The Actor’s Eden: How John Barrymore Created New York’s First Penthouse Garden
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
May 29, 1942
On this day, the illustrious actor John Barrymore breathed his last, departing our mortal stage with the same dramatic flair that characterized his storied career.
While many now associate the Barrymore name with his charming granddaughter Drew, it is the grandfather's rooftop escapades that deserve our horticultural attention today.
At the tender age of 35, when stardom's embrace was but a whisper away, Barrymore took residence in a Greek revival townhouse in Greenwich Village. His landlady, a wealthy widow named Juliette Nicholls, could hardly have anticipated the botanical revolution about to unfold above her head.
When Nicholls departed for European shores, Barrymore seized his opportunity with the audacity only possessed by those truly touched by creative genius. He penned a seemingly innocent request:
"I'd like to build a little stairway to it and place a few plants there, with perhaps a small pavilion in which I could sit when the locust blossoms come to the courtyard...
It would be like living in Paris in the twelfth century."
A "few plants," indeed! One must admire the sheer cheek of such magnificent understatement.
When engaging a contractor for this "modest" undertaking, Barrymore revealed himself as a true pioneer of organic design, forbidding the use of measuring tools with a declaration that would make modern landscape architects swoon:
"I want everything crooked or off-center, like a Nuremberg poet's home.
Just guess your way along, old man, as we all do about most things."
Can you imagine giving such instructions to your garden designer?
The freedom of imperfection, the liberation from the tyranny of the straight line!
What began as "New York's First Penthouse" – a charming appellation for what was essentially a shed with a porch – soon blossomed into a rooftop Eden that would make even the most ambitious gardener blush with envy.
Picture, if you will, the determination required to haul thirty-five tons of Long Island topsoil to a rooftop in burlap bags!
This was no window box arrangement, dear readers. Barrymore installed eight-foot cedars, cherry trees, and wisteria vines that surely cascaded down the building's façade like nature's own theater curtains.
The beehives!
The flagstone path!
The strategic hedging around the perimeter!
One can only marvel at the vision – and the structural engineering that supported such ambition.
Imagine poor Mrs. Nicholls's expression upon her return from Europe. Where once stood an unremarkable rooftop now flourished a garden sanctuary, complete with an Asian reflecting pool, and at its center, the great John Barrymore himself, feeding birds with the serenity of a man who had created his own paradise several stories above the bustling city streets.
Perhaps there's a lesson here for all gardeners with landlords – better to beg forgiveness than ask permission?
Though I daresay few of us could charm our way out of such an extraordinary transformation as masterfully as Barrymore surely did.
