extreme originality or not, the books listed above form a very impressive output for anyone. Some of his books were tightly controlled on a high intellectual plane. There is a cerebral quality to his writing, based more on what he has read than on what he was growing. Other books were re-working of previous material. Few could ever be called a “potboiler”. The Garden Book Club would not have approached him if his work had been shoddy in any way.

The index book for me was The Development of Garden Flowers, published in 1970. He laid out in minute but fascinating detail the work of great hybridizers such as Victor Lemoine. It was a revelation. I had never heard of Lemoine nor had I given any thought to this aspect of horticulture’s history. It sent me in many different directions at once.

I wanted to know how Gorer had come to look into this and then how he found it all out. I wanted to know more about Lemoine and his colleagues and it made me consider writing a book about the importance of plant breeding in the rise of modern horticulture. A few diehards prefer to grow species plants but the majority of gardeners depend on hybrids because of their superior qualities.

The way in which Gorer dug out tiny but crucial detail in horticulture was the same impulse which had driven his study of obscure Continental composers. It was a facet of his personality which expressed itself no matter what the subject matter was.

Along the way Gorer had become a fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society. The Lindley Library contains almost all the seminal works in horticulture, such as complete runs of all the journals from their inception and all the monographs as they appeared. Its riches are such that one could disappear into this library and never come out again. I have the impression that Gorer immersed himself in it all, building up his knowledge bit by bit until he began to share it with the world in the form of books. The Development of Garden Flowers, The Growth of Gardens, The English Flower Garden, and possibly Living Tradition in the Garden are the results of this research.

The Flower Garden in England covers early English gardens in great depth, and equates their development with the arrival of new plants over the years. Once one knows about Gorer’s association with John Harvey, one can see the latter’s influence at work.

In The Growth of Gardens, Gorer laid out the trajectory of plants from all around the world and how they influenced English gardening. This too is a topic which I have found deeply interesting and has engaged me for some time.

Living Tradition in the Garden is a wonderfully idiosyncratic work in which Gorer parades his prejudices, getting a few licks in against the icons of modern garden design such as Vita Sackville- West. His term for the creators of Hidcote and Sissinghurst was “exterior upholsterers”.

Although he was such a sophisticate, Gorer left London and settled in various small towns thoughout Kent and Sussex over the years. The first foray into country living was in 1936, very soon after coming down from Cambridge. He bought a market garden near Maidstone and employed Samuel (”Patrick/Paddy”) Ross as his manager. Part of the impetus for this might have been the “back to the earth” movement of the 1930s but he took his very close friend Billie Ledger with him. The market garden gave him cover.

Figure: a) Richard Gorer in Maidstone’s High Street with friends. Gorer is on the far left. 1937. b) Richard Gorer with “Paddy” Ross in the garden. 1933. Reproduced by permission, Mrs. Ann Manno. Photographer unknown.

Mrs Manno, Patrick’s daughter, recalls the unbelievably untidy cottage they inhabited. He and Patrick locked horns over the best way to deal with a market garden. Patrick was a gardener. Richard was a cerebral townie.

He finally retired to a cottage in East Sussex where he lived alone and died at the age of 83. Some of his neighbours remember his garden and how cordial he could be. Miss Marriott, who lived up the street, recalls him taking his dog for walks and being very friendly. His family also told me how easily he made friends with all sorts of people.

He was often asked to be a judge at local flower shows and was said to be very strict in his judging, surprising the community. This was important for him, maintaining standards as high as possible. Gorer did not confuse friendliness with sloppiness.

The house was modest but he had a substantial garden which he kept up for a long time. Susan Pask, who bought the house from his estate, recalls catalogues from speciality nurseries continuing to arrive in the mail for months after she moved in. The garden had been neglected toward the end of his life but she told me there were remnants of wonderful plants among the weeds.

Figure: Various views of Richard Gorer’s cottage and garden in East Sussex. Reproduced by permission Sarah Pask. Photographer unknown.

Gorer collected books about music and horticulture. He bequeathed his personal library to Kings College, Cambridge where they are now held in the Special Collections department.

In spite of finding out some significant details about his life my feeling is that Richard Gorer remains an enigma. This was partly due to the fact that he was gay in a period when it still a crime. He may have felt that moving to small country places was a way to reduce attention to his way of life. That was probably a delusion, as eyes in the country are far more prying than those in a large city.

Gorer had friends who were gay and knew many others casually. One quite close friend, but probably not lover, was Jocelyn Brooke the poet and novelist who was passionately involved in finding wild orchids. Jonathan Hunt is writing a biography of Brooke and visited Gorer in 1988 to ask him some questions. Jonathan was kind enough to let me see the correspondence he and Gorer had after that visit. By then Gorer was less wary and commented on their friendship and Brooke’s way of life fairly honestly. He did not think that Brooke was a very methodical botanist.

Jonathan‘ s report on Gorer’s household confirmed what Ann Manno had observed all those years before. Gorer was very helpful and put himself out quite considerably for Jonathan but one thing he had not done was tidy up the living room or kitchen!

One last comment is that there is a good likelihood that his brother Geoffrey Gorer was also gay. Geoffrey never married although he made a highly publicized offer to Margaret Mead.

If there is a genetic basis for homosexuality it is supported by the Gorer family history. The same could be said for Angus Wilson. He was the youngest of six brothers. of whom three were gay.

Gorer had a double social burden. He was gay and he was Jewish when neither affiliation was favourable. This may be why there was no obituary in obvious places like The Times. The Royal Horticultural Society had no record of when he died nor was there any obituary in their publications. He simply slipped away out of sight.

Acknowledgements
The following people were extremely kind and generous. I am indebted to them.

Rachel Gorer Gross niece Mrs Peter Gorer sister in law Thomas Rochford IV family friend Dr Christopher Brickell horticultural writer Suzanne Creighton secretary, Peter Gorer Department of Immunobiology at Guy’s
Hospital Michael McGarvie Somerset county historian Ann Manno goddaughter Charles Quest-Ritson horticultural writer Dennis Toff genealogist Patricia McGuire, archivist, King’s College, Cambridge Jonathan Hunt biographer Michael Barber biographer Susan Pask owner of Richard Gorer’s cottage

Copyright © Judith M. Taylor MD July 2007

This article published in American Primrose Society Journal Fall 2005

In 1871, at the age of twenty five, Hall successfully completed the topographical survey for the proposed Golden Gate Park after submitting the lowest bid. (Figures 1 and 1A ) He then designed a classical park without ever having learned a thing about landscape architecture, became the park’s first Engineer and Superintendent and built the most important segments of the park’s structure over the next five years before being hounded out of office by trumped-up charges of negligence and conflict of interest. (Beatty; Clary; Hudson) What happened?

Achievements on this scale should have been commemorated, but there is no memorial to William Hammond Hall in Golden Gate Park today. Only the gardeners, who were feeling very disgruntled about twenty years ago, remember his name. They call themselves the “William Hammond Hall Society”.

The city of San Francisco had considered building a public park as early as 1852. Mayor McCoppin had his eye on a large uninhabited section to the west of the city. It is hard to realize that in 1860, the future site of Golden Gate Park was a howling desert, with blowing sand and almost no vegetation, a totally unpromising place to construct a park. (Figures 2, 3, 4 and 5) Known as the “Outside Lands”, this region had been in contention between the city and the Federal government since California became a state.

After considerable political manoeuvering, the city secured legal title to these lands. They wanted to build the park there to make sure they never lost this title. The city had consulted Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s. He told them it was an impossible site, and suggested they choose land in the eastern half of the city. Because of their political agenda they disregarded his advice.There were struggles with squatters on the Outside Lands, but in 1870, Order 800 was signed by Governor Haight and the park could go forward.The city solicited bids for a topographical survey.

William Hammond Hall’s education sheds only a little light on his future career. The Halls came to San Francisco from Hagerstown, Maryland in 1853, when William was seven years old. His father was a successful lawyer, legal counsel to Charles Weber, founder of Stockton. John Hall supported his son until he was about thirty years old. The correspondence in the Bancroft Library reveals an anxious son desperate for his father’s approval. (Jones; Margaret Buchanan Hall; William Hammond Hall papers)

He attended a private Episcopal academy in Stockton for seven years and was supposed to enter West Point as a cadet. The Civil War ended those plans. Instead, he was apprenticed to Colonel R. S. Williamson of the US Army Corps of Engineers, working as a “computer” and draughtsman. Gradually he worked his way up and gained experience in many spheres of surveying all over the Pacific coast. Watching General Barton S. Alexander cope with blowing sand while developing fortifications would turn out to be very useful. The general knew that England and the Netherlands had developed defences against the incursions of the sea over centuries. Hall benefited from the General’s studies of antique English and Dutch literature. When the challenge of Golden Gate Park came Hall was ready, with one exception: he knew almost nothing about landscape architecture.

