After a five-year search, the tangled garden, which was the inspiration for one of the most famous paintings in Canadian history, has been uncovered in a wooded lot north of Toronto. The property, which was called Four Elms because of the towering trees surrounding the Victorian-era farmhouse, once belonged to Group of Seven painter J.E.H. MacDonald. "It is one of the very few historic sites related to artists in this country," says Charles Hill, curator of Canadian art at the National Gallery of Canada. That association makes the site of enormous cultural significance.
"Of all the Group, he is the one who is most linked to an earlier rural tradition," explained Hill in an interview. "The house, the gardens and the fields around formed a part of his home base and had a lot of meaning for him. If you look at the early photographs and those gorgeous elm trees and the gardens and the wooden barn with its stone foundation, it [the place]is almost like a sculpture in itself."
Tom Thomson and every member of the Group visited MacDonald here, according to Susan MacDonald, the artist's great-niece. For a season in 1915, Arthur Lismer and his family lived with the MacDonalds, after both artists had quit their day jobs to live off the land and devote themselves to painting. "Wherever Group members travelled, they brought back seeds that were planted somewhere on the property," MacDonald said.
Even finding the location of the tangled garden was a puzzle worthy of Sherlock Holmes, for the property had been turned into a woodlot in the decades following MacDonald's death in 1932. Relentless nature had had her willful way, encouraged by MacDonald's only son, Thoreau (named after the American naturalist), who despaired of farming and planted trees to transform the orchard and fields into a spot of Algonquin Park on the verge of encroaching urbanization. He kept a record of all the trees he planted on the wall near the stairs to the cellar.
Beginning in 1961, Thoreau MacDonald vainly tried to persuade the Ontario Heritage Foundation to take over the 4.3-acre property and turn it into a conservation site. Finally, he sold the land and house to what was then known as the Town of Vaughan in 1974, although he continued to live in the homestead until 1980. The house was designated a historic property by the province in 1983, six years before Thoreau MacDonald died in 1989 at the age of 88.
About five years ago, the City of Vaughan, with the active encouragement of Susan MacDonald, started thinking seriously about how to make the best use of the house and the land. Should the land be cleared and returned to the way it was when J.E.H. MacDonald grew crops of alfalfa and wheat, harvested apples and pears, and painted his riotous splurge of colour and stalk?
One of the larger paintings that MacDonald completed, The Tangled Garden, was exhibited first in 1916 and provoked the ire of art critic Hector Charlesworth. He accused MacDonald of throwing "his paint pots in the face of the public," and infecting "a number of other talented young artists, who seem to think that crudity in colour and brushwork signify the qualities 'strength' and 'self-expression.' " This attack forced MacDonald, a shy, quiet transcendentalist who read Whitman and Thoreau, to become the spokesman for the group.
The controversy -- aside from the confusion the obvious drama and sculptural intensity of the painting created in a public not used to such a bold expressionist style -- largely accounted for the fact that the work remained unsold for some 20 years. Conversely, Charlesworth's sneering contempt is one of the reasons the painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in Ottawa, is so revered today. "It is the key to the history of the early movement" of the Group and a "really major work in MacDonald's oeuvre," says curator Hill.
But restoring the property was not the only option. What about leaving it as a wilderness preserve in honour of MacDonald's son Thoreau, a significant graphic artist who is best known for his woodcuts? Susan MacDonald had never met her great-uncle, who died nearly 20 years before she was born in 1950, but she had known her Uncle Thor from the time she made weekly visits to him as a child in the enchanted forest that "was frozen in time." She remembers a house without running water or electricity, beehives and wildlife, including deer, coming right up to her uncle to eat out of his hand.
And what about the wishes of local residents who had come to cherish the tranquillity of this bit of wilderness in the midst of the burgeoning city? Many of them wanted to keep the place just as it was.
Given such a situation, most bureaucrats will commission an independent assessment and opt for a compromise solution. That is precisely what the good burghers in the City of Vaughan did. Back in 1999, they approached David Waverman at ESG International, now Stantec Consulting. An arborist, heritage consultant and landscape architect, he and his research team began by examining the condition and health of the trees, and then searched archives and other repositories, checking family photographs, diaries and letters for any details that MacDonald might have recorded about the garden and its plants.
At first, Waverman thought the garden must have been located in the front yard and the house was the wall that forms the backdrop in the painting. That meant the garden had to run north-south, a theory that the painting, with its huge flopping sunflowers, disproved because sunflowers by their nature track the sun from east to west through the day.
The next clue to the garden's location came through family photographs supplied by Susan MacDonald, showing various aspects of the property including the wheat and alfalfa fields, the orchard and a sun-streaked image of an overgrown perennial garden in front of a horse barn. This photograph, along with a note from Thoreau MacDonald saying the garden was on the west side of the house and "shows the old horse stable in the background," gave Waverman and his colleagues enough information to guess the approximate location of the barn, which had burned down in the 1920s. The stone foundations had long since been covered over with brush and other plant material.
To be certain, Waverman asked the city of Vaughan to hire archeologist Martin Cooper to test the theory. Cooper, who lives in the area and was a frequent visitor to the property, knew how lush the vegetation was in high summer. Consequently he waited until late November, when the cold weather had withered the plants, and quickly spotted the rectangular outline of what might have been the foundations of the horse barn. "Dig there," he told his crew and sure enough the barn was uncovered.
Last Sunday, on the sort of clear sunny day just meant for planting bulbs, Waverman stood on the porch of the MacDonald homestead, along with representatives of the Ontario Historical Society, the artist's great-niece and other dignitaries, and gazed out at the lawn, the neatly dug flower beds, a few apple saplings, a collection of 100-year-old timbers suggesting the outline of the horse barn, a stone walkway through the property with inlaid stones representing the ruts from the original wagon tracks and a wild backdrop of trees and brush. There wasn't a flower in sight.
"I was always concerned that this would happen," Waverman confided after his presentation. "I kept saying, it is going to be annuals, it's going to be begonias," he joked.
Not so, says the City of Vaughan, which has spent $400,000 in historical research and construction on the property in the past five years. The tangled garden is ready to bloom again. All that's missing is a commitment from the local community to help undertake the planting and stewardship of the garden. And when might that happen? Why in the best of all gardening traditions -- next year.
Sandra Martin