Doris Duke Gardens Close
By Hannah Lepow | Online Only | June 23, 2008
Since 1964, the glass indoor gardens at Duke Farms in Hillsborough, N.J., have attracted visitors from across the country to admire the garden's 11 rooms, each designed to display traditional horticulture from around the world. However, in late May, the Duke Farms Foundation closed the greenhouse to the public indefinitely. Nearly 3,000 people have written to the Duke Farms Foundation trustees and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine to protest the closure of the farm's most beloved attraction.
The closure is part of a broad rehabilitation underway at Duke Farms, the first phase of which is slated to be completed in 2010. "We are in the midst of a transformation," says Karen Kessler, spokesperson for the Duke Farms Foundation, and notes that closing the indoor gardens is part of Duke Farm's overall goal to be as energy-efficient as possible.
"We will probably be the greenest location in the Northeast. We are going to be a real model for environmental stewardship," Kessler says.
Plans for the rehabilitation include a new orientation center (six times the size of the current one) and the renovation of an 1898 conservatory, both of which will be brought up to LEED standards. There will also be new outdoor gardens with a focus on native plants. Though Kessler declined to comment on the closing of the indoor gardens, she says that the overall plans for the future of Duke Farms fit with Doris Duke's philosophies and love of nature. "Duke was an environmentalist well before her time," Kessler adds. "That is really what launched this plan."
Tobacco magnate James Buchanan Duke began working on Duke Farms in 1893. His daughter, Doris Duke, personally designed the 60,000-square-foot glass-enclosed gardens to represent horticulture from countries such as England, Japan, France, and China. She often gave private tours to famous friends, including Elizabeth Taylor, Burt Reynolds, and Jackie Kennedy with her daughter, Caroline. (Employees remember this visit in particular because Caroline ran through the precisely raked sand in the Zen garden.)
"Every school in New Jersey should be visiting this," says Petra Ross-Macdonald, a biologist and environmentalist from Pennington, N.J., who established the Web site www.savedukegardens.org. "This is a major tourist destination that was never advertised. But there's no reason why 50,000 people a year couldn't go through them."
Ross-Macdonald says that, ideally, the Duke Farms Foundation would use an environmentally-friendly heating and cooling system that would allow the gardens to remain open, while keeping with the Farm's overall goal of energy efficiency. Until then, she holds out hope that the gardens will one day be reopened: "[If] all they're doing is removing the plants and leaving an empty shell, it can be restored if the large trees are preserved. This is not the end necessarily so long as the structures are not demolished."
Subscribe to the Today's News RSS feed
Comments