William Hammond Hall was said to be “brilliant, idealistic and irascible”. (Young) This guaranteed he would make enemies. He was very keenly aware of how the world worked. His letters describe numerous efforts to promote himself by currying favour with rich and influential people. His father’s civic and political connections were important and one of his uncles held high office in the state.

None of this played a part in his submitting the lowest bid, $4860, nor in being awarded the contract, but there is no doubt he was in an excellent position to know about the contest extremely early and have an opportunity to think about the solutions. It came at a time he was between jobs and casting about for a way to earn money and distinguish himself, so he could marry his favorite cousin Emma “Katie” McHugh. (Papers of William Hammond Hall)

At this point it may be appropriate to try to place Hall in some larger context of great American landscape designers and architects. The answer is that he was a lonely figure, rising to a specific occasion with genius, but remaining a quintessential outsider.

Landscape architecture

Frederick Law Olmsted and his disciples established the profession in the United States. The great man generously recognized Hall’s accomplishment and commended him for it in a letter Hall cherished all his life, (papers of William Hammond Hall) but once the park was finished William Hammond Hall returned to civil engineering and never did any landscape design again. This does not mean we cannot learn from his work or that his solutions to the problems of terrain and climate are irrelevant. Controlling the shifting sands, first with shrub lupine, and later with beach grasses, would be triumph enough. (Figure 6) His successors built upon these foundations continually. He himself always worked to defend the park’s open lands, and fought off many later attempts to subvert them. (Jones)

To overcome his deficiency in landscape architecture and horticulture he bought many books on these subjects during his tenure as superintendent of the park. What was available in the 1870s? There were monographs and treatises by eighteenth and early nineteeenth century landscape architects such as Humphrey Repton as well as texts from France and Germany. We are fortunate in being able to find out exactly what books he chose.

Among Hall’s papers in the Bancroft Library, I found copies of two letters he sent to booksellers in New York and Philadelphia, requesting particular volumes. (Figure 7) He requested the following:

Alphand Promenades de Paris number 38

Hughes Gardening Architecture

Piebreck Picturesque Garden Plans

Robinson Parks and Pleasure Grounds

Robinson Gleanings from French Gardens

Moisy Fountains (sic) de Paris

Repton Landscape Gardening

Loudon Encyclopaedia of Gardening

Kemp How to Lay Out a Garden

Copies of other letters show he would also ask people if they could recommend any useful books on these subjects. (Figure 8) (Papers of William Hammond Hall)

The speed with which he read and acted on their content is staggering. Maybe the most profound influence on his choice of style was that of “Capability” Brown. Hall later recognized that the topography, climate and other requirements of the Pacific coast would need a different school of landscape architecture from the ones which had served well in Europe and the eastern states of North America, but his immediate goal was to create a “wild, woodland park”. He had to use whatever ad hoc methods he could devise. (Reports to the Board of Park Commissioners)

Golden Gate Park

How did he approach the problems of the new park? He attacked the entire project with supreme confidence. This was no puny undertaking. Thousands of tons of earth had to be moved. Grassy lawns were required where sand dunes undulated. The model of Olmsted and Vaux’s Central Park in New York was clearly an inspiration to him, down to the flow of traffic and placing of trees.

One marvels at the sure-footed way he proceeded, with knowledge only recently acquired from books. To name only one detail, he understood that an historic place like this needed imposing entries. Birkenhead Park near Liverpool announced its significance in this manner. (Figure 9) Hall built an elaborate entrance gate to his park.

During the survey, he had discovered that two hundred and seventy acres of the thousand acre lot were surprisingly fertile, with small oak trees, shrubs, lupines and strawberry plants growing quite successfully: “….this portion may at once be converted into an attractive resort. The remaining seven hundred and thirty acres, stretching down to the ocean beach, is a waste of drifting sand.” (Reports to the Board of Park Commissioners) The soil in the area east of 14th Avenue was a dark sandy loam, with excellent natural drainage. There were no marshes or stagnant pools and many small underground streams provided the park with plenty of water. In addition Hall found eight small lakes surrounded by willow trees.

Hall began with this relatively fertile section, the Panhandle. Almost at once he revealed his acute understanding of what later became known as ecology. The park needed an enormous number of trees to stabilize the soil, to act as wind breaks in the cold foggy climate and for aesthetic purposes. He had started a nursery very early and planted out innumerable saplings of blue gum eucalyptus, Monterey pine and Monterey cypress in the Panhandle.

Each sapling was planted in the shade of the native scrub oaks. This protected the infant plants until the new trees were sturdy enough to stand up to the powerful winds off the ocean. A letter sent to his deputy during a brief absence emphasizes his philosophy of leaving every piece of pre-existing growth in place, no matter how unattractive or scrubby it may have seemed. (Papers of William Hammond Hall) (Figure 10)

Two long drives were constructed from east to west, one along the northern boundary of the park and the other along the southern edge. (Figure) He wanted grand sweeping meadows with curving vistas between them, rather than straight stiff lines of trees. This would not only please the eye but discourage people from driving through the park too fast. “Planting straight rows of trees would be cutting off one side completely from the other, destroying all charm of vistas and landscapes laid open by the other method.. ..the disposition of curving walks adds greatly to the apparent extent of the park in the passing from one pleasure ground to the other without a road for a visible driving line….”. (Reports to the Board of Park Commissioners)

Other ideas could not be carried out. Hall wanted to put some of the roads at a lower level, just as had been done in Central Park, but this was only partially completed.The budget was always tight. Once he had laid out the Panhandle, he could concentrate on the sand dunes. A big problem was that plants which should have taken hold could not survive long enough to put down strong roots. By accident he learned that soaking wet barley seeds would give the shrub lupines he planted time to get rooted. The barley, which had been spilled from a nose bag by a dray horse, germinated a few days later, supplying a nidus for other seeds. He immediately reproduced these conditions on a large scale, and brought in thousands of tone of manure, topsoil and other organic matter to enrich the sandy soil. (Jones) Subsequently he found that beach grasses also stabilized the soil.

By 1876, the park was more or less completed. It extended to the place where the Conservatory now stands. The public recognized its beauty and function. Six hundred people visited the park daily, and twice that number at weekends. Hall might have continued on successfully but for the machinations of one Daniel Sullivan, a blacksmith he had to dismiss for padding his bills. This man was unfortunately elected to the state assembly and one of his first actions was to get even with Hall. (Clary)

Bogus charges of stealing park property for his personal use, cutting down trees unnecessarily and wasting water were advanced. Hall and his supervisors defended themselves vigorously. While everyone realized there was no merit in the case, his salary was halved and he was essentially forced to resign. Sullivan made sure the bonds to pay for the park were blocked in Sacramento. Finally, all three commissioners resigned too. Not so subtle political messages were embedded in Hall’s defeat. His family was from Maryland,with important southern connections, and San Francisco had championed the Union side in the Civil War. These wounds were still raw.

Vengeance for his unfair treatment probably lay behind his fleecing of San Francisco twenty years later. Hall had always had an eye out for the main chance, and was not quite so naive financially as his daughters thought in their well-meaningapologia for him. He knew that the lands in the Tuolumne watershed would one day become very valuable for their water. (Clary) Hall bought two parcels in the Cherry Creek area in 1900 for $165,000. When the city needed his land for the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, he demanded $1,000,000. The city leaders were irate, but he held firm, only selling the land for $800,000 in the end. Hall died in 1934 and has been forgotten. No doubt his later actions did not endear him to official San Francisco, but one always hates a person whom one has wronged.

This article published in The Argonaut: Journal of the San Francisco Historical Society 14 (2) 70 Winter 2004

Sources

Very little has been printed about William Hammond Hall, but anyone wishing to learn more about him can read the following:

Beatty, Russell A 1970 “Metamorphosis in sand” Calif. Hort. J. 31 (2) 41-47

Clary, Raymond H 1987 The Making of Golden Gate Park: the early years 1865 to 1906 San Francisco, California Don’t Call It Frisco Press

Deblinger, Larry San Francisco Examiner, August 27, 1989 Weekly column on the environment

Hudson, Roy L 1970 “Brief history of Golden Gate Park” 31 (2) 38-41

Jones, Mary Ellen “William Hammond Hall: an engineer with vision” Bancroftiana no. 96, May 1988 10-12

Reports to the Board of Park Commissioners by William Hammond Hall, Engineer and Superintendent of the Park 1871 -1876

“The Development of Golden Gate Park and particularly the management and thinning of its forest tree plantations: a statement from the Board of Park Commissioners, together with Wlliam Hammond Hall, Frederick Law Olmsted and John McLaren” 1886 San Francisco Bacon and Co.

