Prairie Gardens — Jens Jensen

Jensen planted native oaks, maples, and elms at the Ford estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, Michigan, a design he completed in 1932.

Jensen at The Clearing, his Wisconsin home and school, in the 1940s.

In 1907 Jensen built a huge greenhouse in Garfield Park and inventively landscaped the interior to suggest Chicago's prehistoric flora. The Fern Room still enchants with its murmuring cascade, fern-fringed paths, and the scent of ginger lilies.

Early morning sun and the autumn leaves of sugar maples gild the meadow at Edsel and Eleanor Ford's Grosse Pointe Shores estate. As was Jensen's custom, the house is masked by trees until the entrance road, which winds along the shore of Lake St. Clair, has almost reached it. But visibility meant security in the 1930s, so Jensen did not add his usual underplanting of native shrubs.

Jensen put his trademark council rings — circular stone seats centered on a fire pit — in parks like Columbus (in the '20s), to draw people together. Children can gather in them for games or storytelling, adults for conversation or picnics. On private estates, placed to catch a view or set in shady groves and carpeted with wild violets, the rings offer a sociable alternative to single garden seats and benches. Jensen studied rocks as carefully as he did plants, and tried to build each ring with appropriate local stone.

Some clients sited their estates on the rugged bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan north of Chicago.

To draw people out into this landscape, Jensen cut clearings and paths in the woods.

On a property still in private hands, only a formal gateway indicates that a house might lie behind the trees.

Stone paths and steps near the house become turf or bark trails as they twist through woods and across ravines.

Jensen often turned poorly drained areas into pools to reflect the moonlight. This one, recently rediscovered at the Rosenwald estate, now Rosewood Park, in Highland Park, Illinois, was originally edged with wild roses and iris.

Budding maples encircle one of eight council rings in the \\"living memorial\\" on the shores of a reservoir in Springfield, Illinois. The site\\'s topography suggested to Jensen wide lanes of redbud, native plum, and other trees on high ground, and masses of sun-loving flowers on the bright lower levels. He sought to use plants from every part of Illinois in which Lincoln had lived.

Rockwork under construction along the Rouge River at Fair Lane, the Henry Ford estate in Dearborn, Michigan, c.1915, shows how his masons set stone in horizontal layers with deeply recessed joints and pockets for plants. Jensen found "a remarkable nobility in rocks, weatherbeaten and worn by water of past ages." He was particularly taken with the stratified limestone bluffs cut by Midwestern rivers, which inspired his own designs.

In turning a sandbar into an island bird sanctuary that also shelters the Fords' boat lagoon, left, he speeded nature up: such islands often form over time in local lakes.

Most of Jensen's palette was drawn from local flora. He studied nature's combinations and often re-created them, believing that plants grew better and looked better with their natural companions.

As an artist, Jensen did not hesitate to rearrange natural combinations, clustering a single species in some places, spacing it rhythmically in others. Trillium grandiflorum and Mertensia virginiana are normally mixed with other wildflowers in Michigan woods. But at the Edsel Fords', Jensen gave them a stronger presence by massing them separately.

Birches in Autumn at the Ford Estate in Grosse Point Shores