He's one of the nation's leading antique plant specialists

Walking by Scott Kunst's house on Third Street on the Old West Side, you might guess that the owner had more than a passing interest in historic landscaping. Up front are a wrought-iron planter and carpet bedding, both authentic Victorian styles. Peering at the backyard, you can see a more relaxed, early twentieth-century garden with some of Kunst's favorite plants--early pinks, irises, peonies.

In fact, Kunst is a nationally recognized expert in old-fashioned plants. He runs a rapidly growing business, Old House Gardens, out of his home, with the help of his wife, Jane, their nine-year-old son, David, and a few part-time helpers in the busiest season.

Since he founded Old House Gardens in 1983, Kunst has invented his own career, taking what for many would be a hobby and finding ways to make it pay. An English teacher at Scarlett Middle School for the last nineteen years, he went down to half-time four years ago as his business began to take more of his time. Last spring he took the final leap, buying out his retirement in order to devote all his time to his business. "It's riskier all on my own," he says, "but I like the unpredictability."

An avid gardener since childhood, Kunst became interested in historic plants when he moved into an 1874 home in Ypsilanti's Depot Town area and tried to put in a garden that fit the house's age. He started with the remnants he found still there--a privet hedge, tiger lilies, and single white peonies--the botanical equivalent of antiques in the attic. The next step, trying to figure out what else should go with them, was more difficult.

Although there were many books on period house styles and furniture, he found very little on Victorian gardens. He ended up doing a lot of original research, scanning photographs of period homes to see what was planted in the yards, reading old magazines to see what plants were discussed, and hunting down out-of-print books and old seed catalogs.

Kunst received an enthusiastic response when he began sharing his knowledge of antique gardens. He has since lectured from Nantucket to Omaha and given advice on historic gardens all around the Midwest, including such prestigious sites as Greenfield Village and Meadowbrook. A recent project was the Bloomington, Illinois, garden of David Davis, a Supreme Court justice appointed by President Lincoln. Kunst traced the garden's history through letters from Davis's wife and a plan done by a great-nephew in the 1920's.

Kunst has been adept at finding his niche. Three years ago, when he began selling antique plants directly, he limited himself to bulbs because he knew that no other nursery was selling them and that the regular nurseries were eliminating more varieties every year.

Kunst's bulb varieties were first introduced anywhere from 1500 to 1920; he finds them in obscure nurseries around the country and even abroad. (After the fall of the Iron Curtain, he found a grower in Latvia who had three varieties of crocus that Kunst had read about but never seen.) He sorts bulbs in his basement and runs the mail-order business from an office at the back of the first floor. He doesn't grow any of the bulbs he sells, but he does use part of his garden and those of a few lucky neighbors to test them.

Once a beloved summer camp for Detroit Edison women, it's about to be replaced by a nursing home

"Like a summer camp, but with grown-up women," is how Mary Kay Bean, public relations officer for Detroit Edison, describes the original use of Vivienne Farm, which from 1911 to 1954 served as a rest and recreation spot for Edison's female employees. Located on East Huron River Drive just west of St. Joe's hospital, it was in more recent times Edison's Management Development Center. The property has been sold, and the building will soon be torn down to make way for a nursing home.

Detroit Edison obtained the land for Vivienne Farm in 1911, as part of their efforts to develop hydroelectric power along the Huron River. In assembling the land and the river rights needed for the Geddes Dam, the company bought the entire Barnes farm at Geddes and Dixboro, including the farmhouse. Because the farm was such a lovely place, Edison employees began to use the property for recreation.

Edison consolidated all its riverside land holdings into one company named Huron Farms and hired William Underdown, then of Cornell University, to manage and develop it. They kept some of the land as working farms in order to demonstrate the uses of electricity in agriculture.

There was an apple and cherry farm across Huron River Drive, where Washtenaw Community College is now, a peach farm near Delhi, and a model dairy farm on Whitmore Lake Road. On hilly land east of the Barton Dam, the company developed the Barton Hills subdivision. The first house built there was for Edison president Alex Dow and his wife, Vivienne.