Academic thesis

Young, Terence George 1991 “Nature and Moral Order: the cultural significance of Golden Gate Park”, submitted to satisfy the requirements for a master’s degree at the University of California at Los Angeles (Helen Crocker Russell Library)

Manuscript sources

Hall, Katherine Buchanan 1957 Biographical sketch of her father William Hammond Hall, handwritten (Strybing Arboretum, Helen Crocker Russell library)

William Hammond Hall papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (BANC Mss: 86/152 c)

Harry M Butterfield, extensison horticulturist at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1921 to 1967 collected voluminous amounts of information about California’s horticultural history.³

One illustrative story concerns the Gillepsies, Charles and Sarah. They came to San Francisco in 1848 on the clipper “Eagle” from Canton, where they had been missionaries. Sarah Gillespie was an inspired gardener. In a very short time they had a house in Chestnut Street. In 1853, she entered a few passion flowers in the flower show promoted by Colonel J.L.L.Warren, the state’s first professional nurseryman. The following year she exhibited numerous varieties of fuchsia, calceolaria and other flowers. In addition to these achievments, Butterfield credited her with being the first person to grow seedling acacia trees in California, using Australian seed she brought with her from China.

Men who made money directly or indirectly from the gold amd silver mines wanted to spend it in highly visible ways. The desire to show off was irresistible for someone who grew up on an impoverished farm in New England or a potato patch in Ireland. A grand mansion with a garden to match was just the ticket..

The means to do this appeared simultaneously. Contractors appeared like mushrooms and nurserymen arrived by the dozen to oblige the clients. The trade began slowly enough but before too long there were flourishing nurseries in the city, the towns of the East bay and down in the peninsula. By about 1870, San Francisco had matured into a city and was no longer an unmodified hell’s kitchen.

Such a city needed all the trades and professions associated with normal existence. Families with small children began to move there. Residential districts for the middle class appeared. The very rich still lived in their gaudy palaces. Huge conservatories with rare hothouse plants still defined luxury, but grocers and schoolteachers enjoyed their smaller gardens and backyards just as much.

We know something about the charm and pleasure of those more modest properties from the pamphlet compiled by members of the San Francisco Garden Club in 1935, the Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens.⁴ (Figure 1 Cover of the Vignettes ) The club had been started in 1926 by a group of civic minded men and women.

Mrs William Hinckley Taylor convened the inaugural meeting at her residence, 2550 Broadway, on April 26. She had some powerful allies. Herbert Fleishhacker was elected Vice President, and Wiiliam H Crocker became Treasurer. Other wealthy and socially prominent women made up the rest of the fledgling board. They persuaded the legendary superintendent of the Golden Gate Park, John McLaren, to be the honorary chairman. The club’s mission was “.. the beautifying of the City of San Francisco and the banding together of those who are fond of gardens and flowers.”

The club’s first self imposed task was supplying trash baskets for the park. The San Francisco Garden Club has remained an independent organization till the present, and is not affiliated with any other garden clubs in California or the the rest of the United States.

Nine years later, in 1935, the club presented a program at which the older members shared memories of their families’ gardens. This meeting was the genesis of the Vignettes. Mrs Silas H. Palmer compiled the material and Mrs E. E. Brownell read it.

There were nine chapters in the unpaginated pamphlet when it was later published. There are thirty two pages of text in the modern five by six and half inch reprint given to every new member of the club.

Mrs Palmer was born Olive Holbrock in 1878, a native of San Francisco. She married Silas Palmer in 1903 and they lived on a great estate in Atherton, with handsome formal gardens. Mrs Palmer did not provide an introduction or foreword to explain why the members chose to preserve their memories at that time. The San Francisco Garden Club published three other similar pamphlets describing old gardens in San Jose, the East Bay and Marin. Maybe they felt obscurely that 1935 was a watershed year after coming through the Depression and seeing the confused state of world affairs, The physical remnants of the old gardens had largely been destroyed by then.

It is hard to know where to start in sampling the riches contained in this fragile volume. Perhaps it is best to begin at the beginning. Anna Wheaton Beaver reached further back into the city’s history than any one else in the club. She was born in San Francisco in 1853. Her parents George and Mary Beaver came from Pennsylvania for their honeymoon in 1852. (Figure 4 Mrs George Beaver, Anna Beaver’s mother) George Beaver worked for James Patrick and Co.

Anna Beaver never married. She died at her home, 1940 Broadway, in 1937, at the age of eighty five. Miss Beaver presided over the San Francisco Ladies Protection and Relief Society for more than fifty years. She was one of the founders of the San Francisco Symphony Club, the Opera Club, and the California Historical Society. Clearly she survived the great earthquake and fire. The Garden Club was another of her activities.

Her recollections went back to the 1850s, when her parents bought a well known house on Market Street, between Fifth and Sixth Streets. This house did in fact have a conservatory where the men went to smoke cigars after dinner and the children played on the floor but its contents were quite modest. Potted cyclamen, cinererias, calceolarias and primroses adorned shelves specially constructed for them. The piece de resistance was a marble fountain.

Outdoors, their garden was in two sections, both surrounded by a high fence. Pink mallows bordered a large grass plot (”never called a lawn”) in the back. Her mother had the first croquet set in San Francisco. Anna remembered the scent of star jessamine and heliotrope growing at the side of the house, a glorious wisteria, a tasseled red fuchsia. and too many roses to recount.

Alice Hooper McKee had grown up on Rincon Hill in the 1870s. She was much younger than Anna Beaver, born in 1873. Her parents, John and Mary Hooper, came from Maine. Alice Hooper married Allen McKee MD, an eye specialist. Looking back to her childhood from 1935 she thought that the American sector of the city already had a settled and mature look. Large trees and well maintained gardens gave her this impression. The Hooper garden was clearly delightful. It too contained fuchsias, but Alice was fascinated by a cactus which seemed to climb over a fence and brought forth white bell- like flowers every spring.

Another member of Mrs Mckee’s generation, Evelyn Norwood Breeze, said that “my grandmother’s garden is firmly fixed in my memory”. Her grandmother was Mrs John Hooper. We do not know if Evelyn was related to Alice McKee. The garden was at 557 Harrison Street, at the corner of Stanley Place.

The front garden consisted of lawns and many century plants (Agave) which were quite rare in those days. From the front one went back through a side garden to the rear where there were flower and vegetable beds. A laurestina hedge separated the two. On the other side of the house her grandmother had a “rockery” protected from the wind by a tall glass screen. There Mrs Hooper grew ferns and vines she had brought back from her visit to Trinidad in Humboldt County years before. This visit had left a very deep impression. She talked a great deal about the flowers and trees she had seen growing in that northern port.

Samuel Pond, 1872 -1954, was the only man invited to give his reminiscences. He chose to describe Nob Hill in the 1870s, and considered the houses of the “Big Four” more than the gardens. Gardens were “set back from the street, with sloping lawns and shrubbery adjacent to the house. Few annuals or perennials were planted”.

A great grand daughter of Robert Woodward, Ethel Malone Brown, 1914 to 1983, gave a loving description of the famous Woodward’s Gardens. These were public pleasure gounds on two blocks of Mission Street, at 13th and 14th Streets. (Figure 5 Woodward’s Gardens)

The project began almost accidentally. In 1866 a charitable organization requested Mr Woodward’s permission to use his elegant private grounds to hold a benefit for the veterans of the Civil War. Once the public had seen how handsome this garden was, they began to wander in quite uninvited at all hours. One of his daughters expressed outrage. “We might as well be a public pleasure ground” she huffed. Building on this thought Robert Woodward created a public garden for all and sundry as a business in 1868.

Mr Woodward wanted his gardens to be educational as well as diverting. He started out with a museum in which an eccenric old German taxidermist, Herr Gruber, held sway. The gardens were furnished with rare and exotic plants. Palm trees sat side by side with orchids and pitcher plants. Later more extravagant landscaping was designed by Boninge, Woodward’s former gardener who made his own fortune in silver.

The gardens lasted until the 1880s. Woodward died in 1879 but the more serious threat to the garden’s popularity was the rise of Golden Gate Park and other more raucous forms of entertainment.

Veronica Kinzie furnished two sets of recollections for the pamphlet. Mrs Robert A Kinzie, 1878 -1972, was a sister in law of Mrs Silas Palmer, the compiler of the Vignettes. Her first contribution covered Mayor James Phelan’s San Francisco garden, totally destroyed in the 1906 fire. (Figure 6 Mayor James Phelan) She tracked down significant details about the structure and planting of the garden.

Phelan had bought his house on Valencia and 17th Streets in 1875 for $53000 from the former mayor, James McCoppin. There were sweeping lawns along the wide carriage drive and a high cypress hedge enclosed the whole place. Mrs McCoppin had planted numerous roses and Phelan maintained the rose garden very carefully. Moss roses, “Marechal Ney”, Tea roses and a fine “Black Prince” were among the most cherished of the bushes. Heliotrope, all types of lilac and fuchsia abounded. The greenhouse was filled with cutting flowers. An orchard contained cherry trees, an espaliered fig tree and many other prize varieties of fruit. Perhaps the most striking feature of the garden was an enormous old weeping willow tree which fascinated people travelling by in the street car.

