Dear Hugo, Dear Hope

An extraordinary correspondence helped create one of our city’s greatest treasures.

by

(Editor’s note: As Memphis magazine enters its Fortieth Anniversary year, we will begin publishing every month stories from our four-decade archive, articles which we think today’s readers of the magazine will find of interest and value. 

This month’s archival feature, a revised version of a story which Michael Finger first told in the April 2003 issue, seems an appropriate choice to lead off this series, not just because this particular article detailing the creation of the city’s finest gardens makes an ideal addition to our annual Home Resource Guide, but also because the Dixon museum itself also celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2016.) 

For four decades, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens has been one our city’s most popular and beautiful attractions. Visitors fill the galleries for world-class exhibitions, relax on the lawn for concerts and special events, and stroll through 17 acres of woodland gardens. And the seeds of those gardens were planted, so to speak, not with a spade or shovel, but with pen and ink — a long series of letters between a brother and sister. 

“I was thrilled to see your house plans,” the sister wrote on October 16, 1940. “They are lovely. I want to help you in any way I possibly can. It’s just perhaps a chance to do a little something for you, who do so much for me, always. So if I send along ideas, send them back, telling me all you don’t like, for you know there are so many alternatives, and you should have something you really love.”

So began a letter from Hope Crutchfield in Stowe, Vermont, to Hugo Dixon in Memphis, Tennessee — the beginning of a fascinating series of letters, notes, cards, and phone calls that would transform the latter’s wooded estate on Park Avenue into the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Born in England in 1892, Dixon made a fortune in the cotton business after moving to the U.S. following World War I. First working in Dallas, then Houston, he met his future wife, Margaret, and they married in 1926. They came to this city when his company, Geo. H. McFadden and Bro., moved its headquarters to Memphis.

In 1939, the Dixons purchased a 17-acre estate at the corner of Park and Cherry. They hired noted Houston architect John Staub to design an impressive Georgian Revival mansion, and Hugo began to transform the grounds — at the time mostly clumps of oaks and brush — into one of the South’s premier gardens.

For advice, he turned to his older sister, Hope, who had also emigrated to America, in 1912. After studying landscape design at Columbia University, she married stockbroker David Crutchfield. They lived in New York City before retiring to Stowe, Vermont. Though she worked on various landscape projects in New England, her brother’s gardens in Memphis would keep her occupied for the rest of her life.

The Dixons worked with Memphis landscape designer John Highberger as well as Cauthen Fleming in Houston, but it is clear from the hundreds of Hope’s plans, sketches, letters, and other materials stretching over a 25-year span that Hugo’s talented sister — perhaps even more than Hugo himself — played the major role in the design of the Dixon gardens.    

The Seeds of an Idea

Although Hugo was apparently anxious to begin the garden of his dreams, his sister warned him, “A garden develops through the years, and is something to do bit by bit. You should gradually evolve a master plan that shows the ultimate possibilities [and] gives you something to start on and dream about, for you get to live with it and find yourself wandering down its unmade walks.”

Hope, for reasons that have never been made clear, rarely visited Memphis, but she and Hugo created a master plan for the gardens even while the Dixons’ grand home was under construction. As explained in “The History of the Gardens,” written for the Dixon newsletter in xxxx by Diane Reed, manager of horticulture: “In this naturally aged Tennessee woodland, Hugo Dixon and Hope Crutchfield created an American-style garden reminiscent of the great English landscape parks, but also reflecting French and Italian gardening designs. . . . The Formal Gardens reflect the Italian style with a series of terraced outdoor spaces. The Whispering Bench allée and Terrace Walk reflect the French style of landscape. The open space of the South Lawn, with it undulating edges bordered by native trees and shrubs, blends the English garden style into our native Mid-South landscape.”

Hope’s first letters concerned the entrance off Park Avenue. In her mind, the driveway was “a little too scimped [sic] for beauty.” She urged her brother to change the size of the circular drive, thought the servants’ house should be moved away from the main residence, and feared that the terrace across the rear of the house was too narrow (“Twelve feet is the very minimum for a grouping of chairs and passing”), and fretted over myriad other details.

As to the gardens themselves, she thought they should be a mix of formal and natural: “I would keep a little formal immediately around the house, push the wild back a bit to conform with the architecture. I see a lovely secluded garden to the east of beautiful semi-formal design, and planted to have beauty at each season.”

First and foremost, she said, “it should be a garden of fragrance, and I would let white flowers predominate. At night they would be beautiful, and in the daytime they are so cool near a brick house. Don’t you picture moonlight evenings and white flowers gleaming? I think it altogether lovely.”

She suggested white tulips, white roses (“planted in broad flat masses amid evergreen”), and white pansies, among other flowers. For one particular area, she visualized a single magnolia stellate rising out of a sea of grape hyacinths with daffodils in the background, followed in midsummer by white petunias against a tall shrub background and white pansies.”

