Working from the Heartland

Tom Buchter
Director, Garden Department, Winterthur Gardens
Wilmington, Delaware

Tom Buchter began his tenure at Winterthur Garden the same year Beth Selsor did. His mission: to begin restoring the garden to reflect the care, thought, planning and design that Mr. du Pont himself invested in the grounds until he died in 1969. A happy assignment, one would think. But he was actually charged with changing the internal culture of an institution that had subjected the garden to a significant amount of benign neglect. In the 20 years that followed Mr. du Pont's passing, the public and Winterthur staff had become used to the overgrown condition of the property, assuming that this was what a "naturalistic" garden was supposed to be: plants and trees run amock.

He was to create for the first time a highly organized, professional Garden Department from a staff of groundskeepers who had also become used to a certain amount of benign neglect. Change is scary and he met with some resistance, often in the form of hate mail conveniently misspelling his name to Butcher,instead of Buchter. So Tom found that to restore the condition of the garden he must first restore the vision of what the garden was all about. And build credibility and trust along the way.

"The key was consistency," he says. "I told the board of directors the exact same thing as I told the garden staff. But I knew that words wouldn't do it alone. They never do with people. It's actions. People are very smart.And they will see the conflict between what is said and what is done. So I had to be very consistent with what I said and what I did.

"And one of the first things I said was that we weren't going going to do any new planting for three years. We were going to spend that time cleaning up and assessing this garden before we moved forward.

"There were people here operating on two different levels. One group had been here since du Pont was here. They had personally put this garden together during the big push in 1951. That group had seen this garden blossom. And they had seen it go into decline. They knew what this garden was all about. But over the years they were helpless to do anything because they didn't have the organizational support.

"So when I told them I wanted to study what had been done here first, that sent a signal to them that I wasn't dismissing what they had done so many years ago.

"For the newer people on board, it suddenly gave them some hope for the future. This was a message that we take their work very seriously, and that they weren't just going to be going around in circles mowing grass and cleaning up from now on.

What Tom had inherited by Mr. du Pont and his planners, horticulturists and landscapers was an estate with good bones. All the architectural features had been overgrown, the weeds took over the beds, many of the original plant choices had long died away. But much of the garden indeed remained, only waiting for skilled hands and judgment to rediscover the genius that survived the neglect.

"The main thing that saved this garden in the period of neglect was that the principles, horticultural ideas and techniques were so good," he said. "And there were so many plants that even though a lot of plants died, just by attrition, plenty of plants were in the right locations where they still continued to grow. Even though they weren't flourishing, they could still continue to grow and survive."

The metaphor of the original du Pont garden can be applied to an organization, even an individual. With the good bones of education and wise planning laid down in early days, it is a lot easier to revive the original mission and set it back on its purpose. Buchter has found a way to do this from the manager's chair, with a vista that his teams create season in and season out.

"This is not a story about money but a story about values and things that are important," he says. "These are values that everyone can adhere to. Part of our approach to gardening is based on the Arts and Crafts movement. One of the principles that comes out of that larger movement is respect for the workman, the craftsman, the raising up of the quality of human endeavor. These are things I personally believe in."

"I've always loved my profession, I love everything about horticulture," he says. "I've always been in an advocacy role in what I represent. That doesn't mean I'm any less passionate about my work. My feeling was that in order to be more effective within the industry, I'd have to move from technical side to leadership side."

Between the two extremes of leadership approaches, Tom could have chosen the micromanagement technique where a disinterested staff wait daily for their assignment — or the choice he did make: to build a department made up of closely knit teams, each team responsible for a particular segment of the garden...each segment blending into the next to create a single garden, vast and unified.

"Every day I go out into that garden, and every day I'm moved by it," he says. "Because of my technical background I can read the landscape. And this is how I read it: Here we have people taking care of a large piece of land. As I go from east to west in that garden, I'm struck by how very consistently how these plants are being cared for, how the look of the land tells one big story. This land represents a level of skills and communication that is consistent throughout the teams. Who needs art on the walls when you can go out there and get a rush?"

Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.