William Brincka, a professor at the Art Institute in Chicago for more than 30 years, combined his artistic flair with a passion for gardening to create four acres of landscaped gardens on a 25-acre property that he owned, designed, and managed with his longtime companion Basil Cross, an antiques buyer for Marshall Field & Co. whose artistry also showed in theater and acting. Together they designed the Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired house on the property, built in 1969, and over more than 40 years shaped gardens with winding pathways as living legacies of a lifelong passion for beauty. Brincka sought to blend plant collections rather than emphasize their numbers, and the gardens originally included twenty-five varieties of forsythias, 40 cultivars of ornamental grasses, 400 types of hostas, 25 kinds of crabapple trees, and 450 varieties of daffodils; today there are fewer hosta varieties, about 250, and fewer forsythias, while more than thirty species of conifers add to the space. For Brincka, a garden was not merely a collection but a three-dimensional form to walk through and experience in the round.

Photo: Daniel Barriball

Photo: Daniel Barriball

Town of Pines, Indiana · USA