Sketch #15: Roses
Sketch #15: Roses
Summer People, Some Are Not
In 1962, my father Jean finally found a buyer for the Walk-Over Shoe company and made plans to move our family from Brockton down to Cape Cod year-round. He celebrated by buying himself a new Austin Healey 3000 and decided it would be great fun to take the wife and kids on a six-week trip to Europe in the fall. Friends told him that my little brother David and I were too young to benefit, but Jean said that it would cost more to house us with a nanny than to take us with them, so we came along.
The winterization of the Cape house was to begin after Labor Day — nothing could be allowed to interfere with our summers on the water. The project involved doubling the size of the cottage by digging out enough dirt to add a basement apartment with a third bathroom and a laundry, a large new living room above, and central heating. The plan was that the work would be completed within two months, but at some point, Jean realized that there was no way that the house would be ready by the time we returned from abroad in late October. Jean turned to his mother Ethel Keith, who lived right across the road from us, to see if she would ask her immediate neighbor and bridge partner Jennie Webster to let us stay in her house for the winter. By all accounts, Mrs. Webster could not have been more gracious.
The Webster house on Quissett Avenue was a local landmark. Pink stucco covered with creeping ivy and bright ultramarine “Webster Blue” trim, curved windows, shake shingle roof and three turreted towers, the mansion stood high above the harbor and looked like a Disney castle. This was the summer home of Jane and Edwin Webster who bought the house in 1905 from next door neighbors William and Ella Shearer. The estate came with a matching turreted carriage house across the street with living quarters above for the chauffeur and gardener, dock, and glorious lawns that swept down past the tennis court to the bathhouse on the beach below.
Inside, a circular staircase ascending to a long hall of second-floor bedrooms dominated the grand entryway. The house featured a round card room with a green felt table, a second floor bathroom with a small fireplace and an enormous porcelain, iron-footed tub with faucets and drain on the sides. A grown man could stretch out without the hot pipes on his feet. Servants quarters on the third floor accessed the kitchen by narrow back stairs. I spent countless hours building model ships and cars in the casual room in the basement, warmed in the winter by the mighty coal-fired furnace nearby.
The Webster holdings included a large estate in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, another estate on Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire, and a magnificent townhouse on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. The financing for it all resulted from the extraordinary success of the American engineering company Stone & Webster, founded in 1889. Charles A. Stone and Edwin S. Webster met in 1884 and became close friends while studying electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.I.T. Just like the birth of Microsoft a hundred years later, they formed the Massachusetts Electrical Engineering Company as an electrical testing lab and consulting firm based in Stoughton, Massachusetts. The twenty-two-year-old working-class guys renamed it Stone & Webster in 1893, establishing the earliest electrical engineering consulting firms in the United States.
The fledgling company's first major project was the construction of a hydroelectric plant for the New England Paper Company in 1890. Following the panic of 1893, Stone & Webster purchased the Nashville Electric Light and Power Co. for two or three thousand dollars and sold it a few years later for $500,000 after modernization and refitting.
At the start of the new century, Stone & Webster operating operating moved into operating streetcar systems in cities across the United States including Seattle, Houston and Dallas. Their long list of projects, partnerships and subsidiaries throughout the USA is broad and deep. Over the next two decades, the company expanded into engineering, construction, and plant operation and management services — from hydroelectric plants to American nuclear power. In June of 1942, James C. Marshall engaged Stone & Webster as the principal contractor for building plants and providing the required fissionable material for the Manhattan Project.
Edwin S. Webster’s tremendous success enabled Jennie Webster to indulge in her passion — roses. In addition to being a generous philanthropist and patron of the arts, Jennie was an avid horticulturist. She filled the two-story windows of her double bow-front Federalist-style home on Commonwealth Avenue with flowers all year long, delighting drivers and passers-by with kaleidoscopic displays of color even in the middle of freezing, snow-crusted Boston winters.
In 1929, construction began on the hillside to the south of the main house in Quissett for what was to become the Edwin S. Webster Rose Gardens. Jennie Webster commissioned landscape architect Herbert Kellaway of Boston to design terraced gardens of pathways, hedgerows, flower beds, trellises, statues, seating areas, croquet pitch, gazebo, and fountain. Jennie’s gardens included a variety of rose cultivars grouped by color or type, with companion perennials, shrubs, evergreens, indigenous beech trees, elms, and oaks. Annuals — petunias, zinnias, pinks, and alyssum —complemented the fragrant blooms from English Antiques to hybrid tea roses.
Between the mansion and the central fountain nestled the glorious Blue Garden, an ode to Mrs. Webster’s favorite color. Scottish master gardener Peter Arnott planted grape hyacinths, deep-blue lobelia, azure delphiniums, blue ageratum, violet-blue lupines, Canterbury bells, lavender, soft blue globe thistles and royal blue petunias. Lilies and stock offered white contrast to the dominant blue.
