Gardner Museum Will Get an Update From New Curator of Landscape

The interior courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has been merely a display since its induction. Patrick Chassee, the newly named landscape curator, hopes to make the garden accessible to visitors.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is known for its indoor courtyard filled with formal plant displays. The museum was opened to the public in 1903 and is home to the expansive private art collection of Isabella Stewart Gardner, which is housed on three floors surrounding the interior garden.

Patrick Chassee has been a consultant on the courtyard--which has a display that rotates every four to six weeks, offering the season's best flowers in bloom--for the past two years and was recently named the museum's first-ever curator of landscape. Chassee's experience in landscape history and design will be put to use to update the garden by bringing back the Mediterranean style of the original courtyard. Over the years, the garden has gone through several style changes, from flowery and colorful, to plain and simplified, and back again. To help the design process, Chassee has been researching photographs dating from Gardner's day. He has already added four fish-tail palms in the corners of the courtyard and he hopes to make the area feel more like a garden and less like a garden display. Chassee will also establish educational programming and, once the museum's new building addition is complete, he wants to carry the ever-changing nature of the interior garden to outdoor garden spaces as well. For more information on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum visit www.gardnermuseum.com