This rich and complex garden dated back to the early 1850s when McCoppin was mayor. He had the vision to know that the city needed the Golden Gate Park. He also saw to it that the four smaller lots on which parks stand today were safeguarded in perpetuity: a true public servant

The memory of a grandmother’s garden forms the core of Sophia Pierce Brownell’s essay. Mrs Edward Erle Brownell, 1879 -1976, recalled her grandmother, dressed in a long camel hair shawl and black straw bonnet, fiercely trimming shrubs and bushes while the gardener hovered on one side and a nurse tried to get her to rest on the other. She was said to be a “semi-invalid”, that wonderful Victorian catch-all phrase for anything or nothing.

The garden was at 1730 Jackson Street, and ran between Jackson and Pacific Avenue at Franklin Avenue. Carriages entered by this lower gate, surrounded by hydrangeas, helianthus, coreopsis, lavender, Matilija poppies, gypsophila, forget-me-nots and scilla in season. Many roses climbed over a fence, Testouts, Reine Marie Henriette and Hermosa. At one time there had been a cypress hedege instead of a fence but it did not do well and was replaced.

The house had been built in 1872 by Mrs Brownell’s grandfather Talbot. He imported two marble lions from Italy to ornament his lawn. Later they were donated to the San Francisco Yacht Club. Nothing was spared to make the garden fragrant and inviting. It had another bed with standard roses: La France, Marie von Houtte, Perle du Jardin, Sofrano, Rainbow, Duchess of Brabant, Gloire de Lyon, and Papa Gantier. Heliotrope, wisteria, syringa and clematis had been lavishly planted. There were cacti, unusual at such an early date, gladioli, geraniums of many stripes as well as a phenomenal holly tree and shrubs of all sorts. This was truly an amazing garden for a city that was only about thirty years old.

Emma Sutro Merritt, 1856 -1938, stubbornly defied her very powerful father Adolph Sutro to become a physcian when this was not considered seemly for the daughters of the very wealthy. She met her future husband, Dr George Merritt of Oakland, at medical school in San Francisco. Emma Merritt recalled the day in 1879 her father drove through the Golden Gate Park to examine a house for sale high on the bluffs by the Pacific Ocean.

This was the genesis of Sutro Heights. The house dated back to 1863. Sutro modernised it and landscaped the grounds extensively. He established a nursery and conservatory, planted many trees and so-called “ribbon beds” which spelled out words and phrases. One bed read “Welcome All to Sutro Heights”. The famous Palm Drive was a special sight in itself. Sutro was delighted when the public began to visit his garden and feel quite at home in it. He considered it his duty as a wealthy property owner to encourage such visits, as part of noblesse oblige.

While the young trees in the “Sutro Forest’ were still small, he surrounded them with a slat fence to protect them from the strong winds coming off the sea. Sutro believed in planting trees. He participated enthusiastically in Joaquin Miller’s 1886 Arbor Day. A thousand people assembled on November 27, 1886 at Yerba Buena to do the work. Sutro had given 50 000 trees to be planted by the schoolchildren of Oakland and San Francisco.

There is one last vignette which recalls a beloved nurseryman in San Francisco at the end of the nineteenth century. Veronica Kinzie wrote about Charles Abraham and his Western Nursery with warmth and affection. Abraham was one of nine children in a poor German family. He came to San Francisco in 1877 after serving classical apprenticeships on great estates in Germany and the Crimea. (Figure 8 Charles Abraham)

He had learned about sub-tropical plants in the Crimea and he proceeded to import much of his stock from Australia, New Zealand and South America. Abraham brought the fire flame tree, Hoheria or bride tree, and bougainvillea as well as rare fruit trees from an old Chinese temple garden to San Francisco. It was he who encouraged local gardeners to grow heliotrope and fuchsia so extensively. He also imported cuttings of five thousand olive trees from Italy. They were distributed throughout California and grafted onto the old Mission olive trees brought by the Franciscans. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was an explosion of interest in novel varieties of olive trees.⁵

Charles Abraham’s personal integrity was absolute. If a client, no matter how wealthy, failed to express the proper concern for the welfare of his plants, he refused to sell to her. On the other hand, he might spend an hour going over everything in great detail with a poor person buying a tiny geranium.

Apart from these delightful stories about his behavior, Abraham was a true professional. He had saved an irreplaceable hand written inventory and catalogue of the first serious nurseryman to open in San Francisco, William C Walker. Abraham worked closely with Alice Eastwood, Curator of the California Academy of Sciences Herbarium. He shared his treasures with the Golden Gate Park and the University of California.

Abraham brought his mother and other relatives over from Germany to help him in the nursery. After he died in 1929, his niece continued the firm.

William C. Walker, not to be confused with the notorious “filibuster” William Walker of Nicaragua, ran a nursery at Folsom and Fourth Streets. This corner now houses the Society of California Pioneers, a most fitting replacement. Originally a lawyer from the South, Walker came to California in 1849 for the gold rush. He stayed to sell plants and flowers to those who had succeeded in finding gold, from whatever source.

Many other nurseries provided flowers and shrubs in San Francisco soon after the gold rush. Colonel J. L. Warren of Boston was the very first professional nurseryman in the state, opening a shop in Sacramento in 1850, but by 1883, there were over a hundred and sixty nurseries in California, sixty seven of them in San Francisco alone. Adolph Sutro bought the 50,000 trees for his Arbor Day gesture from George Miller in Oakland. Miller tragically died quite young in a railroad crash.

The San Francisco Garden Club has decided to collect stories about the gardens of the present members. It is currently in its seventy fifth year and expects to produce another volume of garden memories before it turns eighty.

This article published in The Argonaut - Journal of the San Francisco Historical Society Winter 2001 12 (2) 6-18

Acknowledgments

The San Francisco Garden Club permitted the author to prepare these animadversions on its “Vignettes of Early San Francisco Homes and Gardens” and gave further encouragement by appointing her Honorary Librarian to the club.

The author is very grateful to Frederick Sherman, research associate at the California Genealogical Society in Oakland, for his assistance in bringing the ladies of the San Francisco Garden Club in 1935 to life for this essay.

Susan Haas, archivist at the Society of California Pioneers, identified photographs of former members of the San Francisco Garden Club in the collection and gave permission for them to be reproduced.

Patricia Keats, librarian at the Society of Californiaa Pioneers, assisted the author.

The acting director of the library at the California Historical Society, Tanya Hollis and Wendy Welker, photographic archivist for the society, were both very helpful.

References

The notion is tantalizing. It is a truth universally acknowledged that three men, all Jews of eastern European descent, all violinists of a unique calibre, all of them connected with California in one way or another, must have something in common. The answer is, very little.

I am referring to Jascha Heifetz, 1901-1987, Yehudi Menuhin, 1916-1999, and Isaac Stern 1920-2001.

Perhaps all they had in common was the sacrifice of many of life’s most important rewards for the impersonal monster of great art.

With their childhood gone, their adult lives were almost pre-ordained. Great virtuosi have to travel most of the time to play in new cities and satisfy new audiences. That led to marital stress and some loss of their children’s affections.

Isaac Stern was very open about this in his memoir. He even tried to do something about it for a time but external forces were too great for him to resist. Each man married more than once.

When they aged and looked for the meaning in their lives, they were all sustained by the music itself but in widely different ways. Menuhin’s horizons broadened beyond performance. He became a teacher and conductor, and also threw himself into social and political causes.

Some of the latter were very controversial and led to his being excoriated by the Jewish community. Playing in Berlin with Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1945 was one of them.

Ironically, his most lasting legacy was a residential school in England for children like himself, showing extraordinary promise on the violin. The school offered a broad general curriculum to counter the narrowness of the focus, but the children were isolated and removed from their families for long periods of time.

Isaac Stern also served many good causes. The most important one may have been the preservation of Carnegie Hall. He prevented it from being demolished to make way for an office tower. More than the other two, Stern introduced remarkable new young violinists to carry on the tradition. He travelled very often to Israel. He toured China and listened to gifted children wherever he went.

Heifetz turned to the music as a source of solace. Although his career was confined to a single instrument, he had perhaps the broadest range of knowledge of music as a whole. His teacher in St Petersburg, Leopold Auer, had instilled respect for the piano and orchestra, and had insisted his students learn all aspects of musical theory.

Heifetz’s accompanist and de facto assistant for the last fifteen years of his life, Ayke Agus, has recorded her awe of his facility with the piano, his excellent knowledge of harmony and how to write for the piano. Through the years Heifetz had composed some original pieces. He also knew the craft of composing, and could correct the manuscript invisibly if there were any errors.

All of this was in addition to an encyclopaedic knowledge of the violin repertoire, methods of playing and the instruments themselves. Immersing himself in these activities could not replace human contact but made its absence a little more bearable.

It is not for me, an outsider, to say whether they enjoyed their lives or thought the price was too high, but society still has not solved the problem of what to do about precociously gifted children.

Early years

The three men in question overlapped in time, starting with Jascha Heifetz born either in 1899 or 1901 according to which source you prefer, Yehudi Menuhin in 1916 and Isaac Stern in 1920. Heifetz and Stern were both born in Eastern Europe. As Stern put it so wittily in his memoir, My First Seventy Nine Years, the time of his birth coincided with the two week period that his town, Kreminiecz, was Polish. A week later it would have been Russia again.

