A visit to the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House gardens and grounds.

There is a little known fact about Edsel Ford…he loved trees. So much so that he built a cathedral of them on his 86-acre estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, a Detroit suburb, in the late 1920s. In 1976, Edsel’s wife, Eleanor, had the foresight to preserve their marvelous estate in her will for future generations to experience.

As you drive into the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House located on Gaukler Pointe on Lake St. Clair, you can’t help but notice all the towering trees which dominate this wonderful Jens Jensen-designed landscape.

The mature maples, oaks, American elms and cottonwoods stand tall and majestic as guardians of the English Cotswold-style 60-room home. The meadow, which they surround, is brilliantly placed to frame the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.

Edsel Ford lived in the long shadow cast by his father, Henry, founder of the Ford Motor Company. Edsel was a very different man than his father and at times this made for strained relations.

While both were businessmen, Henry was the hard-driving inventor and manufacturer; Edsel was the designer and patron of the arts. Henry figured the consumer would always be satisfied with the Model T and he would make it available in any color as long as it was black. Edsel knew the company had to move forward, advocating more consumer friendly designs that ushered in the Model A and kept the company growing.

Besides cars, one thing father and son did have in common was their great love of nature. Edsel met Jens Jensen while he worked on landscape designs for Henry’s estates. Edsel appreciated Jensen’s subtle, naturalistic approach to landscaping.

According to John Miller, president of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, “Jens Jensen’s design reflects his genius for balancing wooded areas with open meadow-like lawns.”

What Frank Lloyd Wright was to American architecture, Jens Jensen was to American landscape architecture. In the 1920s, Edsel commissioned Jensen to sight the house on his Gaukler Pointe property and turn the farmland into a suitable setting for the manor house and his family. Jensen worked on the landscape until 1932.

“Edsel was a great designer himself and worked closely with Jensen,” says Miller. “At one point, Jensen, who was keen on native trees, wanted to tear out the mature Austrian pines that had been planted by farmers years ago for wind breaks. But Edsel was dedicated to old trees and insisted on keeping them.”

In designing the Ford House landscape, Jensen made major changes to the property. He dug out a lagoon and large swimming pool on the south side. Jensen used the earth from these and other excavations to provide a natural harbor for Ford’s numerous boats. With these excavations and dredgings from the lake bottom, he created a peninsula of land parallel to the north shoreline to provide the harbor.

Jensen planted this peninsula, known as Bird Island, with seed-bearing herbaceous shrubs in order to attract the songbirds that Ford enjoyed watching.

Other captivating features of this well-maintained Jensen landscape are the naturalistic free-form swimming pool, 132 feet long by 40 feet wide. The pool entrance is guarded by a stand of white birch. The pool overflows into the man-made lagoon and both sit in a woodsy setting of trillium, Solomon’s seal, Jacob’s ladder, flowering dogwood and brilliant azaleas (planted by interior designer Polly Jessup to match the yellow, orange and apricot colors of the Ford’s master bedroom, which overlooks the lagoon.)

On the other side of the pool are the only formal areas of the grounds: the Rose Garden and the New Garden. Eleanor Ford requested the rose garden, which was typical of estates from the Golden Age of American Gardening and flourished between 1890 and 1940. The rose garden has 500 white, yellow and pink rose bushes. Eleanor preferred soft hues, as opposed to reds. This garden is arranged in the traditional English wagon-wheel design, with three concentric circles broken by eight rays extending from the central fountain.

The New Garden, with its sharp lines, trimmed hedges and rectangular reflection pond, is a wonderful contrast to the naturalism of the rest of Jensen’s landscape. The New Garden was designed by Jensen’s son-in-law, Marshall Johnson, in 1939.

Jens Jensen was a genius at creating a landscape with a palette of earth, trees and shrubs. His designs blend so well into the natural surroundings that people think what he created always existed. It is well worth the trip to experience the wonders of this award-winning historic landscape and understand why Edsel Ford so loved his trees.

Visit www.fordhouse.org or call 313-884-4222 for details about tours of the house and grounds. For accommodations and more interesting sights to see in the area, visit www.visitdetroit.com or call 1-800-Detroit.

Rita Henehan, a freelance writer, photographer and Advanced Master Gardener from White Pigeon, is a member of Midwest Energy Cooperative.