Garden History
Garden History
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The Designers
A team of talented Bay area professionals known for their collaborations was brought together by the owners as consultants and to prepare the working drawings needed for construction. Bruce Porter was the artist on the project and from correspondence seemed to be involved in every phase of it. He was a close and trusted friend of the Bourns, of the same social strata, and maintained a personal relationship with them. Today he is recognized as one of California's first native designers to apply an environmental approach to landscape design. He was a stained-glass maker, muralist, writer and interior decorator. Bruce Porter is given credit as the designer of the Filoli gardens, but it is not clear how much he was involved in laying out the garden's architecture. To date little written documentation has been discovered to explain his total contributions. Being an artist, Porter communicated with sketches, leaving the working drawings to draftsmen in the Bakewell & Brown firm.
Two prominent Bay area architects, Willis Polk and Arthur Brown Jr., had important roles in the architecture of the house and the secondary structures. They worked from the Bourns' vision, offered technical advice and produced construction drawings. They engineered the project, helped to plan the approaches and, like Porter, were even involved with interior decorations. Not much evidence has been found to explain Arthur Brown Jr.'s complete involvement in the gardens, but it seems that they were very significant. He designed the secondary structures and the garden walls presumably leaving the detailed design of the garden rooms and parterres and the plant selection to Bruce Porter and Bella Worn.
Floral designer Isabella Worn was a local horticulturist and an authority on the selection of flowers and foliage used for making flower gardens and decorating. She ran a small florist business with her sister in San Francisco which made its reputation planning social events for San Francisco's elite high society. She also worked as a plant broker locating large specimen plants for estate gardens like Filoli and for other country places like Hearst's San Simeon. At Filoli she supervised the planning of the flower displays and provided continuity for the design when the garden changed ownership with the second family, Mr. and Mrs. William P. Roth in 1937.
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