BY MARK R. EISCHEID

The site manager Ben Wever talks about maintenance at Dan Kiley’s Miller Garden.

FROM THE JULY 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Considered a modernist masterpiece, Dan Kiley’s Miller Garden in Columbus, Indiana, is now more than 60 years old. Previously the private residence of the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller family (1957–2008), the property has been owned and managed by Newfields (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art) since 2009. Ben Wever, the site manager of the Miller House and Garden, was born and raised in Columbus and has a decades-long history with the site. His grandmother, Barbara Voelz, worked for the Miller family, and he would occasionally visit the property as a child. He later became a part-time gardener for the Millers while in high school, and eventually a seasonal and then a full-time groundskeeper and a personal assistant to J. Irwin Miller. Wever—an Indiana-accredited horticulturist, member of Landmark Columbus’s Advocacy and Education Committee, and a midcentury furniture collector—also has experience maintaining other Kiley designs throughout Columbus. In his current role, Wever oversees the care, curation, and maintenance of both the Miller House and Garden. The following are excerpts from a conversation regarding the practices and challenges of maintaining the Miller Garden.

Ben Wever in the Crabapple Grove in winter. Photograph by Jeffrey Bond, courtesy Ben Wever.

What is your earliest memory of the garden?

You hear people describing the different sections of the garden as green rooms, with different parts of the design flowing from the house into the landscape. One of my first introductions to the garden was swimming in the swimming pool, and it gives you this great feeling, because when you are in the pool you’re right at ground level, so the arborvitae hedge and the large beech tree are even more of a dramatic feature of the garden.

What was it like working for the Millers?

The property was maintained to a very high level, because you wanted the Millers to be able to go anywhere and enjoy their garden. If you were pollarding apple trees, and you went to lunch, you would put the ladders and rakes away and you stuck them between the arborvitae [a staggered hedge along the eastern boundary of the property]. The terrace was where they would take lunch and enjoy looking out onto the landscape, so that meant that the English ivy near the terrace always needed to be cut back with a straight edge on both sides and leveled out on top.

You knew the sections of the garden that they enjoyed. One of them, and probably the most celebrated part of the landscape, was the honey locust allée. You never saw a sucker on the side of a tree. We had to rake the allée at least weekly. Sometimes with three of us it could take at least half a day to hand rake it from the south terrace to the sculpture plinth and then through the crabapple grove. You can’t get a machine to do that, because you’re not going to get the same look. And when we would rake the allée, we didn’t walk back through it—we’d walk on the concrete edge.

When you worked for the Millers, you got to do all sorts of side tasks, like pillow rotation, rug changes, and other things inside the house. Sometimes we were asked to drive their cars up to the Saarinen-designed summer house in Canada because they wanted their vehicles up there. Or they would ask, “Hey, will you guys come in here and move this Picasso?”

The Crabapple Grove in summer. Photo by Mark R. Eischeid.

Do you have favorite times of the year in the garden?

The spring and fall are beautiful, and that’s obviously Kiley’s intent, but the lushness of summertime—especially if you don’t have to work on it—is really beautiful. People would think the winter is the least interesting, but if you’re trying to grasp Kiley’s use of the grid, his plant choices, and the plant spacing, that’s when you can see the branch structure, and you can see the sculptural effect of the trees. I think there’s a special thing about seeing it in the winter.

How is the garden maintained through the seasons?

Starting in spring, there’s spring cleanup. The oak trees [in a five-tree allée east of the house] are always one of the last to drop their leaves, so you start with those. You start waking up the turf by aerating and applying a low-nitrogen fertilizer. There’s a lawn and mulch edge around the whole arborvitae hedge, the apple tree squares, and all of the other subsequent beds that has to be edged. Then, we go from edging to mulching to pre-emergent, to keep some of the weeds down. The Euonymus needs to be leveled out on top and clipped back around the property. We’ll go through the whole property, including the woods, and get whips and things like that cleaned up as well.

By the start of summer, our turf is really going great. Mowing starts, generally on a twice-a-week basis. The lawn is double cut, so that amounts to four cuts a week. Then we’re starting to get into the cleanup of things like magnolias, which are dropping their blooms. We also then have to remove all of the tulips after they’re done blooming. Then we do a bed prep process where we incorporate peat moss, or now we’re going to try mixing that a little bit with some soil surfactant—which keeps the water levels more consistent—and some biochar product. Then we mound these beds so that there’s an edge to them, and it really helps with how the annuals will do throughout the year. Then we plant all the annual beds, which is pretty strenuous, usually about a two-day process. And from there, we’re getting to the point where it’s time to shear the Taxus. At this time, we’re giving some fertilizer to all the shrubs, since they’re in their growing season.