According to the official history of Detroit Edison, Kilowatts at Work, by Raymond Miller, "Dow was too much a lover of nature to do unnecessary violence to natural beauty, and the contemporary national emphasis on conservation and the protection of natural resources attracted his approval and interest." U-M architecture dean Emil Lorch designed most of the local Edison buildings, including the Barton power station, downtown office buildings in both Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and the Dows' Barton Hills home. Frederick Law Olmsted, best known for designing Central Park in New York, was hired to advise on landscaping for the properties.

It was Vivienne Dow who suggested that the Barnes farmhouse be made into a recreation spot for female employees. At that time, paternalistic employers like Edison sponsored recreational clubs for almost every interest: stamps, photography, bridge, athletics, music, drama. The company built a boat club, a tennis club, and a rifle range for their employees' use. Although some of these clubs were co-ed, most of their members were men. Vivienne Farm was established to give the women something of their own.

Soon women from the whole Edison service area, from Bad Axe to Jackson, were coming to Vivienne Farm for, as Miller put it, "an excursion into rural America at a completely nominal cost."

U-M architecture dean Emil Lorch designed "the lodge" for Detroit Edison after the original farmhouse burned down in 1912. It will soon be demolished to build a nursing home (below).

Longtime Edison employee Oneta King explains that "Vivienne Farm was needed, because they didn't let married women work at Edison until the Fifties." Some of the single women who worked for the company lived in boardinghouses, but the younger ones lived at home with their parents. They could go to Vivienne Farm for a weekend or a week without worrying their parents, who knew they were well cared for and well chaperoned by the resident housemother.

Mary Schlecht, whose mother worked at Edison, remembers hearing that Vivienne Farm was a delightful place and that women had wonderful times there. In a 1974 Sesquicentennial Journal article, Vema Parker, wife of Edison's then-president, James Parker, wrote, "The prospect of taking a train to Ypsilanti, being met by Miss Jenney McCarthy, who with her beautiful white hair and dotted Swiss dress, met them in a Model A Ford, became a highlight in the lives of many young girls." According to Bean's research, camp activities included boating, horseback riding, swimming, tennis, croquet, and day trips into Ann Arbor.

Shortly after Vivienne Farm opened, a fire destroyed the farmhouse and a nearby pavilion. None of the sixteen young women staying there was hurt, but their wardrobes were destroyed--and later replaced at company expense. Lorch was then hired to design the building that is there now.

The new building, sometimes called "the lodge," was completed in 1914. Barbara Wolfgang, whose grandmother and mother both worked there, describes it as an "awesome house." As a child, Wolfgang used to slide down the polished wooden banister of its large open stairway. Downstairs was a dining room that seated about twenty, the living room, or parlor (later used as the conference room), a library-den off the main foyer, and a screened back porch that looked out onto a natural area running down to the Huron River. Upstairs there were seven bedrooms, one a triple, the rest mostly doubles.

On the grounds were a tennis court, swimming pool, and putting green, as well as a greenhouse, all now removed or abandoned. There was room to play croquet or just walk around. Earlier pictures also show extensive gardens. It is very likely that Olmsted at least advised on the grounds, since he was then at work on other Edison properties in the area.

By the 1950's, chaperoned farm vacations had lost much of their appeal. At that point, Edison remodeled the lodge into a conference center for employee training. Retired Edison employee Gage Cooper remembers, "It was isolated from business operations, so you could concentrate on what you were doing." At the elegant conference center, attendees slept in the upstairs bedrooms, ate three good meals in the dining room, and in their free time walked on the well-kept grounds or played cards or pool in the basement.

But as car travel became more common, people began to commute to training sessions. In 1978 the housekeeper position at Vivienne Farm was abolished, and meals were catered from then on. Use continued to decline, and in the last six or seven years it has hardly been used at all. Explains Bean, "It's not large enough for what we do today. Most [people] today are learning technology, and there is not that ability there."

Edison considered expanding the house but in the end decided to sell the property. The buyer is the Health Care and Retirement Corporation, headquartered in Toledo, which plans to demolish the existing buildings to construct a single-story, 180-bed nursing and rehabilitation center. Although it's a sad loss of a historic building and landscape, the new use is certainly a natural complement to nearby hospitals. It is scheduled to be completed by the spring of 1997.

An auto heir's vision of the rural good life, it was a social success but a financial flop

Three miles south of Saline, on Milkey Road, a series of boarded-up houses and deserted farm buildings mark the site that from 1932 to 1953 was Saline Valley Farms. "No Trespassing" signs on trees and fences bar visitors from what was once a busy cooperative farm.

