A Garden for All

Christine Yordán’s passion for gardening motivated her donation to the restoration of Mount Vernon’s upper garden.

Christine Yordán has never been one to shy away from a challenge, especially when it comes to gardening. The Houston, Texas, philanthropist once spent two years researching, planning, and building a monastic-style walled garden based on 13th-century plans of Albertus Magnus at her home in New Canaan, Connecticut. So when the Mount Vernon horticultural team asked Yordán in 2007 if she was interested in supporting the restoration of George Washington’s upper garden, she was all in.

While Yordán and her husband were already donors to Mount Vernon, this project in particular spoke to the lifelong devotee of gardening and history. An American history major at Manhattanville College, she says, “I’ve always had a love of our nation’s earliest days. I also love, love, love to garden. There is nothing more peaceful than to dig and plant, and that activity is part of a continuum of the history of mankind.  When I am in the garden, I feel a link to the past.”

Plus, there was a certain kismet to the timing. Having recently finished collecting every rose variety that Josephine Bonaparte grew in her garden at Chateau Malmaison outside Paris—the one-time French empress amassed every known rose in the world before her death in 1814, inspiring generations of rosarians—Yordán was mulling her next project. The gardens of Jefferson and Washington intrigued her, but instead of re-creating the plans herself, she felt the money would be better spent supporting them, she says. “My home garden was a private collection, and all the work I did would not be viewed or could vanish when I moved.  The historic gardens open to the public, such as Mount Vernon, were like great museums, available to all.”

The six-year undertaking, which involved intensive excavation and research of the upper garden, was completed in 2011. Mount Vernon director of horticulture Dean Norton and his team restored the upper garden to its 18th-century layout displaying a 10-foot-wide border of flowering perennials, annuals, and fruit trees, surrounding larger beds of vegetables that once sustained the household. Yordán was also instrumental in restoring the garden’s boxwood edging which was replaced due to blight with a disease-resistant cultivar. Today, the grounds are as they were when Washington walked them with Martha and visitors—“a true walk back in time,” as Yordán puts it.

Of course, the garden is more than plants, as she points out. “The hardscape, the outbuildings, and places to sit and reflect are important elements that make a garden complete.” She helped restore some of the outbuildings, including the seed house in the lower garden, and continues to support the horticultural team as needs arise.

Yordán dearly misses the elaborate gardens she once created at her previous homes—she doesn’t have a garden in Houston where she lives now—but she has Mount Vernon, which she tries to visit every year. “I feel I owe a debt to General Washington, so I am paying it back by taking care of his gardens,” she says. “He was a plant collector, and no doubt found peace walking the paths of the upper garden thinking about what changes and additions he might make. When I walk those same pathways, I feel him there.”