By late June, early July—even though we have irrigation—the shrubs and some of the larger trees aren’t getting enough water. So, first thing in the morning, after we’ve cleaned the driveway, we put the sprinklers out, and move them around until the end of the day. The idea is to keep extra water on everything to make everything stay nice and lush.

As the summer goes on, we work on the arborvitae. That would’ve been something that the Millers wouldn’t have really wanted to observe. So, when they would go to their summer home in Canada in August or late July, we would start on the arborvitae. But then, as those are trimmed, it’s generally time to trim the Taxus again. All the while, everything is growing, so the ground cover has to be cut back and made sure it’s not going up the trees. Generally—because we’re working with a hodgepodge of irrigation, some of it installed in the late 1950s—we have to go through and fix heads and line breaks.

As we go into fall, we have a lot of leaf removal. This is also the time for the late fall turf fertilization, removing all the annuals, prepping beds again, and putting in the 5,000 tulips that will be coming up in spring.

I’d say winter is probably the slowest time, but that’s not even really a slow time, because you’ve got 80 apple trees and 40 crabapple trees to be pollarded. You have continuous work throughout the wooded areas. And snow removal. Depending on the year, that could be hardly anything, or it could take up a lot of your time.

For the past few years, it has been myself and another full-time groundskeeper. Last year we added a seasonal groundskeeper.

Since we’re a public garden, we’re working toward a great experience for anybody who visits. You don’t know which area of the garden somebody came to see, so you make sure that all of the areas look as good as possible.

The southern apple orchard in early spring, shortly after lawn edging and mulching. Photo by Mark R. Eischeid.

Are there things that disrupt the property’s maintenance regime?

We usually have at least two or three big floods per year [Author’s note: These floodwaters come from the Flatrock River, located at the western edge of the property], and by big floods, I mean floods that fill the entire meadow. And then we have two or three floods per year that are smaller and will only disrupt the adjacent wooded area and not the meadow. Depending on the time of year, the floods will wrap rotting cornstalks around every tree, and will deposit brush from other people’s properties, trees that people have dumped into the river, or declining trees that have dropped in the wooded areas along the river. Because we’re getting a lot of weight and compaction from the floods, we aerate twice a year in the meadow.

What are some of the upcoming major projects for the garden?

The next project that obviously needs to be worked on is the crabapple grove. Those trees were originally redbuds, and were replaced at the end of their life span with crabapples in 1985 because they couldn’t source multistem redbuds at the time. Through discussions with senior leadership at Newfields, we’ve decided that redbuds could be a nice choice to go back in there. Replacing the crabapples with redbuds would be a special opportunity to raise funds and for someone to contribute to a beautiful section of this garden.

The looming thing is the staggered arborvitae hedges. We do everything that we possibly can for them, but at this point, they’ve been sheared so much that we really don’t have that much to work with on the outside. We’ve kept them going, and hopefully we can get other projects done before we have to replace them, because, as you can imagine, that’s going to be a pretty big undertaking.

The oak allée, prior to leaf litter removal. Photo by Mark R. Eischeid.

What do you think has led to the successful maintenance of the Miller Garden?

When you worked for the Millers, you were fortunate enough to have them consult with a good landscape architect. Maintenance decisions were ultimately made by the Millers, but they were informed decisions, communicated from landscape architect to gardener, which I think is a fantastic way to work. My grandmother said she remembers Mrs. Miller getting out a notepad and walking around with Kiley and writing down what he said, things like, “This is growing well,” or “If this was thinned or pruned, then you’d get this effect.”

At Newfields, there are archivists with access to the correspondence and drawings that were donated by the Miller family to the museum, which is a fantastic resource. You can look at what was done historically and why, and get an idea of Kiley’s thought processes. You aim to keep as close to the design as possible, and you have the archival resources to help you do that, but you also know that there are newer maintenance practices that can help as well.

As a landscape architect, you’ve put a lot of time into a design, and you hope that your vision is fulfilled and that it can last. We all know that it’s not going to last forever, but you hope that it can mature and do the things that you want it to do. I think what’s been accomplished here is through the collaboration of landscape architects, clients, owners, and devoted gardeners and landscape maintenance staff. All of this has come together so that this place can be enjoyed as a Kiley landscape 60 years later, and you can’t say that very often. This is a place that has become more beautiful as time has passed due to all of that care.

Mark R. Eischeid is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at the University of Oregon.