Dumbarton Oaks Gardens To Close For Renovations For 7 Months

GEORGETOWN, DC — The beautiful Dumbarton Oaks Gardens will close for renovations starting this July, the Georgetown Metropolitan reports. The gardens will open back up in July.

A letter from the organization states:

The time has now come to undertake large-scale improvements to the garden’s water supply network, which dates to the garden’s original creation in the 1930’s. We are therefore obliged to close the gardens to the public from July 10, 2017 to March 15, 2018.

The gardens are part of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, administered by the Trustees for Harvard University. The institute in residential Georgetown supports research and earning internationally in Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies through fellowships and internships, meetings, and exhibitions.

Check out the full story of the estate, told by Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy:

"In 1920, a career U.S. diplomat and his wife, Ambassador Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss, returning to Washington from 20 years abroad, purchased an early 19th-century mansion surrounded by six acres of disheveled gardens and 'gentleman’s farmland' on the northern edge of Georgetown.

"With a goal of creating, in Robert Bliss’s words, 'a country estate in the city,' over the next 20 years, the couple vastly expanded that acreage and, under the guidance of landscape architect Beatrix Farrand, created one of the greatest garden ensembles in American landscape history.

"Farrand’s 1921 design envisaged a carefully phased transition from formal gardens near the mansion to informal gardens further away, ending in a designed pastoral and woodland landscape in the valley below the mansion, centered on a stream with numerous constructed waterfalls and ponds.

"In a remarkable act of generosity, in 1940 the Blisses — still healthy and only in their 60s — donated their estate. The mansion, out-buildings, and formal gardens nearby went to Harvard University (Robert Bliss’s alma mater) for use as one of the world’s leading research institutes in three fields in the humanities. The majority of the estate, comprising the carefully contrived pastoral and woodland — 27 acres which are now Dumbarton Oaks Park — was donated by the Blisses to the American people, as represented by the National Park Service, which since has administered the park as a unit of Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C."

"The donation in 1940 coincided with the ongoing Great Depression and soon thereafter World War II, which would consume the nation’s energies. The National Park Service thus from the beginning was limited in the resources necessary to maintain the park, which slowly deteriorated over decades. Community efforts in the 1990s and early 2000s helped restore some of the park and also catalyzed National Park Service support. Those efforts achieved some visual improvements and successes in conservation landscaping, but not fundamental break-through solutions to the underlying issues of invasive plants and hydrologic (water drainage, stormwater surge, and erosion) problems."

"The Dumbarton Oaks Park Conservancy, created in 2010, respects the previous efforts but affirms — at cost of modesty — that we are the best organized, best supported organization in 75 years to bring back this park. By tackling the underlying problems in order to create a long-term sustainable and affordable environment, the conservancy believes that Dumbarton Oaks Park can contribute to the community and 'polish up' a true aesthetic gem of American landscape design."

Photo: DC Gardens/Flickr