Garden Guru By Susan Higgins
Richmond Magazine February 2025 Feature
Early-20th-Century Richmond Landscape Design Star Charles F. Gillette Created a New Genre of Garden Design That’s Still Revered Today
"You can’t live in Richmond and not admire him. You won’t find a garden in Richmond that isn’t influenced by him. You can’t be a landscape designer in Richmond and not be inspired by him," says Wendell Welder, owner of Wendell Welder Landscape Design. Such is the enduring influence of Richmond landscape architect Charles F. Gillette.
Gillette spent his life transforming green spaces in Virginia and North Carolina into meticulously conceived gardens. He completed more than 2,500 commissions over his 56-year career, an impressive body of work that included the campuses of William & Mary, Radford University, the University of Mary Washington and James Madison University, as well as the grounds of Reynolds Metals Company’s international headquarters, Ethyl Corporation’s corporate campus at Gambles Hill Park, and St. Joseph’s Villa on Richmond’s North Side.
(Caption: This is the East Hall of the Virginia House, one of Charles Gillette’s garden designs at the Windsor Farms estate.)
Gillette’s impact also lives on in the grounds of many Virginia historic homes, including the gardens at Agecroft Hall and Virginia House, both crafted from reconstructed English manor houses that were meticulously taken apart, shipped to Richmond and rebuilt as private homes at the center of the Windsor Farms neighborhood. But he was at his best as a planner of private estates. In his book Genius in the Garden, George C. Longest credits Gillette with the creation of 378 residential projects in Virginia, 198 of which were in Richmond. He was responsible for the look of the Windsor Farms neighborhood as well as many other distinctive properties along River Road, Cary Street Road and Monument Avenue. In 1918, Gillette converted an antebellum farm into a charming residential enclave that today is known as Henrico’s historic Chatham Hills neighborhood.
Gillette inherited his knowledge of plants from his father, a farmer and herbalist who often took his son on rounds through the countryside as he attended to his patients. Though finances prevented him from acquiring a formal education, Gillette was an ardent reader, eventually amassing a significant collection of books about horticulture and landscape design. He took his first job in landscape design in the Boston-based office of leading landscape architect Warren H. Manning, who sent him to Richmond in 1913 to supervise the completion of what is now the campus of the University of Richmond.
In 1912, a wealthy patron financed a two-month tour of the major parks and gardens of Ireland, England, and France to deepen Gillette’s professional studies. The experience was transformative. Returning to Richmond after the tour, he opened his own practice, putting down roots in a city whose gardens would come to be defined by his signature style. Gillette blended the traditional formal gardens of the grand early 17th centuries with new designs, reflecting cool geometric stone walls with the adaptation of 18th-century British naturalism. It was a mixture of influences that he populated with plants that thrived in Richmond’s hot, humid climate.
In the early part of the 20th century, Richmond was primed for the talents of a gifted young landscape architect. Owning a country house surrounded by elaborate gardens came into vogue just as the city was recovering from the post-Civil War economy. Wealthy residents were building homes in the Ginter Park, Highland Park, and Windsor Farms neighborhoods. They wanted grand gardens to complement their elegant new homes.
A Gillette garden is more than just an artful arrangement of plants. There is a narrative quality to his work, articulated in the visual vocabulary of the natural world. Broad, open spaces are juxtaposed against intimate garden “rooms.” Decorative open spaces united enclosed spaces with fountains, sundials, and statuary for a sense of purpose. Formal plantings are arranged in structural symmetry and furnished with sculptures or benches. Spring bulbs planted by his wood-edged beds bloom in harmony with Virginia cedar, azalea, camellia, crepe myrtle, daffodil, and yew.
Spaces were imposing, intimate, and unpretentious. Eventually, Gillette’s aesthetic became a regional aesthetic known as “the Virginia garden.”
In 1954, at the request of Virginia Gov. Thomas B. Stanley, Gillette was commissioned to reimagine the circa 1813 plantings on the south side of Virginia’s Executive Mansion as a formal garden suitable for entertaining. Gillette chose traditional elements for his design to complement the home’s Federal-period architecture. Brick walkways, terraces, and lawns flanked by boxwood-edged beds embraced a private oasis, removed from the formality of Capitol Square and downtown Richmond. The Garden Club of Virginia restored the garden in 1999.
The boxwoods that anchor so many of Richmond’s gardens are a hallmark of Gillette’s work. He defined spaces by molding boxwood hedges like living architecture. “Weider notes, ‘and then planted perennials in contrast to their dark glossy background.’ Gillette borrowed his beloved boxwood from Virginia’s early gardening traditions, combining it with the classic landscapes that he had discovered abroad.
Gillette’s ability to integrate architecture into its environment was masterful. At Virginia House in Windsor Farms, he designed a series of descending terraces and pools along the challenging downhill slope to connect the building to its surroundings. The University of Richmond campus owes its serene, secluded atmosphere to the trees and shrubbery Gillette used as natural screening. At Reynolds Metals, now headquarters to Altria, he used plants to blend the building’s rigid lines into its parklike landscape. “He had a sympathy for the land,” Weider says, “a way of collaborating with it, leading you through a space on brick walkways, over elevation changes, into open view sheds and densely planted gardens.”
Much of Gillette’s original work has been meticulously restored by its present-day owners, who are often able to refer to his original plans—many of which have been preserved in the Library of Virginia Special Collections. The Garden Club of Virginia alone is responsible for the restoration of five public gardens across the state. His legacy also lives on in the work of a new generation of designers who have been inspired to incorporate his blend of formal and naturalistic elements with their surrounding architecture and environment. So steeped is the commonwealth in Gillette’s artful aesthetic that it has become synonymous with the idea of a garden itself.