Cape Cod, New England’s hooked peninsula, juts out 65 miles into the Atlantic Ocean like a flexing arm. Winters can be harsh on this exposed moraine of low scrub oak, briars and seagrass that grow in the Cape’s chalky soil. In September, the southern breeze and warm Gulfstream waters from April to August give way to howling Nor’easters. Close to the water, blizzards bring horizontal sheets of frozen sleet to pelt the shore. Frigid blasts of damp, salt air pummel everything in their path. Squalls of icy snow obliterate treacherous roads and form crusted mounds against houses and trees. In the age of spark plugs and carburetors, cars won’t start in the damp, cold mornings. Raw-cheeked children in mittens and boots huddle together out of the wind, stamp their feet, straining to see their yellow school bus emerge from the fog.
To sustain her marvelous garden a hundred yards from the beach, Jennie Webster engaged horticulturalist Harriet Foote, famous for the rose gardens she had designed in Grosse Pointe, Michigan for Mrs. Henry Ford. Mrs. Foote introduced an ingenious technique for grafting Jennie Webster’s specialty roses onto the roots of the rosehips that grow wild along Cape Cod’s beaches. Before the bitter winter months arrived, the gardeners emptied the blue-bottomed fountain, stacked hay bales, and installed enormous, custom-built plywood boxes to shield her beauties from the elements.
Our winterized home was finally finished. It took me less than sixty seconds to run down my driveway, cross the road, duck through the hedge, and stand in the middle of Jennie Webster’s magical Blue Garden. When shadows melted at dusk, edges softened, outlines disappeared, and colors blended together as one spectral event. Through the branches of sturdy pitch pine, I saw the harbor lights twinkle to the west and heard the sound of waves lapping at the pebbly shore. Drawn by the splash of the fountain in front of the gazebo, I walked barefoot down sets of marble steps, crunching gravel pathways with grass-stained summer-toughened soles. Embraced in a satin ocean of scarlets, pinks, crimsons and reds, oranges, violets and lavender, soft blends of ivories and pale yellows, I swam in a perfume sea of bliss.
The iron gates were closed. The lovely ladies by twos and threes in their long summer dresses were gone. Every day they had strolled the gravel maze, pausing every three steps, bending over to take deep breaths, reading the tidy little plaques, and delighting to find an old friend or gladly discover a new one.
Smelling roses is a uniquely personal experience, raising spirits, instilling calm. Luscious, nuanced, romantic, surprising, no two people perceive scent exactly the same. Damask, Tea, Myrrh, Fruit, and Musk, the five main fragrances of rose. Strong, intoxicating Damask roses are sweet and nostalgic, evoking memories of a bygone era. Earthy, tar-y Tea roses bear essences of violet, nutmeg, nasturtium, and fruit. Myrrh roses, not for everyone, bring notes of sweet and spicy anise. Fruit tones carry layers of raspberry, lemon, apricot, peach, berry or clover. Musk roses, simultaneously sweet and spicy, echo meadows and honey. The lover of flowers embraces boundless possibilities with the scent of a single rose.
In those days, after Labor Day the wealthy summer people boarded up their grand homes and returned to the cities, leaving elderly caretakers behind to keep an eye on things. But we were year-rounders now. Mrs. Webster’s rose garden sat in the center of more than thirty acres of private land. With our seasonal neighbors gone, my little pack of friends and I turned the abandoned grounds into a sprawling playground, roaming wherever we wished without a care.
The gardener’s winter boxes became our club houses and forts. We rearranged their bales of hay like a giant game of Jenga to make tunnels and secret caves with chimneys for scouts to shinny up and take a look around. We climbed trees, flew kites, played football, baseball, flashlight tag and Capture the Flag. We shot the elms with our bows and arrows. We sledded down wind-swept hills. We ran around and around, ducking and hiding in the evergreen shrubs and dwarf pines with our toy machine guns imagining we were small platoons fighting the Germans in the forests of France. We never broke into any houses, but we dug up the rusty, iron T-wrench that opened the valve of Mrs. Webster’s fountain just to see how high we could make the water go.
When we wanted to fly, we’d head to the Houston house and jump on the trampoline, which was wedged into a narrow strip of grass between the back of the house and a sudden drop to the harbor fifty feet below. We climbed up to the balustrade of the veranda and leaped into the air, pulling up our legs to land on our bums twelve feet below, then bouncing up as high as we could. Any miscalculation on the trampoline would catapult you over the rosehips to your death on the jagged rocks below.
Two years after Jennie Webster’s passing in 1969, her descendants demolished the fabled mansion and razed her gardens to the ground. A grass-covered plot graced by a few remaining trees is all that is left behind.
