Selma’ s Gardens
~ story and photo by Jeff Tryon
We have Selma Neubacher Steele to thank for the state historical monument at Belmont that preserves the great Brown County painter T. C. Steele’ s studio and home, the“ House of the Singing Winds.”
She shrewdly required the state to retain and preserve both the place and the collection— 350 Steele paintings now at the home studio. For many years the property was neglected, and we are lucky to have it today.
But it turns out Selma left us a more enduring legacy than the House and studio, more enduring even, than the magnificent collection of paintings. She left us her gardens. Now, decades of thought and planning are coming to fruition at the state monument as the restoration of gardens first designed by Selma Steele takes shape.
While T. C. Steele captured the beauty of Brown County on canvas, his wife Selma created extensive flower gardens on the property, which was an abandoned farmstead when she arrived in 1907, walking up the monster Brown County hill in her wedding dress to a modest four room bungalow that would come to be known as the“ House of the Singing Winds.”
A prolific painter, Steele was at work whenever possible, leaving Selma free to design many different appealing landscape tableaus on the property.
“ She was looking at this land pretty much as a blank canvas,” said Cate Whetzel, program developer at the site.“ She thought it was her job to decorate the home inside and out. As a gardener, she enjoyed the work, the planting of flowers.”
“ She said her greatest joy came when she realized‘ the painter’ decided her gardens were suitable” as subjects for his work.
A popular Steele work depicts Selma in a floppy hat, bending to work the terraced gardens near the house, a small figure surrounded by clusters of multi-colored blossoms.
In fact, the gardens as they appear in some of Steele’ s paintings provided some clues used to resurrect Selma’ s gardens, which had fallen into neglect and virtually disappeared after her death in 1945.
Restoration began in 1989 based on the paintings and historic photographs showing the gardens during her lifetime, along with her own journals, correspondence, and gardening records.
Many original plantings or their descendants still survive, including long-neglected perennials which began to flourish when their beds were cleaned up and refurbished.
The wisteria vine that covers the front pergola, now over 100 years old, was planted by Selma, along with hundreds of daffodils which attract special attention each spring.
“ People are always calling in the spring asking,‘ Are the daffodils up yet?’” said Whetzel.“ We have her peonies which we were able to salvage. They were in a holding bed and have just been replanted.”
46 Our Brown County July / August 2017