Heifetz was born in Vilna (Vilnius), in Lithuania, a noted centre of Jewish culture and learning. The name Jascha was used by his mother as a Yiddish diminutive of his actual name, Joseph, but it stuck with him long after he grew up. (He named his daughter Josepha and one of his sons Joseph, known as Jay). When the Russian Revolution made life in Russia too dangerous, the Heifetz family fled across Siberia in 1917 and entered the United States through the port of San Francisco.

Only Menuhin was born in the United States, at the old Mount Lebanon Hospital in the Bronx. His parents had come from Russia by way of then Palestine.

In all of these men the amazing gifts were manifested very early, while they were still children. Isaac Stern went to school for a couple of years and played with children of his own age. That ended when he showed serious promise on the violin. Heifetz never went to school at all. Menuhin was totally uninterested in school and left after a short time in the first grade.

Their families were all victims of anti-Semitism to one degree or another and that, with poverty, was the force which drove them to emigrate. Poverty did not mean an absence of culture. Both Mr and Mrs Menuhin were teachers. Isaac Stern’s father was an artist and Heifetz’s father was concertmaster of the Vilna Symphonic Orchestra.

One is reminded of the French writer Georges Duhamel’s remark about his family:

“Nous étions pauvres main nous n’étions pas des pauvres.” [”We were poor but not of the poor”].

Mr Stern had to settle for working as a house painter in San Francisco, to make a living, but they always managed to go and hear important musicians who came to town. He and his wife spoke Russian at home, not Yiddish. Isaac used the Russian to great effect when playing with Serge Kussevitsky.

All these children had general lessons at home and probably learned as much as any child in a busy class with a harassed teacher. The Menuhin family stressed languages, with Hebrew, French and German in constant use. There was even a smattering of Russian which served Menhuin well during World War II.

Hebrew was Yehudi’s first language. He and his sisters called their father “Aba” and their mother “Imma.” Their New York neighbour Willa Cather was concerned that the Menuhin children were “linguistically rootless” and spent time reading Shakespeare with them.

It will be illuminating to delve into some of the myths surrounding Jewish prodigies and the violin before taking a look at the lives that the three most prominent Jewish violinists of the twentieth century led in California and their response to being Jewish in a non-Jewish society.

The Jews “Own” the Violin

It is hardly surprising that the appearance of one Jewish child-wizard after another should make the public think that this talent was inherent to the Jewish people, inborn or genetically determined. Dozens of hapless Jewish youths had their childhood ruined by ambitious parents who assumed that this was true, in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary.

After Yehudi Menuhin first played in public at the age of theoretically five but actually six, every second-hand violin in San Francisco was sold within a two week period. Six months later they were all back in the pawnbrokers’ shops. Isaac Stern was still little more than an infant and not affected by this craze.

The distribution of exceptional musical talent has been studied in various ways, and the premise turns out to be a fallacy. Early skill and facility with the violin are not restricted to Jews, nor are Jews automatically better than any other ethnic group.

In San Francisco itself, Ruggiero Ricci followed very closely on Menuhin’s heels. Son of a poor Italian immigrant, Ricci was born in 1918. He has had a most distinguished career, beginning in 1928, aged ten.

What explains the tenacity of this myth? The Jews themselves like to believe it and non-Jews obediently follow suit. The romantic view is that it is a manifestation of centuries of learning and the mystical spirit which has sparked Hasidic life since its earliest days.

Lionel Menuhin Rolfe, one of Yehudi’s nephews, has written a memoir of his family in which he suggests this as a source of the genius. He satisfied himself that the Menuhins were descended from generations of great Hasidic rabbis, many of who showed precocious skill with their studies. Hasidim used music and dancing to express their love of God.

My personal impression is that the myth has a lot to do with shrewd marketing and the onerous oppression suffered by so many Jews in the twentieth century. A gifted child was a golden ticket out of misery. A family had to survive as best it could. With emancipation and prosperity, the need to extract every ounce of value from a child’s talent ceases to exist.

The corollary of such prosperity is that the incentives for a Jewish child to devote months and years to an uncomfortable and isolating activity for remote future gratification are enormously reduced. A child can be a child, pure and simple, not a miniature adult. Wonderful material goods are showered on him with little or no effort on his part, simply because his parents or relatives can afford them. Jascha Heifetz would have been a ferocious competitor at computer games.

Precarious economic circumstances still lead to the exploitation of children but the specifics have changed. Advertising is one way. It is essentially passive. The child only has to stay still briefly and is not expected to do anything difficult. The parents of infants, toddlers and very young children receive handsome fees for photographs promoting clothes or toys.

Sport is the other time-honoured way for escaping poverty. Richard Williams is said to have asked his wife to conceive an additional child so they could rear a tennis champion, Venus. Even if this is an apocryphal story, it is a commentary on modern life.

At one time it was axiomatic that a child would succeed commercially if he entered the adult world of high culture. The ability to perform the works of the great composers was recognized as a good thing. Astute Jewish parents read these signals very clearly. Youth culture and popular culture had not yet driven fine music off the compass.

This assumption is no longer true. Classical music is fading and the audience is not renewing itself too well. Grey hair prevails at most concerts. A very wise and experienced music teacher in the public schools told me that many children want to play instruments very well, and are willing to work very hard but none of them has the faintest interest in going to a concert. If the audience collapses for whom will they play?

The old musical public supported the succeeding generation of great Jewish violinists, such as Yitzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zuckerman and even the one after that, Gil Shaham for example.

It has similarly nurtured the many non- Jewish, frequently Asian, violinists who are their contemporaries. In fact the pendulum has swung toward Asia and young girls and away from Jewish males. Midori and Sarah Chang typify today’s violin prodigy. The singleminded pursuit of music as a career for their children is now much more in the hands of Asian parents. Their family structure still has the firmness needed to shut out all distractions and expect the child to cooperate without question. Sarah Chang has commented on her experience growing up like this.

The public feeds on the sensational and a small child’s mastery of a fiendishly difficult instrument still commands attention. It is not clear what will happen in the future. Once the prodigies grow up it gets much harder than it was in earlier epochs. They often have to package themselves as variants of pop artists when they mature.

Nigel Kennedy, one of the original pupils at the Menuhin School of Music in Surrey, England, now wishes to be known simply as “Kennedy” and frequently plays jazz on his violin. Beautiful young women violinists wear provocative clothing, drawing attention to their sexuality in order to ensure an audience for Beethoven or Bach. At a recent concert by a well known quartet of youngish women players, the artists were dressed in scarlet “teddies’. There are exceptions to this but some see it as necessary to survive in a hostile environment. Who is to say they are wrong?

If a person is destined to have a unique career as a soloist, it seems fairly obvious that the talent has to emerge very early. Childhood is the perfect time to lay down complex physical skills. There have been very few great performers who first took up music in their teens. Claudio Arrau is one of the few who comes to mind. He started piano lessons comparatively late.

The thrust of these comments lies in the treatment of gifted children by the parents and outside world, the degree to which they are exploited. Playing the violin is not an inborn skill. It has to be learned and reinforced by very long hours of practice. The instrument is unwieldy and awkward; creating the tones is hard because there are no signposts, and bowing is an unnatural movement. The born prodigy is distinguished from the ordinary child because producing the music gives him a pleasure and gratification no other activity matches. This makes up for all the drudgery.

Is There a Physical Basis for Musical Gifts?

It is possible that an aptitude for music has an anatomical basis in the brain. Time and again, an exceptional child has appeared who demonstrated precocious ability with the Western diatonic system. I have not looked into the equivalent history in Eastern music or other non-western systems. Children in Asia who have come to attention in recent years all absorbed Western music.

The evidence for this assertion is indirect and circumstantial. The most obvious anatomical and physiological prerequisite is coordination. Its substrate is inborn but it can be developed and perfected by proper training. There are no reliable signs in the shape of the hand or other physical attribute. David Oistrakh had huge workmen’s hands, other men had smaller hands. The key is in the invisible connections between the peripheral neuro-muscular system and the central nervous system.

Perfect, or absolute, pitch is the ability to name and/or sing the notes of the diatonic scale in the absence of any clues, and without instruction. This cannot be learned. There are presumably cerebral connections between the inner ear and the aural cortex which are quite unknown. By itself this gift is not a harbinger of other musical skills, though many great musicians had it, e.g. Sibelius and Menuhin.

The gifted child can correctly reproduce music heard previously, either vocally or on an instrument. Mozart was renowned for this skill. The first important American woman composer, Amy Beach, manifested similar talents at the age of two. Again, this facility also does not promise that the child will automatically be a great musician, but it is suggestive.