Saline Valley Farms was the brainchild of Harold Gray, "a rich man with rich ideas," according to former resident Ruth Hagen. Gray's grandfather was a practical lawyer who made a fortune as the first president of Ford Motor Company. Harold, on the other hand, was a pacifist and economic dreamer who decided to use his large inheritance to try an alternative method of farming. In interviews at the time, Gray said his idea was to show that by combining agriculture with on-site canning and marketing activities, "a group of people living on the land and working in close cooperation could achieve a standard of living and a degree of security above that of the average farm family."

"Man Looking at Chicken on Lap," Saline Valley Farms

Gray developed his ideas of agricultural economy while studying economics at Harvard (he earned a B.A. and an M.A. and did further graduate work) and as a missionary in China. In the early days of the Depression, he decided to try to put his ideas of farming into action, and after a year of searching found an abandoned 596-acre farm that met his purposes: rural enough for low taxes but near to markets and also to the cultural advantages of Ann Arbor.

Gray's first recruit was Harold Vaughn. Vaughn, a former county extension agent who had retrained as a social worker, became the farm manager. "We arrived on barely passable roads," Vaughn later wrote of his first day, April 4, 1932. "The old farm house and west barn stood empty. Loose doors banged noisily in the wind. The furnace was broken, the water system didn't work and the electricity was off."

Together, Gray and Vaughn found people, eventually twenty families, to move to the farm and turn it into a working operation.

With a lot of work, plus a massive infusion of Gray's capital, the farm was soon transformed: roads built, a lake formed by damming the creek that ran through the property, fields laid out, and orchards planted. Houses for the workers were built with the occupants in mind and varied depending on the size of the family.

"Hog Barn," Saline Valley Farms

The first ones were dubbed "Detroit News" houses because they were taken from plans published in the newspaper, but two of the later ones were designed by U-M professor of architecture George Brigham.

Behind the original farmhouse, a store was built with a recreation hall upstairs that was used for square dances, potlucks, and plays. Attached at the rear of the store was the canning factory; Saline Valley Farms sold its canned goods under its own label, which featured a picture of the twin-siloed main barn.

Gray liked to have the best of everything. The cows were purebred Guernseys that produced very rich milk; the pigs made excellent sausage. The chickens were Plymouth Barred Rocks that Hagen bred carefully, using the trap nest method so he could account for every egg.

The produce and animal products were preserved in the canning factory, the domain of Marian Vaughn, Harold Vaughn's wife. She was a strong force on the farm, organizing cultural events, setting up a summer camp for the members' children, and acting as peacemaker when her husband and Gray, although friends, periodically fought.

J. L. Hudson's food shop was a major customer for Saline Valley Farms products, but the main mode of distribution was through delivery routes that Gray had developed out of his own practice of taking fresh produce to his friends in the Detroit suburbs. Gray himself and several other delivery men would deliver fresh dairy products, produce, canned goods, and meat on a regular schedule.

Although it produced delicious products, Saline Valley Farms was never a financial success, according to Don Campbell, who kept the books. "The whole operation was too expensive to make any money. It never even broke even." Also, although it was called a co-op, it never really was. Day-to-day decisions were discussed at staff meetings, but no one doubted that Gray had the final say. "My husband and the general manager didn't always agree with him," recalls Ruth Hagen, "but he was the boss."

"Farm Buildings," Saline Valley Farms

Although inflexible about the farm operation, Gray was tolerant of most other ideas. Political philosophies ran the gamut from anarchism to Republicanism, and religious beliefs from atheism to extreme piety.

During World War II the farm's diversity and reputation for tolerance increased as they made room for Japanese-Americans whom the government had let out of concentration camps but still wanted to keep an eye on, conscientious objectors paroled from the federal penitentiary in Milan, and European Jewish refugees. Says Daniel Katz, a U-M social psychology professor who lived on the farm for a year during the post-World War II housing shortage, "You wouldn't want a more stimulating group to talk to, or kinder."

After the war, wages went up dramatically and Gray had trouble finding workers for what he was willing to pay.

One by one, crops had proved to be uneconomical and were discontinued. Canning stopped during World War II when rationing made it impossible to guarantee orders. The farm became a shadow of its former self, and in 1953 he decided to stop the whole operation.

