Sara Butler, Associate Professor Roger Williams University
Charles Adam Platt's 1902 design for a Country Place Era estate at North Farm in Bristol, Rhode Island, equally merits attention as a precocious effort of landscape preservation. Platt's Renaissance Revival gardens incorporated, as a valued relic, a portion of George Rogers Hall's notable nineteenth century collection of Japanese trees and shrubs. While Hall is well known in horticultural circles as the first American importer of Japanese plants to the United States, his gardens and their layouts have received little attention. This paper explores Hall's gardening life and examines Platt's deferential preservation of the seminal, border-shattering collection of exotics in his turn-of-the-century landscape design work at North Farm.
