Gardens Now...Twentieth Century Landscape at the Shadows
"He was an artist to his finger tips, no doubt about that... In a sense it might be said of him that he had already completed his great work. He had transformed the house and grounds, through his passion for creation, into one of the most distinctive pieces of art which America can boast of. He was living and breathing in his own masterpiece..." - Henry Miller, The Air-conditioned Nightmare (New York: New Dimensions Books, 1945, 114)
Sitting
on the bank of the Bayou Teche, the slow moving body of water flowing
through the fertile sugarcane producing region of southwestern Louisiana,
one can sense an earlier time. This is precisely what Weeks Hall, the
fourth generation and last private owner, envisioned when he designed
his gardens. The Shadows of Hall's time is located in the very center
of town on Main Street, a major highway. Hall planted a tall, dense hedge
of bamboo, which for many townspeople lent a sense of mystery and foreboding
to the home. Of the hedge Hall wrote,
"Now that the town has grown and the place is surrounded by gasoline stations and fruit stands, it is absolutely impossible to remove it without utterly destroying the peace and quiet indispensable to the preservation of the whole atmosphere of the place. It may look unnecessary from the street, but from the grounds it will at once be seen how necessary it is." -Weeks Hall, 1945
Behind the hedge, Hall divided his grounds into "rooms" with a square garden, a round garden, and a "naturalistic garden,", these being formed by boxwood hedges and aspidistra walks. While sustaining his home had been Hall's trust, creating the gardens were his passion. Many of his contemporaries considered his gardens to be his crowning achievement; gardens now providing peaceful pleasures to visitors from around the globe.
The current stewards of the property, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, are acutely aware of the need to make the story the landscape tells as accessible as that of the historic house.
This Concludes the History Section of Shadows on the Teche
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