In her first letter, Hope proposed one of the Dixon gardens’ most distinctive features: the sweeping lawn stretching southward from the rear of the house, edged with towering trees, with a cross-axis extending eastward from a swimming pool. “I would have an allée perhaps of magnolia and evergreens. This would give vista and take away any closed-in effect.

Some of this would be a challenge, she admitted to Hugo: “It will not be easy to wrest a garden from those oak thickets, but anyway you can dream of it until it is a reality.”

Towards the end of her 27-page letter, Hope noted, “I’m sure Margaret is full of ideas, of things she has always longed for.” If Margaret Dixon did indeed have ideas for the property, they are not apparent in the letters between Hope and Hugo.

Making His Garden Grow

The Dixon archives show that within weeks Hugo wrote to a dozen firms across America, requesting flower and seed catalogs from Wood-Howell Nurseries in Virginia, Hillenmeyer Nurseries in Kentucky, Tom Dodd Nurseries in Alabama, Trivett’s Tested Seeds in New York, and Dixie Rose Nursery in Texas, among many others. Closer to home, he contacted Cartwright Nurseries in Collierville, whose owner probably would have been more careful to spell his name correctly (addressing their reply to “Hugo Dickson”), if they knew this customer would be ordering thousand of dollars worth of plants from them over the next three decades.

By 1943, Hugo had begun work on the formal gardens east of the mansion. “Dear Hope,” he wrote on September 19, 1943, “I spent a long time yesterday laying out the pool garden and finally came to these conclusions.” Hugo’s letters reveal a fascination with numbers and dimensions, and those conclusions included: “the combination of a pool of 10-foot radius, 10-foot grass cover, and five-foot brick wall looks best. I enclose several different sizes I tried on paper, and I think you will agree none of them look so well.”

We can assume that Hope agreed with these and other plans, for the Dixon archives include long lists of plant and materials that began to arrive at the estate. In one month alone — May 1940 — orders included 90 boxwoods (85 cents each), 12 lilacs ($1 each), 20 yards of zoysia grass, 100 pounds of fertilizer, and even two hoes. The most expensive item was 12 white cherry trees, which cost $28.

All the while, Hope and Hugo continued their correspondence, sometimes writing two or three letters a week. “I am so glad to see the laurels coming in so well,” Hope wrote to the Dixons on May 30, 1945. “I remembered my desperation when I thought we could not use them, for they are not only lovely, but they are used near the most formal architecture, as well as in the woods, therefore a most useful transition plant for a place like yours.”

In her 20-page letter, she suggested some gardens on Long Island that Hugo might visit, and began to fine-tune other details of the Memphis estate. She suggested “tanbark for paths, which is nice,” “the idea of a circular seat at the end of your vista” and also worried that Hugo might be overdoing it with the brick pathways that lace the grounds: “Don’t have too much brick; you already have a good deal. Of course, when weathered and partly overgrown by grass, they would not, as it were, hit you in the eye with it.”

Another issue that began to concern Hugo and Hope around this time was how to enhance the gardens with statuary, a problem what was not settled for years. After paying a visit to a local sculptor, she found one piece that she thought might work, but “although I admired it to a certain extent, I did not feel that I personally would crave possession of it to buy him.”

So their correspondence continued, through the 1940s and into the 1950s. In a letter dated July 25, 1945, Hope, apparently working from photographs mailed by Hugo, noted “quite a few places that need finishing” and “urged a low hedge along the edge of the terrace.” She closed that particular letter by commenting, “I always like to tell you what is really correct so that you can make your decisions.”

In another letter written just two days later, Hope suggested, “Why don’t we leave all plans until we have heard what the landscaper has to say? Now is our chance to pick someone else’s brains. You know I don’t mind at all.” Having said that, however, she continued on for another ten pages, with detailed suggestions for “a clipped hedge of equal height (say about 3 feet) on both sides of the path,” and urged Hugo to question the landscaper “to the limit about this and then let me know what he says.”

The gardens flourished, and the plant orders probably astonished the nurseries lucky enough to receive them: 600 boxwoods, 300 assorted ferns, 175 azaleas, 500 tulips, 300 narcissi, and 10,000 bricks. Among the large orders were specific requirements, which Hugo tabulated on scraps of paper: three Silver Moon and three Climbing New Dawn trees from Stringer Brothers Nursery in Memphis, ten Salmon Queen azaleas from Buffa’s Florists here, 25 Olympia tulips from seed merchant Coyle Shea. A fountain was installed in the formal garden east of the house, four stone statues representing the Four Seasons were set on tall brick pillars edging the south lawn, and cast-iron urn, with a special “nice lead color” finish, adorned the terrace.

Still, what worried Hugo and Hope the most was how to handle the broad lawn that swept down from the house and ended at their property line some 300 feet away. Their specific concern was what to place at the end, and a series of letters written in 1954 discussed this topic, and little else.

“A wall is a good idea,” wrote Hope, “for you have something very simple, and the whole area should not be too formalized.” Once they finally agreed that a brick wall might work, no detail was overlooked. “I want to make sure that we have the wall in the best possible place,” emphasized Hope, noting that Hugo had provided a sketch that showed the wall precisely 41-1/2 feet from the rear fence. That didn’t seem right to her: “On my sketch, I have drawn it in 36 feet from fence to wall.”    