Such children constantly demand new musical and technical challenges out of proportion to their chronological age, overtaking even quite gifted peers who are making normal progress. The cellist Jacqueline DuPré is an example who comes to mind. Her elder sister Hilary was a very talented young flautist but once the eight year old Jacqueline got going, Hilary was relegated to the sidelines. Menuhin insisted on learning the Beethoven violin concerto long before his teacher thought he was ready.

Mental readiness seems to be translated into physical execution in ways that are not immediately apparent. Here is another sub-myth. A few tips from the teacher are said to be all that is required for the child to synthesise the performance. Prominent teachers of these children have all said that they concentrate on the interpretation and the music’s meaning rather than technique.

If it all sounds too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true. These stories have an apocryphal ring, post hoc ergo propter hoc. Hour upon hour of dull and boring repetition of scales, arpeggios and études have been conveniently forgotten in the flush of success.

When this essential preparation is missing, the foundation is very shaky. Heifetz taught a few gifted violinists in his master classes at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. They were all the best and the brightest in their communities, brilliant, with Tartini’s Devil’s Trill and the Tchaikovsky concerto at their command but he could reduce them to jelly by asking them to play a few scales.

Isaac Stern regretted that he had not been required to learn all the intricacies of scales. One of his teachers was Louis Persinger, the concertmaster of the San Francicso Symphony. Stern felt he was too soft, a charming, good natured man with a profound sense of the music but not a disciplinarian.

Menuhin too had to go back to basics after playing in public for seven or eight years. Enesco conveyed deep musicality but he paid almost no attention to mechanics. Yehudi was taken to Adolph Busch in Switzerland for two summers in a row. Busch stood for no nonsense. You played your scales or else. It was dull and dry but it was essential.

First teachers

No one is as important as the first teacher. The basic skills, whether imparted skilfully or clumsily, set the stage for all that follows. Reuven Heifetz taught little Jascha. The Menuhins wanted Louis Persinger to teach their child at four, but had to turn to a man widely considered to be a hack, Sigmund Anker, when Persinger obstinately refused. Anker was maligned as incompetent and ineffectual, but he made a very dignified rebuttal.

A year or two after Yehudi became a local sensation, Anker was criticized roundly. He pointed out that if he had been as terrible a teacher as the critics claimed, the child would not have played the way he did.

Isaac Stern wrote that he asked for violin lessons because his best friend at the time was learning to play the violin. It was his way of keeping up the friendship, of being companionable. The two boys had the same teacher for a time. He does not mention the “Menuhin effect” as the reason the friend was started on this path. It was not a conscious factor in Stern’s own memories.

Significantly, Stern did remember the point at which all the teaching coalesced. He realized he was making beautiful sounds and that if he moved his bow in a slightly different way, there was a new effect. He was now in control of the process and all its possibilities were open to him. From that time on no one ever had to tell him to practice again.

When Lynn Harrell, the internationally renowned cellist, and now well into his middle years, plays in San Francisco, he proudly tells the audience that his first teacher is there, listening. That is how important the first teacher can be.

It is quite clear even from this brief analysis that none of these qualities is restricted to the Jews but one additional point has to be made: all the Jewish children in this category were boys.

Jewish Girls and Music

Very few girls, Jewish or non-Jewish, played the violin, and certainly not in public. This was in keeping with social mores at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Girls played the piano and occasionally the harp. Paula Gillett has chronicled this period and its attitudes with great skill.

Sometimes the girls played the piano very well indeed, but bourgeois Jewish families resembled mainstream bourgeois families in abhorring careers for their daughters. Marutha Menuhin prided herself on her radical and modern approach to life but this did not apply to her daughters Hephzibah and Yaltah. She was no more radical or modernistic than Frau Abraham Mendelssohn had been with Fanny.

Clara Wieck Schumann was a lone exception. Her father recognized her great talent and trained her to become a concert pianist. He had no time for the impecunious Robert Schumann and resented his taking his daughter away. Clara was lucky that she had this career. Robert Schumann died very young at the age of 46 and left her with eight children to support. (The Schumann’s youngest child lived until 1936, well into the modern era).

Marutha Menuhin allowed Hephzibah and later Yaltah to play in public very grudgingly accompanying their brother. The juvenile violin and piano duo of brother and sister was of course an immense hit. Not since Mozart and his sister Nannerl had played for royalty had there been such a sensation.

Mrs Menuhin did want the girls to have the best teachers, in keeping with her philosophy of excellence. When they were in Paris Hephzibah took lessons with Marcel Ciampi, Georges Enesco’s accompanist. She was seven. Ciampi was reluctant at best and wanted nothing to do with the five year old Yaltah. Once he let her play for him he was overwhelmed and remarked, “Mais le ventre de Madame Menuhin est un véritable conservatoire.” [”Mrs Menuhin’s womb is a veritable conservatory”]

Heifetz was envious of the music his sister played on the piano. The violin has a limited range of expression. It usually plays only one note at a time and does not have the same rich harmony of the piano. This is a window into his soul. His sister Pauline was a lesser mortal but she could do something musically he could not do.

Virtuosi, Not Composers

I have not said it specifically but have implied that the same gifts are present in musical children who become either virtuosi or composers. This is only true at the outset. The two métiers diverge later in life.

The three men in my series were all virtuosi. None of them claimed to be a composer though Heifetz wrote some relatively minor works and was very adept at transcribing other composers’ music for the violin.

The creative genius of the Jews has been manifested in numerous ways but apart from the well-known exceptions of Mendelssohn, Mahler, Castelnuevo-Tedesco, Ernest Bloch and Darius Milhaud, classical composition is not one of them. This subject has been sadly contentious for more than a hundred years and I do not intend to cover it again.

Jewish Attitudes to Musical Skill

There is considerable irony in the fact that orthodox Jews have traditionally had a very low opinion of musicians. Deeply religious scholars considered playing music to be profane as long as the Jewish people were still in exile. No one should enjoy themselves in such a frivolous manner.

In the elite families of rabbis and wealthy merchants, playing an instrument was beneath contempt, not a fit profession for their sons. Gypsies were musicians, not well brought up Jewish boys. Fiddlers and other musicians were fine for weddings and simchas. No one took them seriously.

The names Fiedler, Geiger and Musikant confirmed the occupations of popular musicians.

One Unexpected Result of Great Individual Success

Jascha Heifetz was loved or he was hated but his playing led to a seismic change in standards. After he established himself as the leading violin virtuoso in the world, not only did some other fine musicians’ careers collapse but suddenly anyone who wished to be taken seriously in the violin world had to improve to his level. He displayed a technical polish outside anyone’s experience, coupled with an uncanny penetration to the depths of the music not heard before.

There is a story about Mischa Elman and the pianist Leopold Godowsky at Heifetz’s first concert in Carnegie Hall. Elman is reported to have said, “Don’t you find it a little warm in this hall,” and Godowsky is supposed to have replied, “Not if you are a pianist.”

Very few speak about Mischa Elman or Efrem Zimbalist today, except as historical figures. (Note the name “Zimbalist.” One of his ancestors had played the cymbals in a band.) One has to go all the way back to Paganini to find an equivalent source of excitement and legend to Heifetz.

The need to sharpen one’s skills came as a shock, as much for the ordinary orchestral player as for the aspiring soloist. If Heifetz can do it, why can’t you? The threshold was raised. Conductors improved their orchestras by demanding that the string players all tighten their techniques by several notches. Just being good enough was not good enough any more.

Curiously, similar changes took place in ballet at about the same time. When Olga Preobrajenska found the secret to doing thirty two fouetés without collapsing from dizziness, suddenly everyone had to be able to do it.

The new generation of fledgling violinists started from this level, not having known anything else. Violin teachers improved, sending out better prepared graduates to compete ever more fiercely with other musicians who had also been trained in the same manner. It became harder and harder to succeed.

The odd thing was that Leopold Auer, the revered kingmaker among violin teachers, did not change his methods when teaching Heifetz. Whatever was happening was inside the pupil before Auer began teaching him. Auer had shaped Elman and Zimbalist. This was why Reuven Heifetz insisted that Auer teach Jascha despite all the obstacles put in his way. No one yet knew that this child was outside whatever norms there are among geniuses.

Auer himself came from a long and respected line of violin pedagogues, with at least one celebrated Jew in it, Joseph Joachim. It was Joachim who took Brahms in hand as a very young man and remained his friend and mentor for many years. He supplied the nuts and bolts of a musical career after all Robert Schumann’s excited fireworks were over. In spite of being Jewish, Joachim moved in high society. He was the permanent conductor of the blind Elector of Hanover’s private orchestra.

There were other lines of Continental violin masters beside Auer’s. Menuhin’s second teacher, Louis Persinger, had studied with the Belgian star Eugene Ysayë. His musical lineage included Ludwig Spohr, a composer and virtuoso who wrote a method of violin playing.

Persinger wanted Yehudi to study with Ysayë when the child insisted on going to Paris for further education. Out of respect for Persinger, he had an audition with Ysayë, but was not impressed by the elderly man’s decaying health and lack of energy. Yehudi preferred Georges Enesco and that was who they got.

