A Garden Better Than I Expected

July 14th, 2015

The New Jersey Grounds for Sculpture near Princeton isn’t that well known of a place.

The waterfalls with Rats Restaurant in the background.

I had never heard of it until a few years ago when some of my garden-traveler friends mentioned it would be a good place to run a bus trip.

From the pictures I saw, it looked to be a nice setting – although primarily an “art place.”

I got to see it first-hand on a trip last month, and I was impressed. This is an attraction well worth a day’s visit both for gardeners and art-lovers.

(See a Photo Gallery of 20 pictures I took.)

The NJ Grounds for Sculpture is a sort of 42-acre landscaped park crafted as a beautiful surrounding for hundreds of sculptures – many of them by the Grounds’ founder, J. Seward Johnson II.

I kind of expected the sculptures to be the “stars” with the plants serving more as a backdrop. I expected your basic yews, arborvitae, maples, burning bushes, hollies and such.

What I found, though, was an interesting collection of varieties, including such cutting-edge choices as golden dawn redwoods, columnar Oriental spruces and one of the biggest, most elegant weeping blue atlas cedars I’ve seen.

Here’s the NJ Grounds’ bottlebrush buckeyes in bloom.

The day I was there, a mass of bottlebrush buckeyes was in a peak bloom. If you’ve never seen this hefty shrub, it throws out dense sprays of white bottle-brush flowers the size of ceiling-fan blades.

The designers purposely planted different garden settings to accommodate the different styles of sculpture.

A meadow of wildflowers, for example, is the setting for Johnson’s famous five-piece sculpture called “The Awakening” of a giant emerging from the ground.

A huge, 30-foot-tall pergola covered with wisteria is the backdrop for another of Johnson’s iconic pieces, “Unconditional Surrender,” a 30-foot metal casting of a sailor kissing a nurse to celebrate the end of World War II.

And the perfect setting for Johnson’s 25-foot-tall “God Bless America” (his take on Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” painting of the farmer with a pitchfork) is a field edged by giant reed grass – a plant that looks a lot like corn plants.

Sculptures are tucked into niches and around corners everywhere. You never know what you’re going to see until you get there.

There’s a sculpture police officer lurking around a tall hedge, a naked lady bathing by a fog-shrouded pond, and a sculptural dinner get-together going on under a pavilion by the Grounds’ lake.

The foggy pond with naked lady bathing.

Then there are just some plain beautiful settings.

My favorite was looking across a waterfall that drops from a lily pond, a view that has a perennial garden off to the right and the Grounds’ Rats Restaurant (highly rated, by the way) in the background.

The whole shady path along the lake is nicely done, with chairs, benches, under-story shrubs and people sculptures dotting the way.

And our group also timed it to see the opening of the massive pink flowers of hundreds of lotus plants, which cover a pond in the Grounds’ far corner.

I think one reason I wasn’t expecting much was that I’m really not much of a sculpture fan.

Sculptures seem to be abstract in style so much of the time. And I just don’t get abstract. I don’t get modern art in general.

But most of Johnson’s works capture ordinary people doing everyday things – or his twists on classic realistic or at least impressionist artworks such as American Gothic, Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and Matisse’s “Dance.”

Those I get.

The fact that most of his works are at least life size – or triple it – also helps them in the impressive department.

I get the simplicity and humor of “Has Anyone Seen Larry?”

I also get simple humor. And you’ll find lots of that among the serious works, such as three apparent cannibals next to a boiling pot with a foot sticking out called “Has Anyone Seen Larry?” and a life-sized sculpture of a man peeing in the bushes.

Johnson apparently has taken a lot of criticism for that kind of thing. The critics sometimes call his work “kitsch.”

I guess I’m a kitsch fan because I liked just about all of Johnson’s pieces best.

When I see a whole lot of other people smiling as they walk through a place, that tells me kitsch must be popular.

If you lean that way, too, you won’t find as many Johnson pieces on the Grounds as I did since our group hit the end of a year-long special exhibit highlighting Johnson’s decades of prolific work.

Many of his pieces are apparently coming out. Others go out on rental to other venues.

One of our guides told us that the Grounds are beefing up the plant collection even more by hiring staff horticulturists. If that’s the case, I suspect the site is going to become even more of a gardener’s attraction as time goes along.

The Grounds showcase 270 sculptures by 150 different artists in a tree collection numbering 1,200 and counting.

You’ll find it at 126 Sculptors Way, Hamilton, N.J., about a 2-hour drive east of Harrisburg.

See some of my other favorite public gardens in the Public Gardens Worth Seeing section of this website.