“The American Gardens of Lotawana Nims”

AUTHOR: Judith Lang Day 

In 1916 the Nims purchased Bee Tree Farm as a weekend retreat. About thirty miles south of St. Louis, sitting on a river bluff high above the Mississippi, it was to be a true Gendeman's farm. Eight years later they acquired a large estate on Cape Cod as a summer home. Both of these were to become show places for Lotawana's designs.

She began her landscaping at Bee Tree in the 1920s and continued to refine her designs into the late 1950s. On both of Lotawana's estates, the houses sit high on a hill dominating the surrounding area, but in her gardens it is difficult to tell where nature stops and the work of man begins. They are carved out of the shape of the land, their boundaries are the natural growth, and the two tend to meld together. Her massed fields of flowers are the perfection of a natural meadow. Her woodlands were finely honed to emphasize the shape of a tree or the character of a rock and her paths curved through patterns of light and shadow. Lotawana emphasized plants that were indigenous to the area and highlighted native rock with imagination and dignity.

Lotawana would turn swamps into mirror pools and poison ivy thickets into slopes of gold. Her slogan for gardening was to buy a package of seed and go to work. She often bragged that from a few packages of seeds and one lily bulb she developed everything in her gardens. Her estates were not to be the formal showplaces of the wealthy, but fields and woodlands that elaborated on nature, never obViously controlling it and never completely subjugating it to the will of man. The gardens were just separate spots where bramble had been cleared and splotches of color substituted.