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SCHOOL TOURS & PROGRAMS
Sarah's Garden Tour
A hands-on program for school children, featuring gardening in the
Victorian era and Sarah Davis’s heirloom garden, is being developed
for field trips in the spring of 2005.
In 1871, Sarah Walker Davis planned for her new home
an ornamental flower garden, which she named the Upper Garden. The
house and upper garden were situated in the midst of a vast,
1200-acre estate containing pastureland, an orchard, a vegetable
garden, and numerous outbuildings, including a carriage barn,
foaling shed, barn/stable and wood house. Today, what remains of
the original suburban estate (approximately 4.1 acres) is in the
process of being restored. Remarkably, the garden that Sarah
designed still stands at the southeast corner of the property, a
silent testimony to her achievements.
The David Davis Mansion Foundation and the Illinois
Historic Preservation Agency have teamed up to provide funding for
this restoration.
The goal of the Upper Garden Restoration project is
to restore Sarah’s garden so that it will contain the descendents of
many of the original plants in the original locations where Sarah
placed them. Horticultural historians have conducted research in
the Davis Family papers and correspondence, located at the Illinois
State Historical Library in Springfield, and at the Williams College
Library in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In addition, the research
team has enhanced and poured over numerous photographs of the garden
taken in the late 1800s and early 1900s and has also relied on a map
of the garden drawn by Sarah’s grandson, David Davis III, in 1928.
This careful research has yielded a great deal of new information
about the many flowers that Sarah admired and planted in her gardens
during her life in Bloomington.
With the help of volunteers and Master Gardeners from
the McLean County Master Gardeners, the staff is slowly and
carefully removing “modern” plants and replacing them with the type
of plants that Sarah planted. Many of these are called heirloom
plants today, but they were the plants that were available in
Sarah’s time, and the ones she chose to display in her garden.
Sarah truly adored the fragrance of these “old” plants.
Special guided tours—featuring either the restoration
of Sarah’s Victorian heirloom garden or the history of the Davis
garden and estate—may be arranged by calling 309/828-1084. Free,
guided tours are available during the days when the mansion is
open: Wednesday-Sunday, 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Groups, clubs,
and organizations may enjoy a guided tour of the garden when the
site is closed (summer evenings and Mondays/Tuesdays—year-round) for
a fee of $4/person (for 25 or more) or $100 for 24 or less. Tours
may be arranged by calling 309/828-1084.
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