How Does California Fit into This?

California and its Jewish community are very proud to claim these three men as their own. Both Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern were taken to California as very young children and grew up in San Francisco. Jascha Heifetz moved to Los Angeles in middle life and never left.

Yehudi Menuhin

Yehudi Menuhin’s career owed a great deal to the generosity of San Francisco’s Jewish community. His father Moshe was in charge of Hebrew education for Temple Emanu-El. Although he was a very hardworking man he could never have afforded the teachers, valuable instruments and costs of travel inherent in creating a virtuoso violinist.

A wealthy and respected member of the synagogue, Sidney Ehrman, singlehandedly supported the entire Menuhin family until Yehudi started to earn substantial fees. With Ehrman’s money freeing him from worry, Moshe gave up teaching and dedicated the rest of his life to his son’s career. Mr Ehrman had been an amateur violinist as a young man, and so was sympathetic when the cantor, Reuben Rinder, told him about the child in their midst.

Isaac Stern

The Stern family moved to San Francisco in 1921. They travelled across Russia and sailed to San Francisco from Siberia. One of Mrs Stern’s brothers was there. Isaac showed great promise by about ten years of age. It was during the depths of the Depression and the family was painfully poor but the Jewish community came through for him too. Fortunately some families had been able to hold on to their wealth.

Reuben Rinder

Cantor Reuben Rinder at Temple Emanu-El had interceded with the wealthy members of the community for Yehudi Menuhin. He had heard the two-year-old boy sing himself to sleep with a Hebrew melody perfectly in tune.

A few years later Isaac Stern appeared. The cantor first persuaded Mrs Jenny Baruch Zellerbach to sponsor Isaac, but she gave up when he seemed to be wasting his time. Isaac Stern came closer than any of the three to having a normal youth.

Rinder did not lose faith in Isaac. He turned to Lutie Goldstein. Miss Goldstein became Isaac’s fairy godmother. When he was invited to play in New York in his teens, Miss Goldstein understood that he had to excel. She paid for a wonderful violin, and of course all the cost of travel and proper clothes.

Two years after lining up Mr Ehrman, the cantor persuaded his friend Louis Persinger to teach Yehudi. A few years after that, Persinger also taught Isaac Stern.

Reuben Rinder wanted Jewish liturgical music for the synagogue, composed by Jewish composers if possible. He arranged for Ernest Bloch to move to San Francisco in 1924 to be the director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Bloch stayed for five years. The Menuhin children got to know him and found his personality annoying.

Rinders’ faith in Bloch was vindicated when the latter finally wrote Avodath Hakodesh, a Sacred Service. The manuscript has been on display at the new Jean Hargrove Library of Music at the University of California at Berkeley.

Darius Milhaud was another famous Jewish composer whom Rinder espoused. Milhaud taught at Mills College in Oakland, in 1948. This friendship was rewarded when Milhaud also composed a Sacred Service for the synagogue.

In the mid-1930s, when Jewish musicians were persecuted in Germany, Rinder saw what was needed and took action. He rescued Bronislaw Huberman, a very fine Polish violinist, and smoothed his path in a strange country. Cantor Rinder deserves a very honorable place in history. His geese were really swans.

Both former prodigies returned to San Franciso to honour the cantor in 1950. Menuhin always held Mr Ehrman in the highest esteem and looked on him as a member of his family. Cantor Rinder died in 1966, after more than fifty years of service to the congregation.

Jascha Heifetz

California did not play a role in Heifetz’s development. At that all took place elsewhere. He began his violin lessons in Vilna at the age of three and by seven had made his professional debut, receiving a fee. His American debut was at Carnegie Hall in 1917. During his active career Heifetz made several decisions which were significant for his later life.

Twenty years after his first appearance in New York Heifetz built a house in Beverly Hills, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son Lloyd Wright. He gradually shifted his home to California. At that time Los Angeles was very far removed from the centres of musical life. When he decided to retire in the 1970s, he moved into the Beverly Hills house for good. No doubt he had had his fill of sophisticated cities and the international music world. A cul-de-sac in Beverly Hills offered serenity and quiet, as did the beach house at Malibu.

The other amazing decision Heifetz made was to become a violin teacher. He stopped giving concerts while still at the peak of his powers, a wise decision, but his choice of pedagogy has puzzled me a good deal. The ostensible reason was that Leopold Auer had told him he should do it when he retired and had given him his own special cane, truly passing the baton.

Heifetz treasured that cane. When the silver head fell apart, he insisted on his assistant Ayke Agus finding a silversmith who could re-create the original in spite of the expense. Auer had also told him that he would be a very good teacher. Loyalty to his master persisted over forty years of giving concerts and led him to an irrevocable decision, taking him out of circulation completely.

The reason I am puzzled is that Jascha Heifetz was no master of human relations. It is widely known that he enjoyed his reputation for being “difficult,” a glee which masked loneliness and inability to connect with or trust other people who should have been his intimate allies. Eventually everyone was driven away.

Why would such a misanthropic person turn to teaching? One explanation may be that the teacher has power over the pupil, in a very uneven and one-sided relationship. Unlike teachers who recognized that they could learn from their pupils, Heifetz started with the knowledge of his unassailable superiority which nothing could shake. No matter how well a student would play, Heifetz could always do it better. Age and injuries did not affect his preternatural coordination.

Agus commented on his ability to command the bow in the most difficult manoeuvres, such as staccato in either the up-bow or down-bow directions. Staccato is a rapid bouncing movement of the bow, producing a light dancing effect. It is hard for anyone to do, and most violinists can only do it well as they move the bow “up”, ie from nut to tip. He could do it perfectly in both directions, well into his eighties.

The teaching was done under very special circumstances. The president of the University of Southern California and the director of the arts department realized that here was a unique opportunity. They had two of the world’s greatest virtuosi in their midst, Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky, the cellist. The response was to organize master classes, for specially gifted students who would go on to illustrious careers. There were only about ten or fifteen students in the class at any one time.

Heifetz received a stipend from the university, and expenses for an assistant and class accompanist. The administrative details of auditions and selection were all handled for him but he had ultimate authority over who was accepted. The assistant was indispensable. She corrected technical faults in the students’ playing, she found comfortable housing for them, she advised them how to dress and Heifetz left it to her to handle many of their other problems as well.

Exquisite Paradoxes

The history and careers of these men offer paradox after paradox to even the most superficial observer. Those who knew them closely could probably point to many others.

A very fundamental one was how they and their families reacted to being Jewish. They all grew up in households which ignored the usual Jewish rules but the outside world recognized no degrees of being Jewish. Families were forced to flee and emigrate just because they were part of the hated “race.”

Here is a clear paradox. They had suffered for being part of a persecuted minority but rejected its tenets. In spite of that, when they needed assistance on a grand scale, they found it in the Jewish community.

Moshe Menuhin worked for a Jewish organization, teaching Hebrew to several generations of children. He and his wife separated the world of work from home in a very modern fashion: no religious mumbo-jumbo in their house, no chauvinism about the Jewish people. Such social and political freedom was almost unique to the United States.

Once Yehudi’s genius was recognized, that Jewish world came to their rescue, providing capital for the new business of Yehudi Menuhin Inc. Moshe had always worked in education but once he took over Yehudi’s stage career he demonstrated demon skill in public relations and a business acumen worthy of Sol Hurok. Nothing of the kind could have been anticipated from his previous history. His forebears were scholars. He had not seen his family conduct business in Russia or in Palestine where he spent his teen years.

Moshe started by never quite specifying how old the child was. I doubt he lied intentionally but when the press thought the little boy was only five and not the six he actually was, Moshe made no strenuous efforts to correct their impression. The subtraction of this year persisted throughout Yehudi’s childhood and adolescence.

Mrs Menuhin contributed her share to this image. At first dressing him in short trousers and a white silk blouse was quite appropriate. When he reached his early teens and grew quite husky, it was no longer appropriate but she insisted on continuing to do it. They wanted the public to believe that their son was younger than he really was.

The ten commandments do not actually contain a prohibition against lying. The closest they come is a prohibition against bearing false witness. One commandment which was observed to the fullest in all these families was “Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God has given thee.” Anyone who came into contact with the Menuhin children and with the young Jascha Heifetz noticed their dutiful obedience and acquiescence in all the strictures laid on them.

Menuhin himself never even crossed the street alone until he was 18. He wore the outmoded clothes without complaint. Aba told him to jump and he would ask “how high.”

Heifetz’ parents never praised him, always leaving him feeling very insecure. It was their way of preventing him from becoming complacent and above himself. His father accompanied him on all his engagements and tore every performance to shreds in the dressing room afterwards. Other people who heard this were amazed that Heifetz never turned on his father but always submitted to the scoldings patiently. This was long after it was clear that there was no one in the world who could match his musical skills. It was also long after the boy became the sole breadwinner for the family.

