English-born portraitist Douglas Chandor ( 1897-1953) enjoyed a successful career as an artist, painting such luminaries as the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia, Winston Churchill, Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt Joseph Stalin and, in 1952, the first official portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. But the course of Chandor’s life was forever altered by love when he met Texas native Ina Kuntman at a New York social. They married, and Ina proved to be Chandor’smuse, manager, helper and confidant.Returning to Ina’s tiny hometown of Weatherford, Texas, to make their life together, Chandor embarked upon the greatest creation of his life: his garden.

He called it White Shadows.

According to Carroll C. Calkin, author of Great Gardens of America, ( 1969) White Shadows was “one of the most beautiful one-man gardens in all of history.”White Shadows was a monumental labor of love, created over a span of time between 1936 and 1953. Chandor confessed that he painted in order to fund his real passion, his garden.

INSIDE THE GARDEN

Onhis three and one-half acre canvas, Chandor constructed a hidden fish fountain withscaly brickwork,anarbor-coveredpond whose millstone stepping stones led out to a view of a stone ship which displayed a bamboo sail. The waterfall cascaded from a thirty-foot mountain where he erected a chimney to light his artificial volcano. There was a fern grotto, atile-roofed Chinese moon gate guarded by ceramic Fu dogs, tall oriental pagodas, and a glass-windowed diorama of a Chinesefishing village.

Dova’s Walk, named for his mother in law, connected his studio to the home he built. An homage to his wife appears there, written in Latin, with bricks. It translates:“May the littlegarden flourish, dedicated to Ina in the year of the reign of Edward the Eighth.”

The garden was defined by trellises massed with wisteria and by statelyrows ofarched apricot and pear trees. In spring, the cascade of petals have been described as seeming to “drip like purple rain from everywhere.” Two long allees led dramatically down to a large pool dominated by the double dragon fountain surrounded by a base of colored bottles and tiles that Chandor fired himself in the oven of the house.

PERPETUATING THE PASSION

Douglas Chandor died in 1953, just after completing White Shadows, and Ina Kunteman renamed it in his honor, keeping his memory andhis garden intactfor another twenty five years until her own passing in1978.The Chandor garden was then shuttered and abandoned, and the wisteria and other unfettered plantings engulfed it amid silent buildings behind locked gates. Time and circumstance threatened to obliterate the hopeful writing in the bricks. Children and stray animals were the sole visitorsto asecret garden,a “garden without a door,” that could easily have been the inspiration to anymodern-day Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Two of those children, Melody and Chuck Bradford, would later become the agents of its resurrection.

The Bradfords bought the Chandor garden property in 1994. Many of the original ornaments, such as theseven-tiered pagodas,bronze cranes, and delicate statueswere gone, having been sold or lost to vandals or deterioration. However, the basic structure, the stone work and thearchitecture ofWhite Shadows had survived, like some ancient ruin buried by the tendrils of time. Reading accounts of the Bradfords’ efforts toremove themassivewisteria vines and other debris and to restore the fountains and details, one imagines the kind ofHerculean task that could only have beenempowered by a love of theplace and a sense of reclaiming something unique, historical and invaluable.

Today the City of Weatherford, Texas, manages Chandor Gardens and the restoration is nearing full circle.Visitors there enter a garden space which has a sense oftimelessness in itsevocative geometry. The unexpected charm of its niches, ornaments andfountains is amplified by the novelty of encountering such a worldly garden in such an bucolic place.The bowling green is often littered withrose petals fromrecent weddings. Thepears andapricots have been replaced withlarge crape myrtles, andthere are more azaleas and not so many wisterias. The stone ship still sails, just where Chandor placed it, and the dragon fountain has been lovingly restored, a soft, cool geyser ofhypnotic white noise in the lower pool.

The layout ofthe garden is an inspiration for any landscape designer. One can easilyspend hours meanderingpast nooks and crannies, strolling to the overlooks, across the arched bridge and up theivy covered stone staircases.Chandor’s garden has what I have often referred to as the “M.C. Escher Effect”:one moment you are seeing some feature, like thefountain, from eye level, at another moment you see it from above, and then later it is the focal point at the end of a long allee.

SPIRIT RESTORED

Horticulturist and writer Steven Chamblee, an effusive, massive boulder of a man, has a prodigious Texas-sizedpassion for the garden he has come to care for and restore for the past three years. He walks through the grounds with the sort ofreverence that many reserve for a cathedral, and he escorts visitors with the mischievous smile of a guide to some magical playground.He and Event Coordinator Karen Nantz , a wedding planner who became enamored with the garden and redirected her life’s focus, nowpartnerover thework in a sort of modernreprise ofDouglas and Ina.

Chamblee once described the garden this way: “Skillfully crafted garden rooms, each unique in theme and function, are strung like pearls upon a thread of elegant pathways.Smooth hedges echo curves and alleys, accentuating the creative mind of their creator and paying homage to a whimsical elegance of days gone by.Beneath the canopy of live oaks, waters splash, flowers dance, birds flutter and sing. Stones mimic creatures, bricks weave patterns,broken shards tell stories.Beams of sunlight splay into prisms of color through glass and crystals while now-silentmillstones lead the way across blue waters.”

The Chandor garden combines folk art, English garden lines, oriental themes and a great design into something unique and satisfying. It is imbued with history, romance and an artist’s lack of concern for formal rules. All this makes it a particularly American place. The spirit of Douglas Chandor is still a tangible presence. While walking in his garden, itis not difficultto imagine encountering him there, striking some regal pose while smoking his pipe and examining the marbles he once embeddedaround a Buddha statue ensconced in a niche. The oaks and other trees he planted are tall now, andin the late evening when thefall foliage is colorful, the light from the setting sunpierces the canopy of the arbor and emblazons the labyrinth of thegarden with what must be described as white shadows.

As Chamblee notes, “The charm of Chandor lives on.”