A Nice Little House

December 10th, 2013

   What does a bachelor need with 43 bathrooms?

The front of North Carolina’s Biltmore House.

   If your name is Vanderbilt, and your house adds up to 4 acres of inside floor space, I guess you can make an argument for that many.

   The house I’m talking about is the Biltmore House, America’s largest privately owned house and the “little mountain escape” that George Washington Vanderbilt built in the late 1800s near Asheville, N.C.

   I’m just back from leading a 3-day trip there with a busload of mid-staters to see the place decorated for Christmas.

   You want a decorating inferiority complex? Compare your 6-foot tree and homemade wreath to Biltmore’s miles of garland, thousand poinsettias (changed out every few weeks), 65 wreath-adorned fireplaces and 56 decorated live Christmas trees.

   The coup de grace is the 40-foot Fraser fir that towers over the home’s main banquet hall. It’s also changed out midway through Biltmore’s Christmas season, which runs Nov. 1 to Jan. 2.

   More awesome to me is the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains out the back of the house. This mountain range really does glow a powdery blue, the result of volatile organic compounds off-gassing from the mountain’s evergreens (mostly spruce and fir).

   Biltmore also has about 4 acres of formal gardens down a terraced slope to the left of the home’s estate grounds. (It’s too grand to call it the “side yard.”)

   Not much is going on there this time of year, other than a gymnasium-sized conservatory of tropicals, orchids and Christmas plants (which is nothing to sneeze at… unless you’re allergic to paperwhites).

Inside Biltmore’s Conservatory at Christmas.

   I’d love to see the Biltmore gardens during the growing season when the terraces feature a formal Italian garden with three large fountains at the upper level, a walled flower garden and rose garden at the next level, and the conservatory at the bottom.

   A tunneled, vine-covered arbor leads you down the middle through these terraces.

   The gardens were designed by a fellow who had a bit of experience in the landscape-architecture business – Frederick Law Olmsted. This is the same landscape architect who designed a public space in New York City called Central Park as well as the grounds around the U.S. Capitol.

   Our trip also included a stop at the fairly new (1986) North Carolina Arboretum near Asheville.

   It’s best known for its 100-specimen bonsai collection, but most of those are greenhoused away for the winter instead of on display in the Bonsai Landscape Garden.

   The North Carolina Arboretum is part of the University of North Carolina and so this free public garden has a strong educational bent, including an excellent classroom center and a teaching garden for future horticulture professionals.

   It’s also got more than 300 acres of forested land with trails running through and several interesting theme gardens (a Quilt Garden of patterned flowers, a Heritage Garden of useful plants, and a Plants of Promise Garden featuring potential new home-garden varieties).

   I’d like to see that one in season, too.

   So many gardens to see and so few growing seasons…