Metro Pulse/Cover/The Home & Garden Issue

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East Eden

Color, Color Every Wall...
...but not that shade of pink! We look at choosing a color you can live with.

Born to Crop
The addictive allure of scrapbooking

All that's needed to bring Knoxville's prospective arboretum to fruition is the stuff that doesn't grow on trees

by Jack Neely

The stone house near Boyd's Bridge Pike is covered with climbing vines. It's missing the central part of its steep-pitched wood-shingle roof, but it looks like a setting for a Grimm's fairy tale, or the "Ruined Cottage" of Wordsworth's poem. Up the hill are a few even more unusual houses: four circular stone buildings with arcing doors and screen doors which match the circle perfectly, arranged symmetrically, laced with stone walls, some of which end in round stone columns. Behind, a large stone-walled greenhouse, connected to more stone walls, hundreds of yards of them.

That's what most of us would notice first, from the window of a car. But stop and take a closer look, and you couldn't help but notice the plants of surprising shapes and sizes growing within these stone walls. They seem unusual for Knoxville. Some are unusual for America.

"I'm surprised there are a lot of people who don't know about us," says Jim McDonough. But if people don't know about the old Howell Nurseries, it's because it's located in the middle of East Knoxville, and not on one of the yuppie-approved SUV routes. Howell Nurseries is no secret, and architect/contractor McDonough foresees a day when this place will be famous, as the Knoxville Botanical Gardens and Arboretum. He's leading the effort.

Howell Nurseries has a claim to be Knox County's oldest business. They date the family business back to 1786, the year white people first arrived to live here, and the year the patriarch of the family, David Wessells Howell, took advantage of a Revolutionary War-veteran land grant and began planting fruit trees on this ridge. Originally, according to family lore, he sold just the fruit, not the plants. That would have made him just a farmer, like most of the early settlers around here. But the fruit they sold was said to be astonishing.

Descendent Jenny Jukes says there are family memories about an especially unusual heirloom, a giant strawberry, "big as a hen's egg," preserved in a jar of formaldehyde. By some accounts, as he sold strawberries, Howell also began to sell strawberry plants. In the latter 1800s, descendent Samuel Sylvanus Howell established the S.S. Howell Nurseries, which became Howell Nurseries, Inc., in 1916. Eventually it descended to Cole Bryan Howell, a vigorous promoter of decorative plants; he introduced some species, like the Bufordi holly, to Knoxville, and developed new types of azaleas. He grew his business like he grew his plants; at one time, Howell had 13 outlets, some as far afield as Florida and South Carolina. He was especially popular in Knoxville, of course; it's said that almost all of architect Charles Barber's houses built between 1925 and 1940 were planted with Howell trees and shrubs.

His newspaper-advertising blurb, headlined "Diggin' Amongst the Flowers," reflected on the changing seasons from an inspired gardener's perspective, discussing forsythias, dahlias, and magnolias as if they were interesting and talented people he knew well. Though they were short promotional pieces of hardly more than 100 words each, they were as beloved to readers as most newspaper columns, and sometimes collected; at their best, they were poetic. Howell kept writing them until shortly before he died in 1965 at the age of 80.

Cole's son, Joe Howell, was of a different strain. The fruit didn't fall far from the tree in his case, but it grew in willfully different directions. Joe Howell studied horticulture formally at UT, then worked with German and Italian landscape engineers on projects in the Charleston, S.C., area in the 1930s. In 1942 he broke from his father's business, bought an adjacent 16 acres from a neighbor, and started his own planting and landscaping firm. He became known as a patient cultivator of the danea evergreen, the lenten rose, and the false yew.

"He liked a wide variety of plants," says his daughter, Jenny Jukes. "He thought the most desirable landscape had a good variety of plants and textures, corridors and leafy shade." Jukes says he was a big reader, studying books about English gardens, and grew more interested in landscape design than horticulture. "He loved stone, obviously," his daughter recalls. "After all, you didn't have to fertilize and water it, and it made an excellent companion for the trees."

Within a few years, the younger Howell was doing astonishing things with the property, laying it out in interesting patterns, building long fences of natural limestone and stone houses to aid his business and to show how gardens and architecture can work together. These striking circular buildings served purposes as mundane as a tool shed or a bulb storage house. (That Ruined Cottage out front was originally meant to serve as a cash-and-carry retail house but was never used.) A 1951 newspaper reporter exalted in Howell's then-new layout as "a scene that appears lifted right out of medieval Europe." Soon after, Howell became prominent in the early, prodigious days of the Dogwood Arts Festival, co-sponsoring the event's impressive flower shows.

Meanwhile, the Joe Howell Nursery coexisted peacefully with its next-door neighbor, Howell Nurseries, for years. Affluent Knoxvillians in search of a rare flower, exotic shrub, or remarkable tree, would come out to Howell Ridge and visit either or both businesses. Joe Howell used his estate-like grounds, with their encyclopedic arrangement of trees and shrubs of hundreds of species, to impress customers with what they could accomplish with their own yards in the suburbs. A Joe Howell garden became, among Knoxville's affluent homeowners, fashionable.

"That's why I called him," admits McDonough, laughing at himself. "He was fashionable. He designed a lot of gardens around Knoxville. We wanted an English garden in our backyard. He came zooming up the driveway in a Cadillac El Dorado, got out of the car, and said, well, I think we can do it for $25,000. Which was half of what we paid for the house."

McDonough bought some trees from Howell, though, and enjoyed his visits to Howell Ridge. "I fell in love with the place," he says.

Joe Howell died in 1980, without an heir apparent to carry on his unusual landscaping studio. His son, Joe Jr., who suffered from muscular dystrophy, had died years before; his daughter, Jenny Jukes, was happy with her career at Rohm and Haas. The old place went to seed, sometimes overgrown. There were rumors that it was going to be cut up and redeveloped into a residential subdivision or even a trailer park. Jukes was never sure who she could find to buy it.