The stories abound. He told his assistant Ayke Agus proudly that he had been supporting his family since he was seven years old. In spite of the iron discipline Reuven maintained, Jascha threw his weight around and got much of what he wanted by tantrums and bad behaviour. Since he had become indispensible to the family budget they often yielded to him out of desperation. If he threatened not to show up at a concert, that could mean thousands of dollars down the drain and the loss of future engagements. He got whatever it was he wanted.

Eventually Heifetz rebelled, but even in rebellion, he was punctilious. Because of the heavy handed rule of his parents he had to resort to subterfuge, but precisely on his 21st birthday, the official date of adulthood, he informed them he was moving out into his own apartment and they would not have the key.

Isaac Stern seems to have navigated his teenage period fairly well. He practiced a great deal, but also had friends. They could go and buy an ice cream soda or a milk shake without the house falling down around his ears. Adolescence as we know it had not been invented yet. The father was king. Children were possessions just as their mothers were chattels. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father ran his son’s life down to the smallest detail.

Beethoven’s father also did but the result was more of a nightmarish caricature. Six year old Ludwig would be dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to play to Papa Beethoven’s boon companions, all more or less drunk. Because Beethoven was such a great composer it is often forgotten that he too was a remarkable prodigy on the piano.

To show that such control was not confined to the Jews or musical prodigies, a contemporary of our three violinists was the great French tennis champion Suzanne Lenglen. She could not sneeze without her father’s permission.

Marriages

Another source of paradox was in the marriages they contracted. The Menuhin family believed so strongly in ecumenism that when Yehudi showed interest in a nice Jewish girl from an observant home, his mother was alarmed. This was not for her son. He married non- Jewish women both times. His second marriage to Diana Gould lasted more than fifty years until his death.

The other strange feature of all the Menuhin children’s initial marriages was the speed with which they took place and the lack of any consideration of whether their selections were appropriate. As long as they did not marry the type of “safe” young woman mentioned above, the parents seem positively to urge them on in their impulsive choices.

Mrs Menuhin was impressed by her prospective daughter-in-law Nola’s beauty and vigour, and also by the fact that she came from a wealthy family. Such a young woman could not be a gold digger.

Moshe organized his son’s concert career with extreme care, down to the smallest detail, yet in these matters all his caution and prudence were neutralized by the mother’s driving enthusiasm. This too is very hard to understand. Hephzibah married the brother of Yehudi’s bride, Lindsay Nicholas, and not to be outdone, Yaltah, only sixteen at that time, also got married. What can the parents have been thinking?

Looking at it from the girls’ point of view, one hears escape loud and clear. Nola and Lindsay were the children of a very rich Australian chemist who had invented a wartime substitute for aspirin, “Aspro.” Here was the complete antithesis to their usual lives. Hephzibah moved to Australia and lived on her husband’s sheep ranch for some time. She subsequently divorced Lindsay and married Richard Hauser. She intermittently came out of retirement and gave concerts with her brother. Hephzibah died in 1981. At the first concert that Menuhin gave in New York a year after her death, the look of anguish and loss on his face was harrowing.

Yaltah’s first marriage only lasted for a few months. She ultimately married three times. The third time she found the right man for her. Yaltah died in 2001.

Heifetz married twice. Florence Arto Vidor was a beautiful young actress in Hollywood when he married her in 1928. They divorced in 1945. Their children were Josepha and Robert. In 1946, he married Frances Sears Speigelberg, a very different type of woman, but this marriage too came to an end after seventeen years. Joseph (Jay) was their only child.

Stern married three times. The first time was in 1948, to Nora Kaye, a ballet dancer in New York. They divorced quite amicably in 1950. She was a Jewish woman. In 1951 he married Vera Lindenblit. They had met in Israel, and remained married for many years. After he and Vera were divorced he married Linda Roberts in 1996.

And Meanwhile, What of the Music?

So far I have focused on all the externals, the restricted childhood, the controlling parents and the sordid business of money but have not really touched on the central theme, the inner force which drove such young children to accept their warped existences, the music itself.

When six-year-old Yehudi Menuhin first played for Louis Persinger, the master stopped him in the middle of the piece because it was so obvious that the child was already a marvellous musician. Instead of Yehudi being relieved that he did not have to continue, Persinger observed that the boy was furious. He not only wanted to play to the end, he was driven to play to the end, to express the meaning of that particular piece.

Georges Enesco taught Yehudi at his home in Paris and also at his summer estate in Romania. Moshe and his son travelled back and forth at the master’s behest. One day in the country, with a violent summer storm howling around the house, Enesco asked the boy to play Bach’s Chaconne for unaccompanied violin. This is a great test of a violinist, full of immense technical and musical difficulties.

Yehudi played the Chaconne. Enesco made no comment but asked him to play it again. Later he said he could not believe what he was hearing. Yehudi played the piece again and once again Enesco said nothing. He asked him to play it a third time. Yehudi produced another flawless performance, deeply moving and overwhelming to Enesco. He told this story to Robert Magidoff, one of Menhuin’s biographers.

Enesco later summed up the young Menuhin very presciently. He compared him to a gentle vineyard, quiet on the surface, thriving in the warm sun but sited on the slopes of Vesuivius. The seemingly placid and obedient child was only part of the equation. The source of the artistry was the “volcano” underneath.

Enesco turned to the metaphor of the volcano. Lionel Rolfe and Jacqueline Dupré’s biographers have used other metaphors to describe what can happen to relatives of such children. Anyone who gets in their way, even inadvertently, is either blown off course by the “hurricane” or singed badly by the “forest fire” . The force field they generate is outside their conscious control but is overwhelming and dangerous regardless.

At some point an artist reaches the point at which he questions the meaning of what he is doing. Repetition is the hidden rock on which performers founder. How many times can one play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto? That point came relatively early for Menuhin. Heifetz seems never to have reached it. Agus said that Heifetz always found something new in even the most hackneyed “warhorses”, keeping her constantly on her toes. Stern turned to chamber music, pacing himself with a different genre.

Heifetz also enjoyed chamber music. If your cronies are Piatigorsky and Alfred Cortot or Artur Rubinstein, chamber music can be played at the same level of perfection as a solo performance, though Heifetz was not too good at the necessary give and take required. He would disagree with the tempo preferred by the others and sometimes the mood was tense and stormy. Ayke Agus says that in the end he gave way and accepted the will of the majority, to preserve the music.

In contrast the incomparable cellist Yoyo Ma often plays music far beneath his level just to relieve his boredom. Other remarkable soloists have turned themselves into conductors, among them Mstislav Rostropovich, Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zuckerman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

In fact these musicians have made it seem that there is something old-fashioned and timid about continuing to play the audience’s favourite pieces in one concert hall after another. Menuhin said as much about Leonid Kogan, referring pointedly to “artists who travel from one city to another with their little violin case tucked under their arms year after year.”

If he had thought about it little more he would have sympathised with Kogan’s plight, a Jew living in the USSR, totally dependent on on the goodwill of the Communist government for his survival. He did not have the luxury of changing course or of travelling abroad when he wished. Not being as courageous as Rostropovich does not mean that the man was less of a mensch.

Malicious critics laced into Yehudi Menuhin as he changed from child to adolescent to adult. They said he had become self-conscious and that his performances fell off as a result. Listening to his recordings fails to reveal any loss of skill until many years later when he began to burn out and also to lose his hearing.

If one is to sum up and pass judgment, it seems that Heifetz was the consummate musician as well as consummate performer until the end of his very long life, remaining steadfast to his first principles long after the others got tired. This may come as a surprise to those who only think of him as a flashy publicity-hungry virtuoso. From seven almost to eighty seven is a very long time. Which of us can claim as much?

This article published in Western States Jewish History 38 62 -86 2005

Sources

If there seems to be a greater emphasis on Yehudi Menuhin than the other two men in these pages, it is an artefact of the better sources available. He wrote an autobiography in two volumes. There are also several biographies, by Robert Magidoff, (Yehudi Menuhin) Lionel Rolfe (The Menuhins: a family odyssey) and Humphrey Burton, (Yehudi Menuhin) as well as considerable material in magazines and journals.

Heifetz refused to let anyone write about him and would not talk about his personal life or much about his early years.There is one biography (unauthorized) by Artur Weschler-Vered, Jascha Heifetz, and a compilation of “Heifetziana” by a fan who was obsessed by Heifetz, Dr Herbert Axelrod. This book, Heifetz: An Unauthorized Pictorial Biography of the Professional Life of the Greatest Violinist That Ever Lived, ran to three editions.

A truly illuminating memoir is that of Ayke Agus, Heifetz as I Knew Him, but she intentionally closed off certain aspects of his life from her review. She did not decide to write the book until many years after his death.

Leopold Auer left a small treatise, Violin Playing As I Teach It, in which there are transient references to Heifetz’ early career.

We are indebted to Isaac Stern for the charming autobiography which he constructed with Chaim Potok, My First Seventy Nine Years. There are also articles about him, scattered through various publications.

Paula Gillet, Musical Women in England, 1870 - 1914 New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000.