The weather was oddly balmy for November in New England, and Erika Rumbley, the newly appointed director of horticulture at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, was in a rush to leave Zoom and plunge her hands into the warm dirt outside. “We're hustling,” she says, referring to a new shipment of bulbs that had just arrived. “We started yesterday, and we are planting away. It's over 7,000 bulbs in 1,300 pots. We have hyacinth, crocus, daffodil, and tulip, but we’re also including lots of strange Dr. Seuss–like bulbs such as Fritillaria.”
From its opening in 1903, the public has always visited the Gardner to glimpse the exotic and dramatic. A patron of the arts and a philanthropist, Isabella Stewart Gardner acquired and lived with a landmark collection, including Johannes Vermeer, John Singer Sargent, and Gentile Bellini installed in galleries deliciously overlaid with tapestries, manuscripts, and antique furniture from her many travels. Designed by local architect Willard T. Sears, the four levels are modeled after a Venetian palazzo and surround a serene courtyard, incorporating Moorish and Renaissance influences. A 2012 Renzo Piano extension adds a jolting element of the contemporary.
Rumbley, who grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, fell into theater early in life and originally came to plants out of a desire for a calming counterbalance. Eventually, the reprieve that horticulture offered led her way professionally. She cofounded the New Garden Society, which trains incarcerated students in the art of growing, and before she came to the Gardner in 2018, she was the greenhouse manager responsible for the propagation schedule on a 50-acre working farm.
With a nod to her stage background, Rumbley’s design principles at the Gardner verge on performance art. Since succeeding her mentor, the late Stan Kozak, who tended the department for 48 years, Rumbley retained the star actresses the public audience returns to see in the courtyard each year. These include frilly chrysanthemums in the fall and winding, romantic nasturtiums that signify the arrival of spring.
A discreet disrupter, Rumbley believes that “around those main characters, we have so much room to play. Overall our approach to the design right now is to try to turn up a saturation of color and try to add more layering in terms of form and texture.” Her attraction to the otherworldly comes through strongly in the current chrysanthemum showcase, which presents two dozen varieties of Mrs. Gardner’s favorite flower.
Beginning in May, mid-lockdown, Rumbley and her team manipulated single stems vertically with the Japanese Ogiku technique, never allowing them to break. “By the end of November,” she promises, “there will be enormous blooms the size of your head at the top of single stalks.” One variety is Primrose Mt. Shasta, “an ostentatious, irregular incurve that forms a large, lime yellow sphere resembling frosting,” she says.
When it comes to sustainability, Rumbley has implemented significant backstage changes—introducing a compost program, a beneficial insect program, and making the museum’s 10,000-square-foot Hingham, Massachusetts, greenhouse complex Neonic-free so it can be friendly to pollinators.
In the next few days, Rumbley’s 7,000 bulbs will be packed away in a shipping container in Hingham, then carted inside and coaxed to bloom a full month before any buds make their debut outdoors. According to the Gardner’s archives, the last season this many bulbs were planted for its courtyard was during the Great Depression.
This challenging winter, carefully masked and distanced visitors will find comfort in the lush leathery orchids and dappled sunlight of the courtyard. Rumbley said, “I don’t see a way that in the time of year, when the landscape of Boston is tan to gray under snow, you don’t walk into that space and feel like it’s just medicine for your eyes with all that green.”