"I heard it was for sale," McDonough recalls; he went to Jenny Jukes. "I asked what she was asking, and swallowed hard."

McDonough and others saw potential to take what this rare place offers, restore it, and add more. Our region may have the continent's widest variety of plant species, but places to see that diversity is rare. Others have seen the tourism potential in cultivated plants; a giant greenhouse is one of the chief attractions of Opryland Hotel in Nashville. A Scandinavian-style Winter Garden was central to the abandoned Worsham Watkins concept for downtown. The Howell operations could provide something similar, but enhanced with a strong local heritage. It's just about two miles from downtown.

After two years of exploring the place, he walks around the property as if he's seeing it for the first time. "Just look at that view!" he says at the crest of the hill near the round houses, of the Smokies to the South. Later, he claims, "That's one of the biggest Japanese maples I've ever seen in my life!"

"It could be a very important destination-attraction for the city," McDonough says. "If you've got people who like plants and flowers, they stop."

As it happens, local tree guru Jim Cortese had a similar idea and approached Jukes about it. She directed him to McDonough, and the two Jims got together and formed a non-profit corporation called the Knoxville Botanical Gardens and Arboretum. They negotiated a price of $695,000 for the picturesque 16 acres of the original Joe Howell nursery, and, with the help of a grant from Aslan, lawyer-philanthropist Lindsey Young's foundation, bought the place early last year. They had an agreeable seller. Jukes had been worrying about the fate of the place. "I was thrilled this worked out," she said. "It was beyond my best hopes."

Today, McDonough is president of the board of directors, which includes Howell heir Jukes, botanical types such as tree expert Jim Cortese and Ijams director Diane Madison, neighborhood advocate and parks executive Sam Anderson, and philanthropist Natalie Haslam.

They're friendly with the still-extant Howell Nurseries and have an option to buy their adjacent 28 acres when it's vacated. (Bryan Howell, now in his 70s, may be the last in the line; the business will likely go on, in another location.) The resulting total of 44 acres, on a gentle ridge with a view of the Smokies, has potential to be an impressive sanctuary.

McDonough talks of the place as a network of "pleasure gardens," perhaps 12 or more of them, linked by paths and separated by Joe Howell's stone walls. He uses the term casually, as if he thinks maybe he's talking to Kublai Khan. What do you do in a pleasure garden? He answers simply: "Walk through and gasp at the beauty." Carefully designed by well-known garden designers, they might include reflecting pools and contemporary sculpture.

For those who are prone to it, there's some hazard of gasping a little already. Near the stone greenhouse are about a dozen rare columnar boxwoods. Several contorted filberts, some unusually large in size, grow with individually twisted branches, and look like something the wizard Gandalf might have in his backyard. There's an unusually large white lilac tree, vertical yews, a weeping hemlock, a weeping beech. "Joe Howell liked weeping things," McDonough says. The Darlington Oak loses its leaves not in the fall, but in the spring. And there's an unusual curved allee of evergreens known as blue sawara cyprus (It's apparently a slow-growing species; Joe Howell planted them before his death 23 years ago, and they're still not much taller than a man.)

There will be more to it than a Southern Living photo backdrop. McDonough hopes to include on these 44 acres "an example of every tree native to this region"—an ambitious dream, considering this region's arboreal diversity—while maintaining Joe Howell's favorite exotics where he planted them.

The gardens would have a strong educational component, perhaps in conjunction with UT, plus K-12 courses in gardening, botany, and conservation with hands-on experience. McDonough also hopes to be a good neighbor, becoming an employer that will be at least as important to East Knoxville as Howell Nurseries has been. He thinks establishment of the gardens will prompt improvements in streets and lighting nearby. He's also studying a Philadelphia program, which trains ex-convicts in landscaping and gardening.

Long-term plans also call for "an amphitheater based on the Greek model, where annual theater festivals can be held." (Mentioned, in particular, are the plays of Tennessee Williams, whose ancestral home still stands, but barely, about a mile from Howell Ridge.) McDonough adds that it might also be available for symphony performances, rock shows, revivals, and other events.

There's been no lack of interest in the project. Though still in an unrenovated state, the property will be included for the first time ever on the annual Secret Garden Tour offered by the Friends of the Gardens in May.

When it got around that the proposed arboretum might have performance space, he began to get pitches for events that might be held there.

"We need to get a director and a concrete plan, but until we do, there's not a lot more that's possible to do," he says. He can't invite people to come visit the place as is, for a variety of practical reasons. "There are no toilets," he explains. "We can't officially be open. That's why we have a chain and No Trespassing signs. But people still come, at their own risk. There's a lot of interest."

Of course, interest and a buck-fifty will buy you a tulip bulb. "We need money," says McDonough. "Money is the big question. We have no government dollars yet, but we want that." He has gotten interest, but no commitments, from city and county governments.

Operating funds will be a particular problem. "That's going to be difficult especially in these times." Aslan has offered a dollar-for-dollar challenge grant for future fundraising.

He expects there won't be any new gardens planted for at least four years. "It's just a long way off," he admits. "That's hard for people to understand. Hard for me to understand. You've got to apply for all this stuff." Not only grants, but historic-register designations he's seeking on both the state and federal level. "It takes months! And months and months and months!"

"But look how far we've come in a very short time." He compares his innocence to the Rooney-Garland movies he used to watch after school. One would exclaim, "Oh! Why don't we put on a play!" and the other would answer, "Oh, how wonderful." The arboretum business doesn't work that way, he says.

"It will still be fun," he says. "But it won't happen over a summer."