They also had to agree on the shape of that wall. Hope provided sketches that showed a curved wall, a flat wall, and a curved wall with flattened ends. “My reason for a curved wall is that it conforms a little more with the naturalistic lawn and woods of the area,” she wrote. Hugo responded, “I think the first suggestion is best, with the slightly curved wall at the back and possibly a curved seat against the wall. On the other hand, we had thought about a bird bath, a simple shell-shaped one possibly 30 inches wide, because we love the birds and they seem to enjoy the water so much.”

Over the next 30 days, Hope wrote Hugo eight more letters (with sketches and diagrams) about this wall, still fretting about the distance it should stand from the back fence. At one point, they got into a wordy discussion over whether a brick platform in front of the wall should have one step or two, with Hope noting that “even one actual step would be pointless, I think, unless there was a subsequent path or grassway into the area.”

A few weeks later, they apparently rethought their idea about adding a seat. “There are far too many of them used as termination for an axis,” Hope wrote. She also suggested screening the back fence, but leaving an opening to suggest that the property “appears to go on and on indefinitely.”

In a letter dated July 8th, Hope admitted, as if finally worn out by all this talk, “Our wall just got too complicated.” Then, she continued for eight more pages: “The principle behind sketch B is that the line on the ground D should hold its curve almost intact as little as possible broken by the steps. By this I mean the bottom step is set as far forward as possibly (probably only 3 or 4 inches back). In that way, the design holds its unity and does not seem all cut up into all kinds of shapes. The clear curves are there.

In the late 1950s, another topic that consumed the two letter-writers was what Hugo called “his cathedral” — the long east-west axis that stretched from the swimming pool almost to Cherry Road. Apparently the Dixons suffered a garden disaster in 1955, for Hope wrote, “The axis does not look right. It is far too bare ever since the big tree went.” She noted that even if he planted other things, “almost whatever you do is going to be disappointing for a while after you are accustomed to something so dominating.”

Reaping What You Sow

Hope began to have health problems in the 1960s, but continued to offer advice to Hugo. The Dixons had purchased a magnificent eighteenth-century marble statue called Europa and the Bull from an English estate, which they installed on a terrace at the end of the south lawn. Hope worried this would affect that wall they had struggled so long to design, and in a letter dated November 7, 1962, she told Hugo, “I would like to look at that curved wall again. Is it necessary to destroy all of it, or could it just be cut off?” On this letter, Hugo had scribbled in pencil his answer: “Yes.”

In one of her last letters preserved in the Dixon archives, dated November 29, 1966, Hope suggested adding three dogwoods to one area of the estate. “It is such a lovely grove of existing trees and perfect with a few additions. She closed in her usual offhand manner, writing, “You can have what you may like out of all of these, and discard what you don’t want.”

Hope Crutchfield died in Vermont in the late 1960s. “I call this Hugo’s garden,” recalled Diane Reed in 2003, “but Hope was the professional. With her letter and plans, she gave him all the information, and then he made the decisions about what to do here.”

In the last years of their lives, the Dixons decided to bequeath their lovely estate — which by now included an outstanding collection of Impressionist paintings and other works of art — to the citizens of Memphis. Unfortunately, they did not live to see the enjoyment their home would offer visitors. Margaret passed away in February 1974, and Hugo died eight months later in an automobile accident. In 1976, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens opened its doors to the public, and it has been one of our city’s showplaces ever since.

“As visitors today discover the beautiful Dixon gardens, they follow pathways to gardens and encounter sightlines that were established by Mr. Dixon himself,” says Kevin Sharp, director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. “It says something about his vision and abilities that in 40 years no director of horticulture has ever altered the structure of the Terrace Walk, the Formal Gardens, or the Whispering Bench Allée, for example. Of course, new gardens have been built here, but they always were carved out of some part of the landscape that Mr. Dixon largely had ignored.” 

Since this story originally appeared in these pages in 2003, the gardens of course have been further embellished. The main components — The Woodland Garden, the Formal Garden, and the South Lawn — remain relatively unchanged from the Dixon family days, though many of the flowers and trees have by now matured beautifully. The swimming pool has long been covered over, and on that spot today, Hardin Hall now serves as a beautiful indoor/outdoor banquet center for weddings, concert, and other events held on the grounds. 

Formal sculptures selected by Hugo Dixon now have company, sharing the sunlight with works by modern artists such as Jun Kaneko and Dale Chihuly. The most dramatic change is at the entrance, where visitors are now greeted by a broad plaza encircling a modern fountain with figures representing the four seasons, a Victorian-styled Conservatory, and the Memphis Garden Club Cutting Garden, described since its opening in 1998 as a “working flower farm,” offering more than 30 types of plants and flowers, with something in bloom every month the year. 

Hugo and Hope, of course, would no doubt be very pleased at how their ambitious plans all turned out.

For further information on the past, present, and future of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, visit dixon.org.