After selling the farm equipment, Gray continued to live on the farm with his second wife, Meg, in the larger of the Brigham-designed homes. The farm was turned into a youth hostel, the first one west of the Alleghenies. It was run for many years by Johnny Rule, an English-born jack-of-all-trades who had worked in the farm's poultry department, and his wife, May. People from all over the world and local groups like the scouts enjoyed the beautiful scenery, the lake, and the rural atmosphere.

In 1969, Gray, by then seventy-five, sold the farm to Teamsters Local 299 for a park for their members, but they found it too expensive to operate. Gray died three years later.

Many offspring of the farm families still live in the area and cherish memories of childhoods full of freedom and yet busy, helping from maple syrup season to apple picking time. Says Shirley Hagen Grossman, "I had an idyllic childhood, surrounded by an extended family of twenty. If I fell down and scraped my knee, I just ran to the nearest house." Doris Rule Bable agrees, saying, "Maybe it was a failure financially, but it was a great success in living and in personal relationships; very satisfying to the soul."

[Photo caption from original print edition]: Saline Valley Farms manager Harold Vaughn (left) and founder Harold Gray.

[Photo caption from original print edition:]: Gray sold the farm to a union local in 1969, but it proved too expensive to keep open as a park. It's now deserted.

Primroses, Chinese chestnuts, and pinochle in the boiler room Since 1960, the U-M Botanical Gardens have been on Dixboro Road straddling Superior and Ann Arbor townships. But for forty-five years before that, they were in the heart of what is now Ann Arbor’s south side. The fifty-two-acre gardens off Iroquois, now Woodbury Gardens apartments, played an important part in university life from 1916 to 1961. “It was not landscaped for beauty but for [growing] specific plants,” recalls Chuck Cares, who later landscaped the present gardens. “There were pretty plants, of course, but no aesthetic principle was involved.” “Plants were grown for research, university classes, and decorations for university functions,” explains Dorothy Blanchard, whose mother, Frieda Blanchard, was assistant director from 1919 to 1956. Though “it was not a place for the general public,” Blanchard says, “visitors did occasionally come out and were shown around by Mother.”

The original botanical gardens were right on campus in front of the old library, about where the Graduate Library now sits.

The university’s first botanical garden was planted on the Diag in 1897, near what is today the Graduate Library. In 1906 it moved to the newly acquired Arboretum. In 1913, finding the Arb’s hilly terrain not conducive to growing plants in controlled conditions, the university bought the Iroquois site. Harry Gleason, the new garden’s first director, wrote that it was “located immediately beyond the city limits south of Ann Arbor, near the Packard street road, and comprises twenty acres of level fertile land.” As surrounding parcels were purchased, the gardens grew to 51.72 acres. Harley H. Bartlett replaced Gleason in 1919. “The chief thing that attracted me to the University of Michigan before I knew what a generally delightful place Ann Arbor was, was the new botanical gardens, which would provide perhaps the best facility in the country for work in genetics and plant breeding,” Bartlett wrote in his 1923 Harvard alumni report. Bartlett was born in Montana in 1886, graduated from Harvard with a chemistry degree, and then worked as a chemical biologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. While in Washington he became interested in the work of Dutch botanist Hugo DeVries on evolution and began to research the genetics of genus Oenothera, an evening primrose. He accepted an assistant professorship at the U-M in 1915 and, as soon as he could, planted rows of Oenothera at the new botanical gardens to continue his research. “The development of the garden has been my chief interest since coming to Michigan,” Bartlett claimed in the alumni report--an impressive claim, considering his many competing interests. “A Renaissance man, he [Bartlett] knew a little about everything,” recalls Ed Voss, emeritus professor of botany. “If you asked a question, he’d give you a reference off the top of his head.” In addition to directing the gardens, Bartlett chaired the botany department, taught classes, frequently traveled to Asia and Latin America to collect rare plants, published prolifically, and was much in demand as a consultant to federal agencies. Bartlett’s secret was that he had accepted the gardens’ directorship on the condition that graduate student Frieda Cobb be appointed the assistant director. While Bartlett dealt with the public and with the university administration, Cobb managed the gardens’ day-to-day operations, taking over completely during Bartlett’s frequent absences. “She kept things at an even keel,” recalls Voss. Frieda Cobb had come to the U-M at Bartlett’s suggestion and was working on her Ph.D., continuing his Oenothera research. They had met through her brother, Victor Cobb, a classmate of Bartlett’s at Harvard. She arrived in Ann Arbor in 1916 and in 1920 was the first of Bartlett’s students to earn her doctorate. Two years later she married Frank Blanchard, a herpetologist whom she had met in graduate school. The actual work of growing the plants was done by a series of excellent gardeners, the last of whom, from 1935 on, was Walter Kleinschmidt, who was promoted to superintendent. Part of his job was tending the rare plants brought back from various expeditions. “He was good at growing plants--discovering what was needed. For instance, he figured out how to grow ferns from spores,” recalls Dorothy Blanchard. Kleinschmidt lived with his wife and daughter in a house on the grounds. He supervised about four other gardeners, who took responsibility for specific greenhouses. “The workers, Walter and his group, played pinochle in the boiler room every noon,” recalls Peter Kaufman, who was hired as curator of the gardens in 1956. The gardens closest to the greenhouse were arranged in a big oval and were dubbed “the graveyard,” according to Kaufman, “because of their arrangement in horizontal beds divided by family and genus.” The land beyond the graveyard was used for specific research projects, such as Eileen Erlanson’s wild roses, Kenneth Jones’s ragweed, and Stanley Cain’s delphinium. Dow Baxter, a forest pathologist from the forestry department, grew Chinese chestnuts, trying to come up with a disease-resistant strain to replace the American chestnut. Felix Gustafson’s tomato plants loom large in everyone’s memory, because he gave his extras to staff members. “I’d take them and eat them off the vine. They were marvelous,” recalls local pediatrician Mark Hildebrandt, who worked at the gardens as a teenager. Blanchard, who rode her bike to work before getting a car, learned to ride no-handed so she could eat tomatoes on the way home. The greenhouses provided a year-round source of plants for botany classes and faculty research. Flowers were also grown there for special university occasions, such as commencements or honors convocations or visits from dignitaries like Haile Selassie and the queen of the Netherlands. The nucleus of the gardens’ collection of cacti and other succulents was assembled by Elzada Clover, a botany professor who had done work in the Southwest and Central America. In January 1938 Bartlett recorded in his diary that “Elzada Clover has a wild plan for a trip through the can[y]on of the Colorado. She assures me it will be a truly scientific venture.” Clover and a friend, Mary Lois Jotter, completed their “wild plan,” earning the distinction of being the first women to make the trip by boat. In 1952 Clover added another first: being the first person to develop and teach an entire class at the botanical gardens. It was a very popular undergraduate course, and according to a history put out by the botanical gardens, “through it many students were led to concentrate in botany.” In 1955 Bartlett reached retirement age and was succeeded by A. Geoffrey Norman. Five years later the gardens moved to their present site on Dixboro. “We moved as many trees as we could,” recalls Peter Kaufman. “Some spreading junipers didn’t take, but most of what we moved did. We took all the rare stuff that we had collected.” The new gardens were named after regent Fred Matthaei Sr., who donated the land. The 350-acre Matthaei gardens are seven times as large as the Iroquois site and have more than twice as much greenhouse space--44,000 square feet. The other main difference is that at the present gardens there is much more public involvement, with hiking trails, adult education classes, meeting space, and an active friends group. The Iroquois site remained empty for most of the 1960s. Helen Corey, who lived on Iroquois in a house backing up to the gardens, used to walk her dogs on the deserted site which she remembers as “an oasis in the middle of the city.” Although the gardens were in ruins and the buildings falling apart, she recalls, there were still “nice trees, some fruit-bearing.” In 1969 the first stage of the Woodbury Gardens apartments was built. In honor of the former use, the developers named the streets Aster and Wisteria. Residents still enjoy at least nine kinds of trees originally planted in the botanical gardens, including Dow’s Chinese chestnuts.

[Photo caption from book]: The original botanical gardens were right on campus in front of the old library, about where the Graduate Library now sits. “Courtesy Bentley Historical Library” [Photo caption from book]: Dorothy Blanchard’s kindergarten class looking at the giant chrysanthemums in one of the Iroquois site greenhouses, 1930s. Although not generally open to the public, Blanchard obviously had pull since her mother was the assistant director. “Courtesy Dorothy Blanchard”